I stepped in out of the warm June air and took a seat on the leather couch against the window in my local barbershop. Tyson, a dark-haired barber with a red hat, finished cutting the hair of a squirmy blond 6-year-old, then cleaned up, removed the cape, and motioned me over.
As he began cutting my hair, I asked him what brought him to Portland.
“Yeah, it’s a crazy story, man. My wife and I have 10-year-old twins. We were living out in Bozeman until a couple years ago. My daughter has scoliosis and cerebral palsy, which means the central part of her body never formed correctly — the connections in her brain, her spine, her lungs. Most of her body keeps growing like a normal kid’s, but her spine doesn’t. So when she was 6, she was going to need to have rods placed in her spine that would be surgically lengthened every few months as she grew. We were going to have to put her through that.”