<\/p>\n
A message popped up this week on a wall inside the westbound Vista Ridge Tunnel:<\/p>\n
\u201cTODD SNIDER RULES\u201d<\/p>\n
This would be a nice little tribute to Todd Snider<\/a>, the singer-songwriter born in Portland and raised in Beaverton who died last week<\/a> at age 59. Except, there\u2019s much more to the story.<\/p>\n It turns out, that same message first appeared on the wall of the Vista Ridge Tunnel 40 years ago. Snider explains why on his 2011 live album \u201cLive \u2014 The Storyteller\u201d as he sings the song \u201cRose City.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBack in my hometown, there\u2019s this tunnel called the Multnomah County Tunnel, where, when you\u2019re a senior in high school, you\u2019re supposed to go down there at night and get out of a car and write your name in the tunnel,\u201d Snider says. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to use paint to do it because it\u2019s a tunnel, so all the exhaust fumes create all this dirt and you can just take a rag and clean your name into the side. It\u2019s not really technically vandalism. But it\u2019s dangerous. And it\u2019s an exciting thing for teenagers to do. And when I was a teenager I did that.\u201d<\/p>\n Back then, Snider wrote \u201cTodd Snider Rules.\u201d And also: \u201cClass of \u201985 Rules.\u201d<\/p>\n About 20 years later, Snider explains on the album, the same message appeared in the tunnel. This time, it came after he played a hometown show and then sang karaoke with high school friends over pitchers of beer. Snider saw the message in the tunnel on his way out of town the next morning, with no memory of putting it up the night before.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m almost 40,\u201d Snider says on the song. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t be writing that I rule in tunnels.\u201d<\/p>\n Snider goes on to say that a few months later, he connected with a hometown friend who had been out of town during his Portland show. She asked how it went and he said he thought it was pretty good.<\/p>\n \u201cIt must have gone pretty good,\u201d Snider recalls her saying, \u201cbecause one of your fans went down to the Multnomah County Tunnel and wrote that you rule!\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward 20 more years, and that same message is back again. A fitting tribute to a Portland favorite.<\/p>\n