An elderly man wearing a baseball cap described himself to me as a former pastor who was now serving God as a freelancer. I was loading his SUV with foodstuffs. He didn’t move all that well, at least not his body. I got the feeling his soul moved just fine, much better than a lot of American souls.

The man told me the homeless crisis had prompted him and his wife to drive around the Portland area on a regular basis and administer to the needs of the homeless people in their various encampments. He defined his administering as delivering food and other supplies and also praying/counseling if the situation called for it. Sometimes it did, but that was never his first or even second goal.

I asked him how he chose where to administer and he told me God directed him. Such as a couple of days ago when he was driving up north near the Columbia River and he passed encampment after encampment and then turned right onto a gravel road, into a wooded and willowed area, and kept driving until the road ran out, and there he found a man living in a battered RV. He made the acquaintance of the occupant of the RV and discovered he was a former pastor who had lost his congregation and family and was now homeless. The man and his wife were heading out there this very morning.

I asked the man if he had learned how the former pastor had lost his congregation and he told me that was God’s business, not his. It occurred to me right then and there that Jesus was no journalist and just did the good work. I should learn from that. I already have determined that my role in this homeless crisis is not to act as a journalist, as much I want to. There is plenty of fine reporting I’ve read in print about this issue in urban Oregon and it is educating me like solid journalism does.

My loading was complete and I said goodbye to the man and his wife. They drove away and I watched them disappear down an avenue. I wished I could have accompanied them, but immediate responsibilities beckoned.

Yes, no journalism for me…but I dearly wanted to meet the former pastor living in the RV. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either. A meeting and conversation doesn’t have to end up as journalism.

During my ride, I saw cedars, oaks, wetlands, herons and other birds, a snow-capped Mt Hood, goats, sheep, rabbits and squirrels. I saw all this beauty at the same time I was riding through a homeless community. It was the most mind boggling juxtaposition of scenery I had ever experienced in my life.

I saw a woman sitting on the ground reading a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and then I caught a glimpse of what I believe was a tiny home made up of hundreds of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

I nearly swerved out of control seeing (I think) that. Surely if this home did exist, it was the only home of its kind in the world, but it occurred to me in that moment it was utterly practical and brilliant because libraries and homes across Portland had tens of thousands of these thick volumes with nowhere to go but to a landfill or recycling because no one wanted encyclopedias around anymore except someone who might build a home with them.

I saw two women barbecuing something on a Weber grill and laughing.

A young couple dressed in summer attire took photographs of flowers near the creek.

One man was sleeping or resting in the entrance of his tent and using a tire for a pillow.

I saw 30 full shopping carts arranged around as a tent as a sort of fence. Outside smoking and rummaging through their gear, were the tent’s presumed inhabitants: an attractive young couple completely devoid of the ravages of drug use. She was wearing her hair in ponytails. He wore his long like Jesus in the mid century Hollywood movies.

A card game was going on.

One tiny dirt path off the trail led to a gated tent community with wire and pallet fencing. A dog was in the “yard” and staring up at me. It occurred to me that there was exclusion within exile even here.

I think I saw a game of yard darts in process. I know I saw a dartboard nailed to a tree.

More than a dozen people lounged in recliners and couches.

My friend and stopped at a food cart village along the trail. There were members of the local homeless community patronizing various food carts. One of them ordered Salvadorian food, like I did. It was one of the best meals I’d eaten in years. I wanted a beer to wash it down with but the beer garden was closed. I imagine another time I could sit in the garden, drink a beer, and talk with the trail’s homeless population, if indeed they would talk to me. Am I some kind of interloper in this scenario? Are you an interloper if you just want to talk to someone living a situation that deeply distresses you, but that you don’t judge? I can’t seem to mind my business on this issue, especially when I encounter multiple times every day.

If I eventually check out on this issue, then I know I’ve checked out on being a decent American, and there’s way too much of that going on today. I want to combine kindness with action. Two simple great things that go together in perfect simplicity like bread and butter.

Oh yeah, there was a motorcycle gang at the food cart village as well and more racial diversity than I’ve ever experienced in my entire Oregon life.

During our ride, my friend and I talked about what was going on around us and possible solutions. He described the homeless as refugees, fleeing or not really fleeing the brutality of American capitalism. He insisted they should be treated as refugees, housed in facilities with sanitation and basic services, and processed into whatever nation-within-a-nation we can establish. As with most refugee camps, the refugees may have to wait years before processing. I wasn’t sure I agreed with my friend on everything about his analysis and solution, but anything is better than what is going on along this trail.

The Hoovervilles of the Depression disbanded at some point. Will these camps? They’re not even camps. A lexicographer needs to invent a new word to define them but will it be a noun? A noun seems totally inadequate. Was it a person, place or thing I saw on this ride, that I rode right through. Maybe it’s a verb because I did observe varying movements. Perhaps this word or phrase will become a new part of American speech and perhaps we don’t need a lexicographer to invent it, but rather we need a new American Shakespeare. He invented 1700 words still in use today! There’s got to be one, and it does matter finding the right one.

The ride is over. But I will ride the path again soon. How can I not?

A final thought: I want to bring paperback books for these people to read, if there are any readers besides the encyclopedia reader, living along the corridor. I suspect there are. I don’t want to make a big writing deal out of bringing these books, but I would throw in a few of my titles, and leave it at that.

I bicycled approximately 30 miles round trip on what is officially known as the Springwater Corridor Trail and during my journey and encountered approximately 250 tents, structures, hovels, shelters, and other oddball domiciles. During the ride I saw an estimated 50-75 people outside these installations and several more moving inside.

The pedestrians, bicyclists and joggers were apparently there for fitness and recreation. I wasn’t. What was I there for?

The bicycle/pedestrian trail I traversed during my ride parallels a salmon bearing stream that has been extensively restored in recent years to improve salmon habitat. So as I rode and noticed such restoration, it dawned on me I was also riding through human decay where little, if any, restoration is happening.

I rode by a Latina woman sitting on the ground and when she saw my old school, Rasta-colored bicycle she said, smiling, “I love your bike. It’s pretty cool for a white guy.”

Upon hearing this, I laughed aloud and slapped my thigh. “Thank you,” I said.

She looked back at me and smiled wider.

One round dwelling was encircled with wood and the entrance was framed with giant sticks of beaverwood doubtless harvested from the nearby creek. I guess there is another beaverwood nut in Portland besides me. I’d like to talk to him or her about their obsession.

I saw an obese shirtless man flat on his back attended by medics with a could of Sheriff’s deputies standing around in body armor. The man looked dead, although I never seen a dead man.

Is there another bicycle/pedestrian trail in Portland or Oregon or all of America for that matter where a person can ride or jog or walk right though hundreds of homeless encampments a few feet away and see these homeless people, hear them, interact with them if so desired?

I never saw another bicyclist or jogger or walker interact with the homeless people along the trail, although I did see many homeless people try to interact with non-homeless people. All of what I was heard was friendly. Of course it was a nice day. A couple years ago, a homeless man along this trail was feigning attacks on pedestrians and cyclists with a machete. Or they might have been real. There are many people who refuse to use this trail because of a perceived danger.

Saturday. It’s a beautiful Portland morning. I’m biking with a friend into the heart of a unique homeless community. Is that heart dead or alive or somewhere in between? It’s like bicycling into a story, but the story is unknown.

I will report with my eyes and of course I will miss a lot. But I think I can see more on a bicycle ride than a walk. You can subtlety meander on a bike in a way you can’t when walking, and that provides a more expansive yet also secretive scope of vision. That is, if you are looking. I am looking.

(Three hours later)

Okay, I thought I would narrate my ride with a present tense chronological treatment, but what I saw made that impossible. There was absolutely nothing linear about it although I did go from point A to Point Z.

How am to write about what I saw on this ride, which was more of a coast, a coasting through homelessness, physically and metaphorically, and the good thing about coasting through homelessness is that you get to coast right through and leave it behind in reality and metaphor, but as a writer I don’t want to leave what I saw behind, so I guess the technique I will employ here is to provide some images and observations and meanderings, and also offer very few insights because I still don’t know what the hell it was I saw. And if that last Faulkneresque sentence barely makes sense, then I wrote the perfect sentence to introduce this subject because what I saw on this ride through homelessness defies conventional literary treatment of any kind, at least any kind I am aware of. It is the first subject in my writing life that I don’t know how to approach. I keep hoping an idea will come to me, but nothing has yet emerged, so I guess I’ll just riff away here and call it an essay, or better yet, I’ll assay what I saw on my ride, meaning I will wrestle with it.

I drove west down Powell Blvd after my first shift volunteering at faith-based food pantry. There I interacted with several friendly homeless people and learned something of their food pantry preferences. One of them had a cute elderly mutt who rode shotgun in a baby stroller with various pantry items.

It was raining like heaven as I drove. (I will never associate rain with hell.) I could barely keep my eyes on the road because of the homeless encampments along Powell Blvd and the staggering amounts of garbage in and around them. Why the city hadn’t dropped off a dozen dumpsters along this thoroughfare was beyond my comprehension. It should have been a simple and logical act of governing. Maybe a private citizen should just cut the red tape and do it herself. How much trouble could you get into with that act of citizenship?

Squalor. More squalor. Human and manufactured detritus washed ashore in Portland from some type of enormous black sticky tide that baffles scientists, sociologists, solons and scribes. It also baffles and frustrates and vexes the citizens who walk daily along the wrack line of this tide. The tide is always high, never receding. Thus it isn’t really a tide at all. Call it a flood that perpetually remains at flood stage, which is an impossibility with rivers but not with the American homeless population. These are not Hoovervilles and whenever I think of Hoovervilles I remember that I am a distant relative of Herbert Hoover and thus need to somehow cosmically atone for his indifference toward the poor and dispossessed during the Depression.

(How does one atone for being related to Herbert Hoover? I am also a distant relative of Anne Bradstreet and became a writer, so maybe I have it covered.)

I turned off the radio and stared at the free degradation sideshow of our three ring circus known as capitalism. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, degrade people and allow others to degrade themselves in public (maybe it’s the public part we can’t abide).

I wasn’t going to look away and bitch about it on social media.

What the hell would Bob Dylan do with this sight in song?

Something caught my eye. I slowed down. I beheld an elderly couple wearing yellow slickers and orange safety vests in the middle of one of encampments, picking up garbage and placing it in a large green plastic bag. They were not a team part of an organized cleanup. They were going solo on a rainy weekday afternoon in the throes of an urban dystopia.

What in the name of…?????????

I almost started crying. I thought about pulling over and joining them but of course made an excuse not to.

They were out there practicing full blown American citizenship in almost total anonymity.

Almost.