Canada in The Books Store

Welcome to Portland, one of the most livable urban areas in America! Call it Stumptown, Rose City, Beervana, Bridgetown, Puddletown, or PDX, it s your town now. (Just don t call it Portland, or-eh-GONE. The state name is pronounced OR-uh-gun. Practice before you arrive.) Portland is located at the northern end of the fertile Willamette Valley, roughly an hour east of the coast it s called the coast here, not the shore or the beach and an hour west of the crest of the Cascade Mountains. The high desert is a two-hour drive to the east, and world-class wineries are less than an hour southwest. Abundant recreational opportunities make the city a favorite of outdoor enthusiasts, and from the city s West Hills, and even from some downtown office buildings, it s possible to see the Columbia River Gorge and five snowcapped volcanoes: Mounts Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Rainier, and Jefferson. Top that, Topeka!

Of course, Portland s appeal transcends its spectacular setting. The city is known for its vibrant neighborhoods, progressive urban planning, environmental awareness, liberal politics, coffeehouse and brewpub culture, and, yes, for its rain. So what s it really like here? Well, though Portland enjoys more than its fair share of pleasant, well-preserved urban neighborhoods, connected to one another by bike lanes and transit and state law limiting the extent of urban sprawl it is also afflicted with strip malls, traffic congestion, ill-conceived development, and other assorted ills of the modern American metropolis. The key difference is that in Portland you can arrange your life so that you don t have to deal with those problems. If you want to live in a close-in neighborhood, within walking distance of cafés and food markets, and ride your bike to work every day, you can. (You won t necessarily be able to afford a house in such a neighborhood, however.) If you prefer to live in a suburban community, you can do that, too.

As for politics, Portlanders on average are more liberal than the citizens of the typical American burg when Money magazine rated Portland the country s best place to live in 2000, it warned conservatives to stay away but the city has a surprising diversity of political opinion, ranging from a strong libertarian contingent to a small community of Trotskyites. (The latter get nervous around ice picks.) Suburban communities are generally more conservative, and the region as a whole is probably no more liberal (or conservative) than any other large coastal metropolitan area.

In 2005 Kate Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. Her camping equipment was rudimentary, her knowledge of Congolese customs even more so. She knew how to string a net and set a pitfall trap, but she never imagined the physical and cultural difficulties that awaited her.

Culled from the mud-spattered pages of her journals, Mean and Lowly Things reads like a fast-paced adventure story. It is Jackson’s unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis—coping with interminable delays in obtaining permits, learning to outrun advancing army ants, subsisting on a diet of Spam and manioc, and ultimately falling in love with the strangely beautiful flooded forest.

The reptile fauna of the Republic of Congo was all but undescribed, and Jackson’s mission was to carry out the most basic study of the amphibians and reptiles of the swamp forest: to create a simple list of the species that exist there—a crucial first step toward efforts to protect them. When the snakes evaded her carefully set traps, Jackson enlisted people from the villages to bring her specimens. She trained her guide to tag frogs and skinks and to fix them in formalin. As her expensive camera rusted and her Western soap melted, Jackson learned what it took to swim with the snakes—and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to get a baby cobra out of a bottle.