PNW Week: Meet Me at Mill Ends Park

Back in the summer of 1995 the chatter around the ole' Highland neighborhood was that the school boundaries had changed. I was about to enter the sixth grade and my final year at Highland Elementary, and I was bugged at this news that the grown ups were messing everything up. Back then there were only two elementary schools, one for Highland, and one for Alpine. Though our towns were close and shared the same junior high and high school buildings, the elementary school kids did not blend. And I didn't want to. Sure, as a kid a year away from entering junior high I knew it was inevitable, that one day I would be forced to learn alongside the rich Alpiners, who lived in their snotty mansions and drove nice cars... I just didn't think that day would be this year. It felt like I had been gypped my final year at Highland Elm., I didn't want to meet new kids, I just wanted one more year with the same old faces I had known since first grade.

It must have been that same year that Utah got an Old Navy because all the cool Alpine girls showed up wearing Old Navy t-shirts and dog tag necklaces. That was the first time I remember wanting to fit in better at school and being aware of the brands people wore (up until this point the only thing I thought would be cool to wear was a white Highland Hawks sweatshirt). I remember finally going to Old Navy around Christmas time for gift shopping, and being so excited to have my mom buy me a dog tag necklace.... but realized, after I proudly wore it the first week back to school from the break, that they weren't cool any more.

One Alpine girl who didn't seem like the other girls who joined our school that year and who happened to be in my home classroom was Amanda. Though she definitely fit in with her Alpine cronies, she didn't act like them. I listened in on their conversations and it sounded like she knew them all really well, she could joke with them and make them laugh and the feeling from the group was that they respected her. The Alpine kids I was a little intimated by seemed to be comfortable around her and put their guard down. She was funny, and had an underlying cool quirky demeanor.

We didn't become good friends that year, but because of that demeanor I naturally gravitated to her in junior high. As the oldest kid in my family, and having older cousins tell you that being in the marching band was cool, I was a little lost at the new big school. I viewed Amanda as my safety boat,  in a sea of girly clicks whose waves might toss me onto an island where I beat a snare drum in the band nerd parade.... I wanted her to paddle me far away from that. I felt good around Amanda because she was smart and knew what was hip, but preferred the funny and the weird. I needed that. Lucky for me she let me sit with her blend of weirdos at her locker every day for lunch.

We've been best friends ever since. 

Amanda always seems finds the strange and bizarre things in life, and delights and celebrates her findings. Nothing is boring around her...small little trinkets, friendship bracelets, creepy city sites around town, and songs on the radio.. all are given a significant meaning, even for purely comical reasons. Every time we drove past her neighbors house she made me stop at this weird red train sign that was placed there as yard decor, simply because the idea of her neighbors looking out their windows and watching cars treat it as a stop sign cracked her up. She always had a backpack with her, full of dress up clothes and odd objects that might be handy on our weekend exploits. We used to throw parties, make a ton of weird food, and invite people we didn't even know out of our year book over to play "spin the fish". On every New Years Eve she had us all pick a word that we weren't supposed to use all year long, and we had to figure out each others word throughout the year. She found out we could become ministers online, so we both became ordained priests.

Because of her fascination and awe for the small and peculiar things in life, and because peculiar things eventually find her, it was only a matter of time before she discovered the most adorable park located in Portland, Oregon... Mill Ends Park. She literally had stars in her eyes when she first told me about it.

Have you heard of this park? It's amazing!

Mill Ends Park, located in a two foot wide hole on a median strip of Naito Parkway, in downtown Portland, is the world's smallest park. It's history on how it came to be is absolutely adorable. A newspaper columnist in 1948 named Dick Fagan planted flowers in the abandoned hole and named the hole "Mill Ends" after his column in the paper. Dick told the story that he was looking out the window where he worked and saw a leprechaun digging in the hole, he quickly ran over and grabbed the little guy, because everyone knows when you grab a leprechaun you get a wish. Dick told the leprechaun, Patrick O'Toole, that he wished for a park of his own... but since he didn't specify a size for the park, the leprechaun made that hole the park.

Dick Fagan, who must share the same kind of soul as my friend Amanda, continued to write about this whimsical park in his column for years, sharing stories with his readers about the latest Mill Ends happenings, and often wrote about the leprechauns who lived in the park. Once, when the mayor of Portland proposed an 11:00 p.m. curfew on all city parks, Dick published a response from the leprechaun, O'Toole, who threatened a curse upon the mayor and dared him to try and evict him and his friends. In the end, the mayor took no legal action and let the leprechauns stay in the park after hours..

Portland is full of enough weird and whimsical people who take silly things seriously that the have taken care of Mill Ends for Dick Fagan since he died in 1969. The city made it an official city park in 1976. They once even brought in a tiny Ferris wheel to add to the park, and the city used a normal size crane to do it! That's insane!


It makes me happy to think that there is a whole city out there that delights and celebrates the magical weirdness in life. Every country needs a Portland. For those people who don't want to conform to a boring "Alpine" city, Portland is their safe harbor, it rebels against the normal... and that's how Amanda has always been to me. A renegade who lets you be your weird self.

Amanda and I made a promise that one day we would visit Mill Ends Park, and have the world's smallest picnic there. One day we will make, the closest we have come so far is when my sister visited Portland earlier this year and we made her find the park and take a picture for us:

Thank heavens for Portlands and Amandas.

The world would be much more normal and scary without them.