DAY ONE
Friday. 01.03.25
I went out on the street today, walking gingerly without my usual maintenance cart filled with provisions. I went empty-handed, left the house around 8:15 headed east on Market Street. The January rain was coming down in a light and gentle drizzle, misting up the atmosphere. Looking up into the sky I saw all kinds of things usually missed by the inner focused soul: a flock of pigeons perched silently on a power wire, an old airplane sputtering through the sky at a distance, clouds.
As I made my way to the I-5 underpass at Market, a crowd of flittering tiny birds darted enthusiastically to and fro before alighting in the trees north of Market. Allen was panhandling off in the distance up and down the off-ramp. Allen’s a man I see nearly every time I walk Market, a man with a Santa Claus beard, enough funds for a place to stay, not enough to meet other necessary ends. Today he was decked out in full raingear: fishing slicks with long bibbed pants, a thick jacket, and rubber booties covering his shoes.
Before checking in with Allen, I sat down next to another character whom I’ll call here “Bud Beer.” I’ve encountered this man as often as I do Allen, but he’s never told me his name, only made it adamantly clear he’s not interested in any nutritional assistance, only interested, as his cardboard sign says: BUD OR BEER. This summer on a very hot day I plan on packing a six-pack of Corona on ice before making my way to him to share a couple of bottles in the hot summer sun. Today, I sat on my rump next to him and listened to his tirade:
“None of us asked of God to be born, none of us asked for this and I can’t put my focus on Heaven or Hell since I think that, like a dog when I die I’ll just go back to the dirt…but Jesus, I want to have a mind that thinks of him. I don’t need any food-I’ve got a food card…I never asked for this and all I want is to try to stay warm and dry.”
When I engaged him for clarification, asking if the bud/beer combination was his way of surviving, he went on at another angle: “All these people driving by don’t got it any easier than I do—they’re all working and paying for their cars, the mortgage, anxious if their horses got enough food…I just want to be warm.”
I left him hanging on warmth and Jesus and the desire to return to the gritty earth he arose from clearly not of his own will. Perhaps that’s the struggle to understand for each of us: we didn’t choose our landing spot, but Someone is interested in us finding how to soften it, to be able to harness a measure of grace when the descent is painful and unbidden. Is there a way to begin choosing what we haven’t chosen?
Allen had a warm piece of veggie pizza in hand, the kindness of a driver exiting the I-5. We mumbled about his slick get-up, completely averse to any entrance of rain into his underclothing, and turned the discussion to his days on that corner: “I get between 10-15 miles of walking in per day just going up and down this ramp. Christmas Eve was a very good day; I made about three hundred bucks…Thanksgiving is always a good day too. New Year’s Day wasn’t any good, nobody on the roads and the few who were – not feeling generous like Thanksgiving and Christmas.” He always thanks me for coming out, for whatever he chooses from the cart (he likes oranges more than anything else) and I depart with a fist bump.
Before leaving the house this morning I drank a fair portion of water and coffee so after visiting with Allen I made a bee-line to Fred Meyer to use their bathroom. I often wonder what the poor and homeless do when they need to relieve themselves? Do they find a natural unexposed corner to expel urine and feces? Most businesses in homeless-dense areas now have restrooms that require a passcode given out to customers only. I’ve spent a few bucks at Fred Meyer so I assumed I was already grandfathered in, though I too was walking the streets today. I felt a twinge of shame flushing without a legitimate real-time purchase.
The shrubbed hedgerows to the west of Fred Meyer line a longish field between that store and the Days Inn motel. I ducked into the field through a hole in the fence/shrubs to visit where camps of former days had been disbanded. I’d guess there are two hundred and fifty yards of greenway demarking the border of the parking lot/field. The entire stretch is lined with leftovers from campers moved by the authorities: canned food, plastic bags, plastic covering from a case of bottled water, liquor bottles, empty fast food cartons, a jar of unopened salsa, a lime green carry-on piece of luggage, a yarn tunnel where a cat used to play, wax burner cans, wood pallet leftovers, grass, standing water. A blanket hangs in the trees, soggy and weighted from the Oregon winter. A kind of life was present here, a hard and uncovered effort to survive, chased out weeks prior by someone with a regretful job to do. Countless pockets of our city betray the same history of campers, clinging to anything, recently moved along at the pace of making them scarce.
Re-appearing from my stroll along the hedges, I stepped onto the pavement and headed west toward the Days Inn. Anybody who’s spent any time on the streets understands that many vehicles are acting presently as homes. Three campers and a van with only three wheels lined the cul-de-sac entrance to the motel. A battered Winnebago in the Denny’s parking lot looks as if it hasn’t moved in weeks. The scars on these vehicles betray a rough past.
Now headed west on Market, I meet two souls beneath the I-5 overpass on the south side of the street. John is wearing a bright yellow “City of Salem” jacket, thick for winter, a gift from a worker days ago. He’s in Oregon for a month now, transferred up from Santa Rosa CA to see jf he might locate friends from the lengthening past of 2017. A young man under 30, his blonde beard is sweating with recent moisture decking the air from the constant traffic. He doesn’t say much when engaged, but slowly rolls a joint and looks pensively into the distance. I want to ask him if he’d like to get off the streets or if he has any sort of plan to do so, but my spirit invites me to pray. I too look into the sky of concrete keeping us dry momentarily and ask the Father of us all to watch over this young man, clearly afraid, clearly intelligent, clearly accepting his current space in life. I don’t know what it might take to enter stage left to penetrate the heart defenses established in this youngster. I like him, I bid him farewell, I commend him to a love I hope he can feel.
Before visiting with John, I saw Lizzy hunched over her cardboard sign at the off-ramp stoplight. I’ve met her once before when she explained her four years of homelessness as a gift from Covid. A sequence of hard events produced the final undercurrent which swept her outside. She is lovely, a slight redhead with an indiscernible tattoo climbing down the right side of her neck. Today I sat with her a long time as she spoke freely of growing up in a caring and loving home, parents who know she’s out there: mother in Canada, father who’s married step-mom from hell. She knows they love her but her homelessness is easier to deal with “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” She starts in “The drug scene is hard but momentarily eases the pain and the campsites, I know, they are a whopping eyesore. That’s mostly because of mental illness. I have a friend out here who had a complete mental breakdown because, while cleaning his camp, the police threw away a bunch of empty pizza boxes which were a reminder of his son who loves pizza. But the community out here is about some kind of freedom which most people who are housed wouldn’t understand. Most people out here don’t understand what it’s like to be the guy right there in the Chevy Tahoe, working a job and starting up the bills and house payments and all of that. Last night I did stay at a friend’s housing, he’s super generous and nice though he knows taking in a bunch of us on the streets might put him in danger of losing his housing but he takes the risk anyway to help us. Do you hear all this traffic out here? It’s non-stop twenty-four hours a day. Last night staying indoors I couldn’t fall asleep, it was too quiet, there wasn’t this constant din of noise which being out here you just get used to and any kind of quiet is deafening. Anyway, I’ve been out here four years due to Covid and even though my mom knows I’m out here, she filed a missing person report when she didn’t see me active on social media for a while. I don’t understand what that’s all about, everybody putting stuff out there which a lot of the time isn’t real and doesn’t truly show the picture. When I am concerned about one of my friends out here, I go find them since I know where they usually hang out. I do THIS, what we’re doing, and I look them in the face since that’s the only way I’ll be able to have a sense of how they’re doing. It’s way better anyway. My daughter is almost fourteen now, Evelyn, a good kid who lives with her dad, who’s in stable housing. He also has a wonderful girlfriend who loves her, I don’t mix myself in there anymore, don’t want to confuse her heart, though it's good to know she has people who love and care for her.”
After listening to Lizzy, I asked her to bless me; she demurred, her face flushed in confusion. “Me? Bless you? How? What would I say? How would I do it?” “Just put your hand on my head and talk to God in the same way as when you pray for one of your friends.” “What’s your name?” I told her and she did as asked, speaking simply and lovingly to our Father in terms of equal grace to what she had already shared. I got up to leave and put my hand on her head in silence, gazing up at the One who blesses.
After crossing Market at Fred Meyer, I pointed my compass north toward the Bottle Drop. Standing hunched to the ground in the middle of the parking lot was a figure beneath a red, soaked blanket. The blanket looked like a cape and his face was to his shins, thank God vehicle drivers were showing awareness. I was praying the scourging at the pillar (the second Sorrowful Mystery of Our Lady’s Rosary) and walked into his immediate presence, placed a hand on the small of his back and continued to pray. It was then I realized my lower back had been bothering me since getting out of bed this morning. Was this some kind of spiritual solidarity? Did the Lord know we were to meet today, in this fashion? He stood there for a long time, his red cape of blanket flopped over himself flopped forward. After those moments he poked his head out revealing a burnt orange head of hair, recently poorly trimmed, big patches gone, and big patches still intact. He looked at me blankly and I recognized mental illness. He uttered something unintelligible in my direction, then slumped back down again, before finally standing as erect as possible and walking toward Bentley’s coffee stand with considerable hitch in his steps. He wasn’t very old, and the thought occurred to me: what a privilege it is to enter someone’s world for a moment. When they allow you to touch them physically but they touch you in spirit. I also thought of the Lord Jesus disputing with the religious authorities about healing a daughter of Abraham-bent double for years, to their disgruntled sense of decorum.
After attending to the man under the red cape, I walked along Lancaster past Wolverine Street and saw another slumped man in the bus shelter. He had on sweatpants, dirty grey shoes, and a burlap blanket which was pulled over the top of his head. I sat to his right, placed my hand on his back and continued connection with the Mother of God. At this moment I was beginning the Glorious Mysteries. The person beneath the blanket noticed my presence, slid to the left and I slid with him. The mysterious encounters with pronate men in fetal position, one after the other, gave me pause and raised a question to my brow: Lord, why are you so slumped in these men? Where has your fierce dignity gone in the lives of these, your children? Life on the streets must be hard, and I never want to make light by platitudes or tracing their steps as though I understand. The shame is immense: where does one defecate in peace and security? Where is one’s elemental privacy? When walking by a temporary camp (they are all temporary and will be moved out soon), the common denominator is how enclosed a tent or dwelling always is: no open spaces or windows for fresh air to enter. No gaps for light to inch through. The tarps and blankets are staged for complete isolation: a protected space.
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