Was I happy at the sweep? Yes, I admit I was. I wanted the miscreants out of the wetlands. It would take half a decade to heal, but it would. I knew that from my years of work as a member and coordinator of a coastal watershed council and my decade-long tenure as a caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge, where I helped restores acres and acres of wrecked land to fuller ecology.

I made my way down the hill and to the shoulder. Someone had spray painted many of the blocks with words of protest. The words were:

The blocks kill

Stop the sweeps

Fuck the government

Fuck the city

Fuck ur $

Fuck ur laws

Fuck NIMBYS

Fuck you

Fuck me

People lived here

My initial reaction to the writer was: fuck you! With the effort and cost expended writing these words, you might have done something far more helpful to better your plight or the wetlands you are murdering with your habitation.

I also laughed at the mention of NIMBY. These people bitching about NIMBY were destroying the homes, front yards and back yards of hundreds of species of flora and fauna with their malicious residency. Go ahead and ruin the concrete under an off ramp of a freeway but don’t ruin an ecosystem and wipe out habitat for a rare species.

We don’t allow the willful destruction of a rare species of flora or fauna in the construction of dams and resorts or because of logging and mining operations. Why allow it here?

I rarely get angry in my interactions with the homeless, but this was one of them.

And then I began investigating the encampment and I got even more angry.

I crossed the road and walked between two of the blocks. I stood on the shoulder and looked down the embankment to the encampment.

It had not been swept. The wetlands had not been cleaned up. There were more discarded appliances and several shelving units.

The city had performed cosmetic surgery. What was needed was a full-blown operation to save a wetlands from critical condition.

I walked roughly 300 yards down the shoulder, paralleling the hellhole. Up close, the devastation was much worse than I had imagined; massive erosion, mounds of garbage, stripped trees, dozens of propane tanks, dozens of shopping carts. There were also considerably more tent/tarp domiciles than I previously thought. I stopped counting at 15.

At first, I heard only white noise of distant traffic. Then I started hearing voices, and staccato bursts of loud and strange, unintelligible words. They sounded almost prehistoric in nature, or what I thought prehistoric language might have sounded.

These voices were eclipsed by the sound of crackling fire. I saw it burning somewhere in the hellhole. I saw an outline of a person feeding the fire wood. Then came unmistakable sound of someone hacking branches with a hatchet.

It was all incredibly discombobulating, this hearing in real time the further destruction of a wetlands. I almost cried out, but refrained because I didn’t know what to say that didn’t involve profanity, and that wasn’t going to help the cause. The cursing on the blocks already proved that.

What would? Maybe some new message spray painted on the blocks? Such as: Hey Miscreants, Get the Hell Out of Our Home! Yours truly, Mr. Beaver, Ms. Salamander and the Willow Sisters.

Regular readers of this blog know I hold no sympathy with those homeless people who destroy the natural areas they inhabit.

I’ve seen this destruction in urban, suburban and rural Oregon. Habitats include riparian areas along creeks and rivers, estuaries, wetlands, forests, coastal dunes, beaches and deserts. I’ve tried in vain to enlist various environmental nonprofit organizations to get off their asses and conduct some outreach to these “campers.” These paid staffers can’t be bothered. I’m always told it’s not their job.

A few clean-up of these pulverized natural areas have occurred in Oregon. I was recently in North Bend and read of a major one on Coos Bay. Major efforts have been conducted along Johnson Creek in Portland, but not nearly enough. I also read of a community effort to clean-up and restore an abandoned encampment in a hiking area along the Sandy River.

So it was much to surprise not too long ago when I took the opportunity to investigate what seemed like from a distance to be a major sweep/clean-up of a homeless encampment that had utterly obliterated a ten-acre wetlands near the Willamette River, a city park, and the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. The wetlands is adjacent to the Oaks Amusement Park and home to the rare northern red-logged frog.

I had last seen the encampment while standing on a hill overlooking the carnage: approximately 15 bombed-out RVs, cars and trucks parked single file on a narrow shoulder 50 feet above the encampment. Some of the vehicles were domiciles and still operational. Others had been abandoned. Garbage was strewn and piled along the shoulder. Two refrigerators were also resting there.

Over the last couple of years, I had seen the encampment change and grow, but never ventured in or around it. From my observation post on the hill. I had observed the strange comings of goings of homeless people who resided there. In the fall, with the leaves gone, I could see glimpses of multiple tent/tarp/pallet shanties erected in the wetlands.

As soon as I heard of the sweep, I decided to check it out the aftermath and tour the encampment up close.

It was a sunny morning in February. On my walk to the encampment, I communed with squirrels, birds and stately Douglas firs. I thought about how I wanted a rescue mutt as a sidekick. Dogs can get you into great stories better than human companions.

I reached the hill and looked down to where the vehicles had once been. They were all gone, as was all the garbage and refrigerators. To prevent reoccupation, the city had placed approximately 75 large concrete blocks blocking vehicular access to the shoulder.

I attended my first hockey game in almost 50 years! A friend and I went to see the Portland Winterhawks play the Seattle Thunderbirds at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland. We took an employee-owned socialist taxi to the venue. We watched an exciting game that went down to the final seconds (Portland lost). I drank a $13.50 beer. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of racial diversity in the fans. There were several fights! They played heavy metal during breaks. I had more fun than I ever imagined and felt good spending my money on a minor league, locally-owned sports franchise.

I have three books coming out next month. I will be promoting them in the usual ways, but also with some new marketing wrinkles. One distribution method has, to my knowledge, never been tried and that makes it all the more worth trying. It will rely on total strangers to support one of the books in their towns and neighborhoods.

I keep reading reports of declining enrollment in public schools across Oregon and the nation. Various theories are propounded for the reasons but I recently saw one outside my dad’s senior living center. A private school for 2nd-8^th graders that specializes in the creative arts opened a couple years ago across the street from the center. The other day, all the school’s students and a lot of parents were taking a walk around the block for some reason. I estimated there were about 50 students and at least that many parents, all in their 30s and 40s, all white. A decade ago, most of those kids would have attended public school. Those same parents wouldn’t have had a type of lucrative, probably remote employment, that allowed them to take the time off to walk around the block in the morning.

I recently read a collection of WW II front-line reporting and was astonished at its clarity and brevity. Writing was so different back then and I actually prefer it. Edwin Murrow’s account of entering a German concentration camp is one of the best pieces I have ever read. I am keeping the book so I can read it at random every now and then to remind myself that brevity and clarity are excellent traits to emulate in writing.

My next literary project will be producing an anthology of writing for Nestucca Spit Press that will enlist the talents of new, aspiring, established and long lost Pacific Northwest writers. The plan is to have that book in the hands of contributors by the fall and then let them each gig it in their own way.

I look forward to warmer weather so I can plant my herb garden.

Showers sprinkled Portland on a Sunday afternoon. I was driving home after a superb visit with dad at the assisted living center. We talked education and politics, read the newspaper, and watched an NFL playoff game. We even took tiny shots of Wild Turkey for medicinal purpose.

A red light stopped me at a busy intersection. I looked across the avenue to a convenience store and saw a young homeless man standing on a sidewalk, talking to a power pole and the wind. Next to him stood a large piece of thick cardboard, folded in half, resting on the sidewalk at such an angle as if were a sign for passing motorists to read and decide if they wanted to act on behalf of its message.

I really didn’t pay much attention because I see such signs all the time and occasionally they motivate me to act, although repenting my sins is never among the actions.

Then I noticed something odd about the one side of the sign I could see from my vehicle. The sign was blank. A tan, three-foot by three-foot blank canvas.

What? It made no sense. I figured the other side of the sign I couldn’t see displayed a message. The light turned green and I drove by the sign’s other side. No message. How could that be? A sign without a message?

But maybe the homeless man’s blank sign was a sign and I simply didn’t get it, although I did try. (I still am.) Maybe he had yet to write the message. Maybe he never would. Maybe he was waiting for a passing motorist to toss him a Sharpie. Maybe the non sign was meant for the viewer to make up his own message on the spot. Maybe I should have pulled over and asked him what the message should read. I have Sharpies in the car. I could have written his for him, or if was incapable of conveying his message orally, which looked likely, I could dive into my creative mind and write one for him.

And it would be…?

I don’t know. To do so would have required a massive dose of presumption and I have come to learn via my many interactions with the homeless, that to presume anything about them is wrong.

Of all my strange encounters with Oregon’s homeless people the past several years, this was so far the most baffling.

Over the course of the last two years, the same seven or eight dilapidated RVs and trailers have rotated their residences through roughly a ten-block area of my neighborhood.

Some of the stays last months, others weeks. A couple rigs remained at the same spot for over a year.

Then one day, for no reason I can fathom, a green sticker warning of an imminent towing appears. But not all the rigs receive the stickers. That’s what I don’t fathom. Why some avoid city action and others don’t is a total mystery.

Once a sticker does appear, the rigs somehow manage to disappear…only to re-materialize a few streets away. They often return to the same spot, parked—if parked is the word—in front of a house, business, church or apartment building, typically near a park or creek. It’s a crazy cat and mouse game.

Sometimes the rigs have handwritten signs posted on them: “Waiting for parts, please don’t call the police” ; “At work. If there’s a problem call ***-***-****; “I’m a veteran” ; “Trying to find housing, please don’t call police” ; “I’m a Christian.”

I read the signs and wonder if they are truthful.

Some of the inhabitants run tight ships around their rigs. Others don’t and accumulate inexplicable shit. The other day I saw one man sorting branches leaning against the side of his trailer. Another has ten ladders roped to the top of his RV.

Most have generators running outside their rigs and you can hear them from a blocks away. Imagine living across from that noise for six months. That would drive me insane.

It’s a marvel to me these rigs aren’t vandalized by angry neighbors sick of it all. Maybe some of them are.

Some of the inhabitants are destroying the riparian areas of a local creek. Some are terrible neighbors. Others are not. All these rigs do not have legal tags. One has an ancient motorized scooter parked outside and I often see him puttering around the neighborhood searching for cans and bottles. He also transports propane tanks on his scooter. It’s always interesting seeing him weave through traffic with the tanks bungeed to the scooter.

The city should have opened a bare bones RV park for these sort of rigs years ago. If I recall, there were plans to do so a while back at the Expo Center on Port of Portland land but the Port nixed it and city commissioners caved in. Other cities have constructed these ad hoc parks and they cost a fraction of tiny home villages.

This sort of RV/trailer living is going on all over Portland and Oregon and the rest of the country, This is not the kind of RV/trailer living as depicted in Nomadland, the book and movie.

None of the people living out of these rigs are directly contacted by service providers. They are never counted. I do believe the city of Portland operates or operated a program where a septic waste hauler visited various RV/trailer encampments and offered to drain holding tanks for free.

I don’t know if the program is still operating. I’ve certainly never seen it in effect around my neighborhood. I thought it was a great idea although others thought it enabled this kind of living. I’d rather have their piss and shit hauled away at taxpayer expense than dumped into the creeks or unlocked dumpsters.

One of the questions I’ve repeatedly asked since writing about the New American Diaspora is: how in the hell do these people obtain these RVs, trailers and buses? Many are 40-50 years old!

I think it’s time I found out. All I have to do is ask their occupants. But in all my hundreds and hundreds of walks past these rotating rigs, I can count on one hand the times I’ve actually seen a person outside one of them.