Walking down around Cataraqui Street and up River Street, I came upon an overlowing dumpster next to a clearing in the woods.
Behind it, a cleared-out homeless camp. I don’t know if this was a police/city action, or what. But it was vast. I initially stuck my head in, then took a few steps in, then kept going, and going. I must have walked 250m into a long chain of connected clearings, beat down by human traffic, before I backed out. Largely because I was being devoured by mosquitoes. I don’t know how far back it went. There was lots of expected detritus — tarp, mattresses — but also a car bumper and other stuff.
Coming back out, the dumpster again. Tents, tarps, clothes, construction supplies.
Just past the dumpster, written along the sidewalk, a poem by Mary Oliver:
(forgive my anti-steadicam lurching gait!)
Where are all these people now? It can’t have been easy back there, in the heat, the humidity — as mentioned, I was being gangstalked by a horde of mosquitoes after about 30 seconds. It surely can’t be easier wherever they are now, without whatever community was back there in the sprawl of clearings, tents, and tarps.
There are a zillion studies that show that homeless people are not all drug users or petty criminals, but that default stereotype drives a lot of resentment — even hate. Hell, I’ve had trespassers steal things out of my back yard, off my laundry line; my garage has holes in the door where somebody tried to pry it open. I’ve been furious about “them” making me feel unsafe or inconveniencing me.
This really unsettled me in its scope. It’s easy to see a tent in a park or a couple of tents by the roadside and think you’ve seen “the problem”. The depth of this, the extent, really hit home for me. This was an entire village, out of sight, now wiped out and scattered and thrown in a dumpster.
Here’s that Mary Oliver poem, for those who don’t want to watch me read it poorly:
Of the Empire
© 2008 by Mary Oliver
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46
Published by Beacon Press 2008
Yeah. That.
