Summers in Oregon are marked by this insatiable longing.
You wait six months for a glimpse of the sun, and when you finally get it, it always feels both too good and not good enough. A Portland summer is the kind of perfect thing that lives as much in your imagination as it does in reality—the sun in the morning, the smell of the river, the daylight that lingers until 9 pm, when it dies in a burst of impossible orange-pink-purple incandescence. Quiet evenings drinking beer on the porch, watching traffic go by, watching the stars come out; loud evenings listening to the crowd, hoping for magic on the field.