Finding Moral Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

Besides economic security, happiness is contingent on being physically active, having access to nature, and interacting with others besides our immediate family.  With the arrival of spring, I was eager to pursue happiness and embarked on a twenty-minute walk (one mile) to Washington Park, a historic park designed in the Arcadian tradition Frederick Law Olmsted instituted at Central Park.  Ninteenth century urban parks or “sanitary institutions,” as Olmsted called them, were scripted versions of Walden Pond where citizens could escape the city’s crass materialism and renew their humanity.  I set out to, as Olmsted put it, “re-create” myself.

Fortunately, the pedestrian network running between the Pearl District and Washington Park is stellar. Other than the deafening roar at the I-405 underpass, I enjoyed an idlyllic walk along tree-lined streets through the city’s most densely developed neighborhoods.  I smiled when I saw 1906 engraved in the sidewalk on NW 24th Avenue.  It was a reminder that Portland is built on the past, and on a spring day with aged trees offering a kaleidoscope of blooming efflorescence how could one not be happy?

Studies show that crime drops and property values rise in urban neighborhoods having a regimen of street trees.  They enhance the pedestrian experience, and more walking brews stewardship. https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_Crime.html  Blending nature and human impluse to cultivate civic pride defined city planning before World War II.  “Trees in the city have great value for health in improving the quality of the air, for comfort in furnishing welcome shade from the burning heat of the sun, and for beauty in the glory that they often impart when well grown to an otherwise commonplace street,” John Nolen wrote in Remodeling Roanoke (1907), one of the nation’s first comprehensive city plans.  Street trees and sidewalks were essential components of the transportation system that Nolen, a devoted Olmsted disciple, designed to move machines and pedestrians in tandem.

By the late 1950s, city planners were focused on moving automobiles not pedestrians.  Road widening evicerated the finely grained networks of sidewalks and street trees.  Walking and bicycling rates dropped, and since the 1980s obesity rates have sky rocketed.  Portland has spent 30 years  rectifying the myopic vision of a generation of traffic engineers, and its investment in walkable urbanism has fostered one of the most lucrative real estate markets in the nation.  The bottom line is clear: in the American city a comfortable twenty-minute saunter that inveighs happiness is priceless.

My stroll became more strenuous after sighting a knoll studded with towering conifers.  Washington Park occupies the steep hillsides that bound the central city, and after crossing traffic laden Burnside Avenue, I felt I was entering a temple as I gazed up a steep flight of stairs.  After 200 odd steps I followed a path that led to what the good pantheist Olmsted considered sacred ground, a glen with a stand of trees filtering the sun’s rays into in an artistic mix of shadow and light. 

For Olmsted, picturesque settings like this fomented “re-creation.”  He believed watching the interplay of light and shadow led to reflection as one discerned the patterns nature transmits.  He also thought the meeting of forest and open space bred a sense of comfort, a fact scientists now tell us is rooted in our genetic coding.  Our species became “human” when they moved from forested jungles to savannahs and developed the ability to walk upright and see into the far distance.  In fact, our  deep-seated preference for pastoral landscapes at the edge of wooded areas is traced to this key point in our evolution (Tony Hiss, Experience of Place, 36-39).

Glen (on left) in Washington Park

The glen in Washington Park was occupied so I set off to find another place of repose.  A bench graced with an overhanging tree limb in full flower called to me.  I settled in and let the scenery galvanize my thoughts.  I greeted a score of people with a nod or a few words.  Imbibing in wonder of a spring day, we enjoyed a common bond.  It was a good place to be, a place that lends moral clarity to our often frazzled existence.  Being immersed in nature not only helps still the mind, it instills an appreciation for humanity’s better nature.  A century ago, citizens taxed themselves to create a green haven where future generations could purse happiness and escape the cacophonic consumerism that prices our lives and subverts the soul.   Parks can “educate people to better things,” John Charles Olmsted wrote in his 1903 Report to the Portland Barks Board.  Aptly re-created, I left Washington Park thankful of the education I received.