Portland is one of those cities I’ve considered living in since about 1984. This weekend I was flown there for the Halleluwah festival (and then the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle, but we're talking Portland here) to do readings from my new book. In a couple of days I got to know a tiny slice of Portland life: the grassroots, art-boho, haute-coffee (“pull” is a common verb, said with a slight thrill, as in to pull a shot of espresso correctly) crowd; thrift-store kitsch and vintage fashion; an amazing array of great bikes and fit, progressively minded people; a visual sensibility that combines happy accidents with a knowing sense of what to recycle and what to avoid; as well as a fierce allegiance to the resurrection of junk instead of making more trash.

My friends Mike and Lily,  laid-back, sophisticated, big-hearted people, live in a communal house painted lemon yellow with blue trim in North Portland. The slightly funky neighborhood is full of bungalows and scrabbly yards (roses, of course, are everywhere in this city of the Rose Festival). Their living room is a tidy example of boho eclectic: Amazing books, some rare, sit on sturdy bookcases made of thick pine planks with cinderblock supports. The walls are painted a dark ultramarine; the trim spanking white. There’s an 18th-century-looking settee sitting in the corner, all bright yellow and green country-cottage.

Breaking up the expanse of blue on the walls is a mini-show of family portraits from the '50s and '60s: wholesome-looking families who once sat in a commercial studio, the photo from which was then enlarged and painted into a somehow milky, haunted-looking, slightly blurry portrait. Found art here becomes even more marvelous, since you can imagine that at one point, before this house turned into a rental for granola eaters and artists, a family such as in the portraits may very well have lived here, with their earnest, Methodist faces, horn-rimmed glasses and all.

In the center of the room, surrounded by these portraits, is a 1930s, painted kitchen table and chairs provided by new housemates: a masterpiece of domestic Art Deco in creamy white and Chinese red. The table sits on top of what looks like a parent’s discarded Oriental department store rug. The newest decorative object I could find in the house, actually, was in the dining room: an over-sized, laminated, teal platter with a gingkgo leaf pattern on it. Turns out someone had gotten Mike and Lily a Pier 1 gift certificate and this is what they found. Lily, a stealth shopper, will find something good wherever she is — even at Pier 1.

Lily gave me a hint of where she gets some of the house’s best junk art. It comes from The Bins (not Bins, as in, not certain very hallowed newspapers), giant Goodwill outlet stores. There are four of them in Portland, and they are named for the bins the enormous piles of junk are rolled in on, to be picked and dug through by a motley crowd. The day we went, the place was packed with a combination of flea marketers looking for a bargain to reprice, serious junksters wearing surgical gloves and a mask to do their digging, families getting school clothes, hipsters hoping for the perfect frock or boots, some clearly down and out folks who have either become addicted to the Bins ritual or just need some clothes, very eco-sensitive woolly-hatted fellows looking for jeans and socks, and Mom and Pop Retirees doing their version of Saturday afternoon sport.  

Lily says the time to get to The Bins is early morning, but we lollygagged in on Saturday afternoon. A stealth shopper with an easy manner on the outside and a fierce swipe after that, Lily was going to make the best of it: She swung her Ford station wagon into a narrow spot as close as she could get us to the entrance, where families carrying shopping bags crammed with heaps of odd things milled around. As we walked in, two clerks were rolling fresh bins piled with a combination of computer monitors and sneakers (and some clothes hangers stuck in between, like an amazing tossed junk salad) through the waiting crowd. I was told to stand my ground against the die-hards if I saw something I liked, and to be prepared to only find one of a pair of shoes—the Murphy’s law of The Bins.

There are two ways to approach bins: one is just to idly wander the rows and let your eye take you where it does (is that a Pendleton jacket or an acrylic blanket? Am I looking at a tangle of Christmas lights or some amazing 1970s fixture no one’s spotted yet? Is that an 8-track player or just some dead stereo equipment?). The other is to wait at the precise location where they roll those newly heaped bins in every 10 minutes or so, ready to pounce ahead of the people waiting next to you. It felt very Blade Runner to me: all of us ready to dive in and pick among the wreckage. Three women went for the same mohair plaid, which turned out to be not a sweater but the stained liner of some old coat. All let go with the same disgust and moved on with their ferocious scavenging.

I followed Lily as she worked the piles, sorting through tangles of shirts and pants and jeans and scarves in all manner of material, picked through in vaguely categorized heaps (dead CD players, children’s toys, pillowcases, work boots, picture frames, belts, purses, sleeping bags, bath towels). While my eyes glazed over and I started waxing cultural on the Bins phenomenon, Lily quietly fished around and pulled out a treasure six times. She walked away with:

a sailboat painting for the living room

a tweed cape from the 1970s with a belt around the front panel that has a very current A-line shape and a swanky Agent 99 look to it (think Maxwell Smart’s smarter partner)

a black crepe cocktail dress with a boat neck, dropped waist, and crinoline underskirt

a bicycle cap

a vintage (we decided) Hello Kitty wallet in light green

bright turquoise DC-brand overalls.

When we got back to the house, she pulled out her finds. We propped the sailboat painting, with its absurd brushstrokes of yellow supposed to represent froth, the pale gray blue of the water, and the odd tilt of the boat itself. It looked perfect. In a perverse way, it was a statement painting, its colors and wacky theme somehow working to unite the light colors of the book spines on the shelves and the cream of the dining table with the dark blue of the walls. A good find, we all agreed. Then, without saying a word, we went and washed—scrubbed—our hands.

Jana Martin is The MOLI View's contributing editor for Fashion & Design.