At the beginning of my week of living local, the temperature plummeted from a spring-like 40 degrees to a frozen-tundra 10. I said goodbye to my car keys; pulled on a pair of long-johns (local), jeans (away), and my only bulky sweater (away); and stomped into the hiking boots (local) that last saw light of day on a trail in the White Mountains. I emptied all of my reporting gear out of my cool but impractical side bag and put it into a very uncool but very practical backpack (away). Localists like Donoghue know that backpacks are essential, especially if you’re planning to be out all day and you’ll need to pick up dinner on the way home. I felt like I was heading out for a hike, and in some ways I was.
Ten-block world
Alex Landry hasn’t been to the mall since March 2006. He leaves the peninsula a handful of times a year. He doesn’t own a car and often manages to stay so local he doesn’t even wander outside of what he calls “the middle.” That means, when we spoke, Landry hadn’t been to the West End or Munjoy Hill in weeks. Landry agreed to meet me at the Phoenix offices on a bitterly cold Tuesday night. He walked. He says cars make him uncomfortable. They’re too cramped and impersonal and “you’re moving so fast you can’t really enjoy the experience.”
He arrived dressed like a businessman from 1950 — he wore a long wool coat, wool pants, and a pale yellow button-down shirt complemented by brown tortoise shell glasses. Only his heavy canvas backpack disrupted his clean Wall Street look.
Landry is in his late 30s and seemed concerned about coming off as a weirdo because of his local lifestyle. While he talked about it, he often interrupted himself midsentence with phrases like, “I don’t want to seem like I’m some crazy person.”
“I’m less idealistic than a lot of people,” he says. “I’m pretty pragmatic. For me, this is the most convenient, pragmatic thing to do.”
Landry, like me, considers himself a person of convenience. He believes shopping for food and other items at mom-and-pops on the way home from work makes his life easier than that of his driving peers. A native of Portland, Landry has spent much of his adult life living in Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles. He says living local and auto-less was impossible in Atlanta and challenging in LA, but Boston was even easier than Portland because of its extensive public transportation and the number of local, independent shops.
Landry moved back to Portland in 2004, into an apartment across the street from the Public Market so he would have easy access to the basics every day. But when the merchants that had made the Public Market a one-stop shop for all of his basic needs abandoned the building beginning in 2006, Landry had to get creative. Now he shops at the Public Market House in Monument Square, where four of the former Public Market vendors have moved, and at any store that isn’t a formula and doesn’t have a big parking lot that he has to walk through to get to the front door. Parking lots are Landry’s thumbnail shopping test. He figures stores with big parking lots want to attract commuter consumers and not locals like him, which means they’re probably not locally owned.
