Perry stood near his domicile, an ingenious mini Conestoga wagon he’d rigged up on a tiny trailer. It had been his home for years and rested in front of an apartment building. The building owner allowed him to live there in trade for security, picking up litter, and some handyman tasks.

Elmer the husky and I were out for an afternoon walk through the park. A dilapidated RV and battered trailer that had been marooned across the street from the park for four or five months were finally gone—to side streets a few blocks away. How these rigs managed not to disintegrate during transit was unimaginable.

The place where the RV and trailer had formerly been parked once hosted a full blown encampment consisting of almost 20 rigs, vehicles, tents, and pallet shanties. I witnessed its sweeping almost 18 months ago, but now and then new domiciles for the homeless reappear.

Perry had been homeless in the neighborhood for almost 20 years. He survives by picking up trash every day, all day, and accepting donations for his labor. He typically wears a clip-on tie on the job. I give him a few bucks every time we meet and always have a brief conversation with him on a variety of subjects, but usually about homelessness.

The RV and trailer had been parked 50 yards away from Perry’s domicile. He’d lived near the encampment for several years and had also witnessed when it was swept. We talked about it later and Perry registered a level of disgust for those residents that shocked me. I mean, he loathed their garbage, hoarding, drug use, screaming at all hours, loud generators, general meth miscreant behavior, you name it.

It was almost the same level of disgust members of the Old Crow Book Club had for residents of the encampment, and when they revealed this particular attitude is when I learned there are distinct class divisions to homeless people and it typically falls along the lines of which drugs are consumed and if you practice a leave-no-trace kind of homelessness.

I walked up to Perry and introduced Elmer. I fished out a couple bucks from my wallet and handed them over. He thanked me and I thanked him.

Perry petted Elmer and then began warning me about walking the dog in the area; he was always finding needles or pills (presumably fentanyl) on the streets and sidewalks.

I asked him about the missing RV and trailer and he launched into a tirade about their squalor and their occupants, one of whom Perry claimed was an 80-year-old woman and I had no reason not to believe him.

But Perry didn’t stop there. He then began an angry riff about the meth and fentanyl zombies that he frequently encountered in the neighborhood.

“Don’t look them in the eye,” said Perry. “They will roll you and the next thing you know the cops will be at your door.”

I didn’t say anything and Perry continued.

“It’s like chumming for shit if you help these people.”

He asked me if knew what chumming meant, and I said I did.

I also knew he meant shit to stand in for sharks, bad human beings. I got the metaphor but wasn’t sure if I agreed with it or it made any logical sense. Chumming is for catching and killing sharks, not helping them. You can’t really chum a human being with smiles, kindness, favors, big favors, then reel them in and kill them, literally or metaphorically. Can you? I suppose a con man could.

And what happens if you chum a shark and it ends up eating you? Think Quint in Jaws.

I think Perry’s point was that helping some of the homeless and engaging them beyond a simple hello and giving them a few bucks can lead to getting burned.

Never once in all my interactions with the homeless, particularly members of the Old Crow Book Club, have I once feared of getting burned by helping them.

It was time for me and Elmer to leave. I told Perry to keep up the good work. As I walked away, I started thinking about the phrase, “chumming for shit.” I thought about it all the way home.

It was a sunny afternoon in Reedsport and Elmer the husky and I were on a walk through a neighborhood clustered with mobile home parks, one of the last options for affordable housing in rural areas of Oregon, but who knows how long that will last.

I was in a jaunty mood with my dog after a full day of researching Steve Prefontaine for an upcoming book and hitting some remote ocean beaches where Elmer went nuts and I thanked Tom McCall for his monumental role in preserving them for the public to use for free.

Down the street I noticed a hulking and dilapidated RV parked halfway on the sidewalk. No back license plates. A homeless rig either housing someone or abandoned, like they are all over Oregon in some of the strangest of places. (Entrance to Crater Lake National Park tops my list.) How people come to procure these battered rigs is the story of homelessness that currently fascinates me the most and I would love to make a documentary film about the subject.

What also fascinates me about this story is connected to something I observed with this rig: a power line was running from the rig to one of the trailers in the trailer park. Someone housed was rendering aid in the form of electricity, perhaps even water, and who knows else what. I see this kind of aid being rendered all the time. It is an almost totally undocumented story.

I have become a self-appointed expert on these kind of RVs and I speculated this one, named The Bounder, dated to the late 80s because of the design and color scheme (very Miami Vice).

The Bounder is one of my favorite names from the halcyon days of RV names from the 70s and 80s, names such as Diplomat, Vixen, Nomad.

Today’s RV names speak for themselves, and their era: Attitude, Volt, X-Streme! Maxx Ultra Lite. Torque.

We approached the rig from the rear and I thought about crossing the street because there wasn’t much room to pass it on the sidewalk. Then I saw the main door to the rig open and some cigarette or pot smoke twirl out. Someone was in there!

A story-gathering mood overtook me so Elmer and I made our way down the sidewalk. I stopped at the entrance and beheld a woman in her 70s sitting on the steps into the RV, dragging on a cigarette.

I said hello and she said hello. I peeked inside the rig expecting to see piles of shit,

It was completely empty, gutted down to the floors and walls!

I asked her about it. She told me she had ripped out everything except the kitchen sink. She was going to customize a 40-something old RV and make it her new home.

Oh to see that finished project!

She said she lived in the trailer park, and I got the feeling she was moving out because it was no longer affordable on her fixed income, although she didn’t say that.

One of her neighbors was letting her tap into power for various tools for the remodeling. Her place was too far away and the rig was too big to park in the park, so out on the sidewalk it had to go.

I asked her what year it was. Nineteen-eighty-six, she said. I told her I’d always loved the name Bounder and thought its logo of a crazy kangaroo with a crazy joey in the mama’s pouch was the best RV logo of all time. She smiled at that.

Elmer started getting impatient and I wished her good luck. Thirty yards away, I wheeled around: I had forgot to ask her how she had procured the Bounder! Fool!

I almost started to walk back and ask, but the moment had passed and I moved on. There will be many more times to ask this particular question.

In recent weeks I have thought about the end of scenes in my life. By that I mean when a fabulous stretch of personal and cultural life comes to an end and you have to move on or risk becoming a relic, steeped in nostalgia. Doubtless there are folkies in Greenwich Village, acid heads in Haight Ashbury and grungers in Seattle who are still there doing the same shit.

I think back to the great scenes of my life, in no chronological order:

Free Pool Sunday at the Sea Star Lounge in Gold Beach.

The RV park.

Building driftwood forts on the Southern Oregon Coast.

The Friday Lunch Jam at Newport High School.

My high school tennis career.

The construction job near Port Orford.

The open mic at Cafe Mundo in Newport.

My decade-long duty as caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

The Hamilton House on Lair Hill my senior year in college.

Dave’s house in NE Portland in the 90s.

The Tacoma House in Sellwood in graduate school.

The sidewalk near the convenience store where the Old Crow Book Club formed and convened. (I really miss that one!)

Is there another scene for me? I certainly don’t have one going on now. I have never gone about trying to begin one or find one. They tend to emerge and then evolve and then die.