The last time we had breakfast, in October, Nick Fish knew how this was going to end. He was discouraged and pragmatic. His stomach cancer? “More often than not,” Fish said, “it crowds out all the BS.
“I just don’t have the bandwidth and the luxury of wasting time right now.”
Especially on the illusion that he had the strength to finish out his council term. At 61, Fish knew he could no longer lend himself to the dilemma that has steeled him in the three years since his diagnosis:
“How do you govern,” he asked, “in an age where people are skeptical about government, where there is no common narrative that unites us, where the sideshow in D.C. destabilizes us, and on almost every issue, there are sharp fault lines?”
How do you govern when our corrosive politics are Stage 4?
That’s the challenge Fish left for us Thursday.
On that October morning at Gracie’s, Fish confessed to playing the cancer card now and then: “When people come to see me, and just want to tear folks down, I tell them I don’t have the time to get involved.
“If they want to lean in and get something done, we’re all ears. You have to be relentlessly focused on getting to the finish line.
“This is where cancer for me has been liberating. I don’t know how much time I have to continue what I love to do. We’re all on borrowed time. I have a little less predictability. What I can do is model good behavior with my colleagues.”
He invariably did. Even when Fish disagreed with his colleagues, he saw no reason to diminish them. In the long run, they were potential partners, not perpetual roadblocks. And Fish was in it for the long haul.
Just not long enough.
“Based on the demands of my illness, I no longer believe that I can do this work at the high level our community deserves and I expect of myself,” Fish wrote in a statement released on New Year’s Eve. “I cannot escape the very sad fact that I will be unable to serve out the remainder of my term.”
Forty-eight hours later, he was gone.
His ambition was never to mark time in Portland, waiting for a better offer. The man had an enduring commitment to the voters, to the city, to his family name.
Four generations of that family served in Congress. His father held a Republican House seat in New York for 24 years.
His grandfather, Hamilton Stuyvesant Fish, lived to be 102. On his 50th day in Congress in 1920, Fish introduced the resolution that established the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Something about the solemn celebration of anonymity on that hallowed ground resonated with Nick Fish.
In 10 years on the Portland City Council, Fish was reliable, not flashy. He had more pride than ego, and more concern for accuracy than attention. He always called back. He rarely picked fights, even with the reporters who, he long argued, don’t give council enough credit for managing the chaos.
But he also believed, to his dying day, that something vital has gone missing in the city.
“We don’t really have a narrative about what Portland is, and what we aspire to be,” he told me at Gracie’s. “We have a lot of loud voices, and institutions going through transitions. But what’s the common narrative?
“One of the things that makes governing more difficult is that we don’t have a common vocabulary or a shared vision or a story that brings people together.
“Ted Wheeler has many strengths, but I would not say that’s one of them, setting a strong vision for the city.”
More dedication to our rivers and the environment. Greater discipline for the police. Safer streets for those with homes and those without them.
“Who was the last mayor,” Fish asked, “who had the ability to lay out a vision and sell it on a regular basis?”
Vera Katz, and she signed off 15 years ago. The one-termers who followed her? Tom Potter hated the job. Charlie Hales hated everyone. Sam Adams was comfortable with executive power but didn’t inspire anyone at City Hall. Wheeler? It’s a mystery.
Cancer is anything but. Fish did his best to focus. “I sure as hell am going to make every day count,” he said in October, and grant him this: When I wrote in November about Brenda Scott’s issues with the city as she retired, Fish was the lone commissioner to call and say he’d borrow the time to take those problems on.
He made so many of those calls over the years, if only to strengthen the city that must come together and survive without him.
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com
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