The people of Portland appointed the next grand marshal of their yearly Starlight Parade on Thursday, shortly after chopping the beloved notable into thousands of pieces, tying a piece of it to a cart with an airplane seatbelt and wheeling it out to gaze, through dead, googly eyes, upon the adoring populace.
The grand marshal is a carpet.
But it is not just any carpet, the hordes of north-west Oregon protest. It is a beauty in a shade of bog-slime green, they allege, with hints of teal suggesting unhealthy acidity, blue lines converging at perpendicular angles and squares of lavender and coral red drifting out along its axes. This, the City of Roses proclaims, is the carpet of Portland International Airport.
There may be an element of irony involved. Yet the ugly wonder has welcomed Portlanders home since 1987, when it loomed into existence. Since then, the inevitable affection that people feel for familiar inanimate objects – a childhood teddy bear, a college sweatshirt gray with age, a tacky mug from a trip abroad – has slowly taken hold.
The bittersweet mania of nostalgia has simply afflicted Oregonians with a particularly itchy gift.
Lore holds that the pattern is meant to represent an air traffic controller’s view of intersecting runways, but even one of the designers of the carpet understands that the glorified doormat assumed new meaning as tens of thousands of locals returned to Portland over the years, saying: “The carpet represents home.”
For years, Portlanders have celebrated it accordingly. They made beer and socks. They wrote poems, including one “by TSA Eliot”. They took photos of their feet standing humble atop stains, fraying cords and bits of trash matted deep in the cropped fabric. They posted those photos in the hall of eternal record and memory that is the internet. They gave the carpet Facebook and Instagram pages and showered likes and follows upon those pages.
And at long last, the city decided to tear the thing out and replace it. But not before the people honor it. In May, four area vendors will each receive 1,000 square yards of the carpet. They will frame scraps as wall art and sell bits as welcome mats, phone cases, hats and shirts, parcelling out carpet for the people.
“I’m getting married on 6 November and I think I’m going to have all my groomsmen wear the PDX carpet socks,” Derek Harguth, a Portland native, told the Associated Press – likely to the chagrin of his family, his betrothed and his groomsmen.
“I guess this carpet is really iconic, and I can’t imagine another city getting this worked up over carpet,” said another resident, understating the case.
Finally, two TSA agents rolled up a swath of it, gave it a hat and googly eyes, and rolled it out on a cart for a press conference. The carpet, having achieved this higher form, would preside over the city’s Starlight Parade, organizers of the Rose Festival announced. The part of the carpet that would be its face betrayed no emotion.
The new carpet will be similar, just darker green.
