There’d been no plan to return to the West Coast after my March trip to Washington. Then an Oregon friend—and fellow grad school hell survivor—posed a question that changed everything: When are you coming to Portland? Margaret had seen the enthusiastic Facebook commentaries I’d posted about Seattle and wanted to make conversation. Instead her question started a chain reaction. The flight over the trees and mountains of Washington, the days in Seattle spent breathing saltiness into a body starved of sea air had made me fall in love with the Pacific Northwest. Now I wanted to go back.

I’m thinking of flying up in August, I told Margaret the next day. Are you game? She was and without thinking twice I swooped in on a ticket and bought it. In the aftermath all I could say was that what I did felt right. That one act of spontaneity, it turned out, would end up saving a wild beast of summer that started with a sudden job loss followed by an equally sudden-—and disorienting—recovery. Then evolved into a record-breaking scorch-fest for Texas and for the great phalanx of states bordering it to the north, east and west.

Portland itself had been burning its own hole on my travel radar for years. Immersing myself in the plaid-surreal world of Portlandia during my one official week of unemployment only stoked the fire. The satiric depictions of tattooed tribalism and vegan radical feminist anti-vivisectionist eco-progressivism made me want to stand up and cheer. So much so that I often found myself singing lines from the show’s defining song loudly enough that anyone nearby—on the bus, in the street, at the office—would flash me questioning looks: “The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland/[Where] the tattoo ink never runs dry/Sleep ‘til eleven, you’ll be in heaven/The dream is alive in Portland/The dream is alive…”

My dreams were more immediate, like basking in cooler weather and hunkering down in a gem of an Airbnb near the freak preserve of southeast Portland. But triple-digit heat followed me from Austin while financial uncertainty pushed me to accept Margaret’s offer to stay with her in the upscale orderliness of nearby Beaverton. I’d miss communing with the funk and weirdness I craved; but I would never regret saying yes to my friend. The universe had spoken through Margaret and job loss or not, this was my time to visit.

When I arrived, the city was in partial shut-down; even the Max train I took to meet Margaret had given up taking fares for the day. It was a state of affairs I found disturbing but that would have made real heat-inured Texans roll their eyes. That didn’t stop me from wanting to do a bicycle tour of downtown mural art until my friend told me that overheated concrete would leave us sunburned and senseless. Instead she suggested we seek refuge by the water. Armed with at least six different varieties of sun-screen between us, we made our way to Sand Island on the edge of the Columbia River the following morning.

Too much sun had caused water levels to plummet. Margaret and I sloshed in ankle-deep water for more than ten minutes before finding a place deep enough for us to float. My friend shook her head. I’ve never seen the levels this low. Then she relaxed into the river. But cold water squeamishness, coupled with my inability to trust the plastic cell phone security pouch strapped around my waist, made me swear up a storm. 

Meanwhile Margaret cackled. Her own cell phone stashed in the pouch she wore around her neck, she gently began instructing me in the art of foolproof packing. Test it for yourself, she said, dipping her bag and then mine in the water. Grumbling, I finally stopped struggling and forced myself to believe in the protective power of plastic. Her job done, she stretched out in bliss while I launched into a fast-moving breast stroke. My friend howled in righteous protest the further I got from her. What about the current? she yelled. Still she followed me while I dodged the occasional jet-ski and power boat and wondered how I might avoid encounters with the occasional river barges that also used the waterway. 

The cloudless blue sky, the cool water, the warm air, the gentle waves had all lulled me into a false sense of security; so had the rhythmic pulsing of my arms and legs. I wasn’t thinking and didn’t want to. Not then, as Margaret and I crossed the river to the rocky, unpopulated shores of Washington state. And not when we found ourselves making no headway mid-way through the swim back. And not even when Margaret noted we had been pushed more than half a mile west of where we had started and had passed the orange-flagged buoy that marked the end of the river bathing safety zone.

If I was the engine that drove our swim across the Columbia, Margaret was the emergency brake. The one with enough survival sense—hard-wired into her by persecution-wary Ashkenazi Jewish forbears—to practice the vigilance I would not. Throwing one pained hand out of the water, she flagged down a passing speedboat. Later on she’d say the men on the boat would not have stopped at all if not for her pleas to dredge us out of the water and take us back to Sand Island.

Back on the beach, Margaret chastised me soundly, only to join me in lunatic gallows laughter that lasted for the next several hours. We’d lived a magnificent—and magnificently reckless—story. Native Portlanders who heard our story bugged their eyes in disbelief. Nobody does that. Ever. More than likely I wouldn’t have either if I had known about the 4 and 5 mile-an-hour, slow-but-deadly currents under the placid surface of the water. Currents which had swept unwary bathers, swimmers and kayakers to watery graves in the Pacific.

None of that bothered me. Not that day, or the next, which I spent on a brief tour of downtown with another friend. But like the current, the foolhardiness of what Margaret and I had done silently ran through me, shaking loose primordial fears of the unknown. I wouldn’t know that, though, until the day my friend took us on an 11 1/2-mile hike through Silver Falls State Park. There were waterfalls we had to see: ten total with nine active ones, all of which—as we were to find out—had lost water to the heat just as the Columbia had.

The changes in plan only continued. We were supposed to have left in the morning but started for park in the early afternoon. Ever the sturdy sherpa, Margaret reassured me that she knew her way around. The trail was 9 miles, she insisted. Not counting the occasional double-backs we had to do to ensure we were on the right path. The trip tested my patience and stamina and when, about one hour away from the main gate, we hiked along a darkened forest path, my ability to remain calm. I’ve done this many times before; we’re safe.

Giant Douglas firs and cedars loomed over us. in the dark; the night felt oppressive, smothering. Bogeymen lurked everywhere, ready to spring on two female hikers following the glow of the headlamp strapped on Margaret’s forehead. A headlamp I realized with dismay that she had almost forgotten to take. Exhaustion and electrolyte depletion had reduced my even hiker’s stride to a shambling gait. Roles had reversed and now I huffed and growled like a cornered bear. The woman who had nonchalantly dodged speed boats and jet skis while her friend fretted and wailed was wrestling with fear while the friend moved with Zen-like trust. I couldn’t stand it; I wanted to give up. But I kept going, knowing that if Margaret, a woman with fibromyalgia, could manage a two-plus mile open water swim that had nearly killed us and then an even longer hike without complaint, so could I.

It was only on the way back to Beaverton, my body exhausted and in pain, my ears shrinking from the tango music Margaret needed to stay awake while driving that I realized it. Everything about this trip had been about living in the moment, knowing everything was not only changing, but surging with volatility. I’d come with Portlandia-inflected visions of prowling southeast Portland And watching, with the wry smugness of a Gen X elder, millennial hipsters ironize everything from the fashions to the values of a mid-twentieth century steeped in its own certainty. Then I’d met with a less scripted reality far more challenging—and satisfying for what it showed me—than anything I could have ever imagined.

Let’s do this again sometime, I mumbled as I fell asleep.