Greg Walden is lost on health care. Portland Public Schools is suing reporters. The Trump administration is kneecapping police reform, the Environmental Protection Agency, and our common humanity.
But none of those funereal developments explain how I ended up in cold, damp crypt with David Yandell.
We took a slow, echoed walk last week to the north end of the Portland Memorial Mausoleum, then dropped into the circular vault known as Wilson Tower.
Sixty-three children are buried or memorialized here. A few lived several years, others several moments. David's only child, Jeremy, was 8 months old in 1982, deathly still in his father's arms, when the respirator was removed.
Yandell doesn't often come to the grave. His father is interred nearby, as are his grandparents - "the only family I have, for the most part" - and those are anguished reunions.
But when he trudged through the silent mausoleum at Christmas, Yandell discovered that the plastic flowers and a stuffed animal, his private memorial, had disappeared from the vase set beside Jeremy's gravestone.
"I was aghast. Heartbroken. Frustrated that someone desecrated his grave," Yandell says. "All I wanted to do was go out and get drunk."
David Yandell Instead, he left his small Martha Washington apartment and checked himself into the county's Crisis Assessment and Treatment Center. For several weeks, he counted his losses. He nursed his wounds.
Then he had an idea.
Yandell, 57, is famous for his ideas. Over the last 20 years, he has organized a series of campaigns that provide holiday turkeys, school supplies and hundreds of new bicycles to cash-strapped Portland families.
He is inventive, adept at marketing, and refreshingly frank about the part bi-polar disorder plays in his energetic community building.
"There's a lot of inner turmoil away from the crowd," Yandell says. "But creatively, I'm very functional. I'm the life of the party. People who are manic, bi-polar, tend to be very creative.
"A little mania goes a long way."
This time around, it sent Yandell out to the Walmart on Southeast 82nd Avenue.
He bought four-dozen teddy bears. Then he returned to the Sellwood mausoleum in early February, set one bear outside Jeremy's tombstone ... and placed another bear atop every other empty metal vase in the crypt.
The Portland Memorial Mausoleum in Sellwood. "My thought was that if I did this, no one would be tempted to steal Jeremy's bear," Yandell says. "Plus, no other child would be forgotten. No babies should ever be forgotten."
He knows how painful that can be. Yandell had a chaotic childhood. As Julie Sullivan wrote in a 2008 profile for The Oregonian, his father died when he was 2, and Yandell spent his teenage years rolling in and out of foster homes, MacLaren - in its "reform school" era - and the juvenile unit at Dammasch State Hospital.
"Initially, I went to MacLaren for 'incorrigibility,'" Yandell says. "I'm still incorrigible now. It's how I get things done."
He met Stacey, Jeremy's mother and another reform-school survivor, in 1979, and got her pregnant in Las Vegas. He was 19 when they married, and a 21-year-old student at Portland Community College when he got the call that Jeremy was unconscious.
The autopsy, Yandell says, was inconclusive. The marriage only lasted several more months. He long ago lost touch with Stacey. But Jeremy? "Every project I do in Portland has to do with my child," he says.
It's an endless battle against loss and loneliness.
He's on disability now, wryly noting, "That's the least of my problems." He hasn't held a job since a messy split with Radio Cab in 2007. He knows to seek treatment when "I can't handle the outside world."
But Yandell hasn't given up on that world. That's what truly echoes for me in this tale from the crypt. Angered by the theft of something that mattered to him, Yandell didn't lash out. He reached out.
Stunned by the empty vase at his son's grave, Yandell returned with an armload of teddy bears, so that the next visitor to Wilson Tower would be surprised in an entirely different way.
"It's poignant, isn't it?" he says.
That it is. Like so many David Yandell stories over the years. A little common humanity goes a long way.
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com