October 4, 2023

During my Sunday morning walk, I was listening to Richard Osman’s second Thursday Murder Club book, The Man Who Died Twice. A character remarked:

…it really is very pretty here in the dark. There are a few lamps lighting the paths, and you can hear the animals in the bushes. I could just imagine the foxes thinking, “What’s this old woman up to?” And I was thinking the same.

Whoosh!

My mind was instantly transported from the Pathfinder Parkway in Bartlesville to a destination 137 miles southwest and 38 years in the past: my port in a storm.

The Port

Imhoff Creek drains central Norman, Oklahoma into the sandy expanse of the Canadian River. Four decades ago, there were paved paths along the west side of the creek north of the river. Shaded by trees, sidewalks meandered above the steep bank, alongside timber retaining walls. They were lit by sturdy metal lamps along the sidewalks, sometimes perched in beds above the paths.

It was all part of The Port apartments, which had been built in the early 1980s just northeast of a new golf club, The Trails, built between state highway 9 and the river. The apartments were northeast of the club’s 10th fairway, separated by a large pond. The place had a nautical theme, with heavy ropes, life preservers, etc. The laundry was built on pilings, projecting out above the pond.

The complex was built between 1981 and 1983, so it was still quite new when I was hunting for an apartment in 1985, seeking refuge after a stormy freshman year living in a dormitory at OU — the University of Oklahoma.

Walker Tower

The Walker Tower dormitory opened in 1966 as Couch North and was renamed in 1970 to honor a prominent banker. It housed over 1,400 students in the four wings of its twelve stories. Next door was the Adams Center, built two years earlier and named for K.S. “Boots” Adams of Phillips Petroleum, with four towers connected at ground level. Across the street was the Couch Tower, seemingly identical to Walker, although in 1984 it was rented out by the U.S. Postal Office’s training center.

Serving all three gigantic dorms was the circular Couch cafeteria. The food at the cafeteria was poor enough that a few months in we got notices that the cafeteria apologized for itself, had plans to improve, and would be offering us a steak and lobster dinner one evening. I had the steak, which was as you might expect. It was more worthy of catsup than Worcestershire.

Back then, freshmen who didn’t own property in Norman were required to live in the dorms. I had a steady girlfriend for the final two years of high school and first two years of college who escaped living in them because her parents had purchased a condominium in Norman for her and her older brother.

As an introverted only child, I had signed up for a single room with air conditioning and a dorm that didn’t have an entire hallway of residents sharing a communal bathroom. I was assigned to Walker’s 8th floor, the Honors Floor, and I expected to have a single room with a bathroom that I would share with the occupant of the adjoining single room.

I moved in on a sizzling summer day. As I waited for an elevator in what would soon become a familiar wait, I spied orange flyers taped on the walls beside each elevator. They urged me to come to a concert by the Kansas City punk rock group “Orange Donuts” with “Death Puppy” as their local warm-up band. It is interesting what sticks in the mind.

Arriving in my room, I puzzled over the message our Resident Advisor had written on a markerboard in the room: Chill out, guys!

The use of the plural form and the presence of two beds alarmed me. I found the Resident Advisor, who cheerfully told me they had more students than expected, so I had been randomly assigned a roommate and we would be sharing a connecting bathroom with two suitemates: a guy from Nebraska and a fellow from South Dakota.

I returned to my room, fuming. I set up my TRS-80 Color Computer and my microwave oven. Eventually Random Roommate came in with some boxes. He proclaimed, “A microwave? Nice! And a computer? Cool! That will sure come in handy for us.”

At that point, I was anything but chill. So as soon as he left to get more things, I scoured the Honors Floor and located a fellow from my high school who had his own computer. I convinced him to be my new roommate, and we moved his stuff into my room, transferring the boxes my assigned roommate had brought up thus far to my new roommate’s former abode. When Random Roommate reappeared, I informed him of his new room assignment and guided him to it. The Resident Advisor came by later, asking what was going on. I cheerfully told him how to amend the assignments on his clipboard.

Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered–just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.

Barrie Davenport

I was happy enough in my recruitment of a new roommate, but dorm life was not for me. I was frequently awakened in the middle of the night by slamming steel doors, and we endured multiple middle-of-the-night fire alarm evacuations. The Resident Advisor would come around, opening each room to ensure we evacuated. That meant climbing down the emergency stairwell for eight flights, and then climbing back up it afterward because the elevators would be hopelessly overloaded. The most frustrating was the alarm sounding in the depths of a cold winter night and us freezing outside for a long time only to find out that the alarm was sounded by someone who had seen the steam coming from the vents of the basement laundry and mistaken it for smoke.

Earlier this year, they tore down Walker’s high-rise neighbor, Adams Center. Walker Tower will be coming down next. I shan’t shed any tears.

Finding Refuge at The Port

So I was excited to go hunting for an apartment in the summer of 1985. My own bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom! I was thrilled when I found The Port, with 128 units on four acres. It had a cute theme, a nice mix of residents, and I was able to secure a 6-month lease for a second-floor one-bedroom unit with a cathedral ceiling, a skylight, and a balcony for $275 per month. That is equivalent to about $782 in 2023.

I set up my Color Computer again, this time on a pressboard desk and hutch with my 13″ television doubling as its monitor. The setup included a joystick, floppy disk drive, daisy wheel printer, and a modem to connect to the university’s engineering computer as well as CompuServe. I still remember that my CompuServe username was 71460,2557 even though, like Orange Donuts and Death Puppy, CompuServe disbanded long ago.

The living room was also adorned with a dreadfully uncomfortable Papasan chair with a loud 1980s floral print cushion and an old love seat. I squeezed a small mid-century modern wooden table and chairs into the tiny dining area, complete with old Pizza-Hut style checkered tablecloth.

It was nice to escape the small apartment along pathways made out of concrete and railroad ties meandering around plenty of landscaping, with high lights on fancy wooden poles.

I was intrigued by the pond and inspired by the nautical surroundings. So I bought an inflatable boat and invited my former roommate to come over and take it out with me on the pond. We plugged its inflator pump into the cigarette lighter of my Toyota Supra, and once it was ready we took the little boat out on the water near the laundry dock.

All went well, with us merrily paddling about the pond, until my roommate saw a snake slithering by in the water. I thought of it as Little Nessie, our water snake, but he thought it looked like a copperhead and insisted that we return to shore. I don’t recall using the boat after that.

My favorite aspect of The Port was the pathways along its eastern edge in the woods above the creek. I remember once struggling late into the night with a Modern Physics assignment. A problem involved a spacedock with movable doors at each end and a spaceship that was too long to fit inside. I was supposed to do calculations about the ship going fast enough that Lorentz contraction could allow it to temporarily fit inside, and the shift in frames of reference in the problem had me baffled.

After an hour of struggling through calculations that yielded wrong answers, I got up and went for a walk. I slowly wound my way along the wooden pathways over to the peaceful lighted walkways in the woods. I was already beginning to question my future in Engineering Physics, but then the solution dawned on me. I scurried back along the pathways to my apartment and my calculator.

Early in the next semester, my six-month lease was up. I confidently strode into the office, to be told by the manager that I would be shifting to a $285 month-by-month renewal. I was put out by the $10 per month increase, and retorted that I had been a model tenant and wanted another six-month contract, but reduced by $10 per month to $265. The manager was nonplussed at first, but she then agreed to my demand.

Leaving Port

Life can be fleeting, and I wound up only living at The Port from August 1985 to December 1986. The summer of 1986 was a deflection point for me. Immediately after being named the Outstanding Sophomore in Engineering Physics, I abandoned that major as I was unhappy in most of my sophomore year engineering and physics courses. I switched majors, broke up with my girlfriend of four years, and found a new side job working for the University of Oklahoma Scholars Program.

It was a tumultuous period of reinvention, and I became lonely at the apartment, something I would have not thought possible back in my freshman year in the dorms. So I rented a room at a house owned by a friend from high school and college. Eventually I was ready to be on my own again, and for the rest of my undergraduate years I lived in an apartment across town from The Port. It was cheap and roomy, but its grounds were drab and desolate. I would never again live in a place as charming as The Port.

The Port would soon encounter troubles of its own. It went into foreclosure in 1987 and was sold in 1990 for $1.4 million. It became Port at the Trails and ran down over the decades. In 2006, it was sold for $3.7 million and is now refurbished as the Landing on 9.

Like me, the bones are the same but the finishes are different. The last time I was there was many years ago, and the beautiful old pathways in the woods were long gone. Now I happily walk the Pathfinder Parkway, having successfully weathered a few major course corrections in my journey through space and time. I miss the old walkways at The Port, but as this weekend showed, my mind can revisit them at the turn of a phrase, and as Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”

Whoosh!