My new book, Gift of the Oregon Magi & Other Christmas Tales of Homelessness, is out for the holidays and I invite you to support it with a purchase, perhaps multiple purchases to give away as gifts.
This will be the last book published by Nestucca Spit Press, founded in 2002, for the foreseeable future. I sense my writing (and activism) moving in a new direction with this recent move to Coos Bay. I am considering launching a newspaper or literary review to serve my new community.
Information about Gift of the Oregon Magi & Other Christmas Tales of Homelessness,is below. Thanks to all of you who have bought Nestucca Spit Press books over the years, mine and the other authors I’ve published. It’s made all the difference.
Gift of the Oregon Magi & Other Christmas Tales of Homelessness
December arrives. Outdoor Christmas decorations go up, enchant, perhaps even move hearts to better Bob Cratchit places. What happens to homeless men and women during Christmas? What does it mean and how do they celebrate if they celebrate at all?
And how do those who are housed in the midst of homeless in their communities, sometimes interacting with their quasi neighbors, respond to the crisis when Christmas rolls around, if they respond at all?
In Gift of the Oregon Magi & Other Christmas Tales of Homelessness, Matt Love explores these questions and more. “My dream for this book is that every holiday season, readers will read aloud one or more of these stories to their friends and family and begin a discussion about homelessness that affects every community in rural, suburban and urban America and what all of us can do to alleviate it,” said Love.
Gift of the Oregon Magi features 15 tales and one incredible true story. Many have appeared in print or online, but the collection also includes nine tales never before previously published.
The book can be purchased directly from Nestucca Spit Press at www.nestuccaspitpress.com or via Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FR4TDMFR
For those living in and around the Portland area, I want to alert you to an extraordinary photographic and literary event exploring the lives of homeless people in the city. It’s called what I carry and it will run from January 18th to March 15th in the third floor gallery of the Central Branch of the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland. The opening reception is Saturday, January 18th, from 2-4, and I encourage everyone to attend and see this show and support the artist, my friend Jim Lommasson. For more information on the show, see below:
what i carry
A collaborative photo+writing storytelling project with Portland’s Street Community
Since 2010, I have dedicated my work to collaborative projects with communities displaced from their homes and their their homelands. These projects encompass the stories of refugees, genocide, and Holocaust survivors who bear the burdens of the diaspora.
My “What We Carried” projects delve into themes of departure and the enduring impact it leaves behind. Each project deepens my connection with the communities with whom I collaborate. what i carry focuses on Portland’s unhoused community.
This project with the unsheltered members of our community aims to remind us of our shared humanity. It serves as a poignant reminder that any of us could find ourselves in need of shelter, should one or two circumstances in our lives shift.
Through this process of personal storytelling with object/photographs with the participants’ handwriting, giving voice to the those who are rarely heard we aspire to build a sense of community and remind us that we are all one family.
It’s been said that my What We Carried projects “humanize” the refugee. But it’s not the refugee (or the homeless person) that needs to be humanized…
In my early morning meanderings through the neighborhood with Elmer, we had seen many sights related to the homeless that I believed in my lifelong study of American history had no parallel in American history. Some were bizarre; some defied explanation; some were farcical or comedic; many were mesmerizing; some poignant, several pathetic, one aggravating; some ended up as poems of collage; some piled up one after another in the course of 20 minutes and remained eternally unsorted.
Elmer and I had also encountered astonishing scenes of nature in the park: creeks, oak and conifer trees, blue herons, Canadian geese, multiple species of ducks, a turtle, otters, skunks, beavers, owls, hawks, a beaver lodge, a muskrat, nutrias, squirrels and coyotes. What also astonished me was knowing that if I had walked a through this park 30-35 years ago, as I had many times while living in the neighborhood, almost none of these sighting of wildlife would have occurred because the park’s riparian areas had yet to be restored to fuller ecology.
But now a bit of wildness ( a beaver lodge!) had returned to the city and I benefited every morning. It was perhaps the main reason I could endure living in Portland.
I often wondered if what I constructed after witnessing and juxtaposing these images and experiences constituted an act of surrealist thought, I mean pure unadulterated slices of the classical artistic movement known as surrealism that originated in France a century ago with Andre Breton as its champion and author of its manifesto.
Surrealism today is almost elusively associated with hallucinatory visual art (i.e. Salvador Dali) but its literature was almost as vital, although that’s largely forgotten today.
Before exploring this subject deeper in this essay, let me discourse a bit on surrealism to set up the ending.
The adjective “surreal” gets tossed around a lot in various American media circles by people who think they know what it means. They don’t.
Some recent examples:
A Fox News host shrieks it surreal that a former President was convicted of 34 counts of fraud by a jury of his peers. (Wrong.)
A college basketball player whose team has just won back-to-back NCAA Division 1 championships describes the moment as surreal. (Wrong.)
A contestant on a network talent show tells the judges it feels surreal being up on stage. (Wrong.)
A historian of the War in the Pacific during World War II writes how surreal it was for a Japanese artillery shell to blast a Marine completely through the trunk of a tree during an amphibious landing. (Wrong.)
A sports talk radio jock proclaims a the aftermath of a prize fight that devolved in bedlam surreal. (Wrong.)
I could could go on and on. Right now, surreal is the most overused and erroneously used word in the vernacular of American popular culture.
Surreal is not a synonym for bizarre or something that seemingly could not happen.
I have studied surrealism for decades, taught a surrealism-themed writing workshops to high school students, teachers and adults, and infrequently integrated its concepts into my books, most notably in Of Walking in Rain.
What then is surrealism? Its famous definition goes something like, “An umbrella and sewing machine meet on an operating room table.” In the manifesto, Breton wanted surrealism to bridge the antediluvian chasm between dreaming and waking life that might lead to a future resolution between those states of mind.
Surrealism as formal art occurs when utterly distinct words or images or sounds or experiences become juxtaposed by an artist, either at random or by design, and then the artist, or anyone for that matter, is free to construct a new reality or irreality based on the juxtaposition or collage of the presented items.
There is absolutely nothing linear or narrative in surrealism. How can there be if an artist cuts out images from a 1963 Playboy, a current issue of Guns and Ammo, a 1930s children’s illustrated life of Jesus Christ, and 1975’s The Joys of Jello cookbook, places them in a dryer for 30 seconds, pulls out the images one by one in the dark, perhaps coasting on magic mushrooms, and collages them into a piece of art while listening to a cassette of calliope music.
What I have just described above is an example of making visual art in a surrealist manner. Something similar can happen with writing.
William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein would scissor random words or lines from vastly different publications and then arrange the words or lines at random or with editorial intent to construct a piece of writing. Burroughs called these experiments in surrealism “Cut Ups” and I’d met with incredible success using this method in teaching creative writing for decades but several years had passed since I’d written (compiled and/or collaged) anything in the surrealist mode.
Was there anything surreal about the homeless crisis that I had observed in recent years? The question had frequently crossed my mind. I’d chronicled many episodes of my encounters with homeless people’s behavior and often evaluated them for qualities of surrealism. For example, and these are all pre Elmer:
Was the image of someone naked, zonked on fentanyl and screaming at a light pole in a progressive city like Portland and no one does anything about it surreal. No. That’s addiction and neglect.
Was the image of two men playing foosball in a homeless encampment that flew American flags atop dilapidated RVs surreal? No. They found the foosball table on a sidewalk, carried it to the encampment, and returned to a favorite pastime from their glory teenage years in the 70s. I would have done the same if I’d found a foosball table. The two men were merely having fun by using a discarded toy precisely the way it was intended.
Was the image of a stripper pole installed in a two-store plywood and pallet shanty surreal? No. To quote Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On.”
Was the image of a man living in a homeless encampment using a portable blow torch to barbecue a crawdad surreal? Okay, that edged closer, but still, not there yet. He was hungry. He owned a blowtorch. He knew how to use it. He saw a crawdad in the creek behind the encampment. He cooked it up for supper. That made perfect sense, as did the paprika he used to season the crawdad.
And what about the image of two young girls dressed in grimy hoodies, oversized holey jeans and mismatched sneakers? One pulled a red wagon full of cans and bottles; the other walked beside her friend, grunting and gesticulating. They both laughed in staccato bursts and generally acted weird. Initially, I had no idea what the hell was going on. I watched them as they passed me as I stood near a homeless man sauced on malt liquor while I was then writing a book about the homeless in my neighborhood.
I didn’t get it until…
…I…
…did…
The girls were playing at being homeless. There was no other possible explanation.
Was that surreal? No. They were simply modeling behavior they’d habitually observed and were having a blast doing so. Hey, adults still dress up as hobos and bindle stiffs for Halloween and carry jugs of Carlo Rossi rotgut wine as part of the costume. That’s not surreal.
One day, after seeing a man sitting on a camp stool wearing a box over his head while smoking fentanyl at 5:45 in the morning, I was staggered by the sight and decided then and there to immerse myself in a surrealism writing workshop later that day.
The goal was to distill what I was seeing in the park with Elmer and perhaps make sense of everything. That I was trying to discover meaning through an exercise in surrealism automatically ruled out any possible outcome of surrealism…
…but…
…after writing almost a half million words about the homeless crisis in every conceivable literary genre, except surrealism, why not give it a try? There was nothing to lose and everything to gain if the exercise produced even a sliver of understanding.
All these years and words and I was no closer to discovering what was really happening in Oregon in connection to homelessness, let alone how to solve the greatest domestic humanitarian crisis of my adult lifetime. It was a crisis that I saw and/or interacted with every day, sometimes two or three times a day, no matter where I traveled in Oregon, a crisis that I had tried to alleviate by assisting homeless people in my midst and writing and publishing a book on the subject.
But something had shifted. Since adopting Elmer and walking with him every morning, I had witnessed scenes of homelessness blocks from my home so novel and devastating to me that I feared a decline in my spiritual and mental health.
Therapy? No!
“Pluck they own heart string” as Emerson advised? Yes!
So I devised a surrealism-themed writing workshop. Feel free to take it yourself. It doesn’t take very long.
What follows are declarative sentences I wrote about the occurrences that transpired on a dozen of our walks through the park between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning in the months of April-June 2024. I could have written hundreds of more sentences from previous winter walks, but I didn’t want the exercise to become too unwieldy or time consuming. These incidents are not in chronological order.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
A softball field waits for players.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
Two skunks sniff around the entrance to the Presbyterian church.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
A writer walks his husky at 5:30 in the morning.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Someone left behind a plastic jar of Cheetos in a grocery cart.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
An old man cuts rhododendron flowers with a Bowie knife.
Songbirds sing.
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
Rain falls.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
A beaver glides in the creek.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A writer composes a haiku in his head.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn’t moved in six months.
Freight trains squeak as they couple and uncouple.
No one has returned in three months to a tent pitched in the blackberries.
The husky takes a dump.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I printed the sentences and cut them out individually. I put all the sentences in an envelope, shook it up, then dumped them onto a piece of yellow construction paper. I began arranging the sentences with conscious intent on a table in my back yard to the sonic accompaniment of classical music (later identified as a fugue) and Elmer’s gnawing on a bone. I attempted to construct a new reality, possibly a surrealist one, from whatever emerged from my construction.
Five minutes later I had composed this:
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A beaver glides in the creek.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn’t moved in six months.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
Songbirds sing.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Rain falls.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I read it aloud twice and in doing so gradually recognized the reason for my particular arrangement. I wasn’t conscious of my choices when I was moving the sentences around or discarding some altogether. They fell into order as if by mental legerdemain.
The exercise produced a poem, if you want to call it that, of one image of homelessness followed by an image of nature. This type of stark contrast occurs almost every morning on my walks with Elmer. Just this morning, I saw a fine telescope in a encampment consisting of a tiny 60-year-old trailer and three tarped tents not long after I observed a mother and father goose herd their new chicks down a grassy slope.
My poem did not meet the standard for surrealism. I wasn’t disappointed. I seek understanding writing about the homeless and this exercise provided one on a strictly personal level. I don’t hold it out as a truism for anyone else.
What I observe in the mornings unfolds all the time in Oregon, and elsewhere in the United States. If something happens all the time it cannot be described as surreal. Surrealism isn’t commonplace or ongoing. What I see every morning with homelessness and nature in my neighborhood has become commonplace to me and obviously ongoing. Indeed, the former seems to worsen; the latter seems very much to prosper. My local watershed began recovering two decades ago after a century of ignorance and abuse.
After two decades of uniquely American abuse too varied and complex to delineate here, many people are homeless, many addled and insane and pulverized with no hope of reclamation or restoration.
Will I walk through the juxtaposition of early morning marvels of nature and the misery of homelessness for the foreseeable Oregon future, perhaps the rest of my life?
I think so. It’s the most dispiriting sensation I’ve ever felt as an Oregonian.
I announce the publication of my new e-book about homelessness, Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day, (A Story for Kids and Adults).
In the book, Sonny the husky discovers a homeless encampment destroying a creek in a Portland city park. She alerts her owner and a park ranger and inspires a community clean-up of the damaged riparian area. Neighborhood citizens and residents of the encampment join Sonny to restore a tiny part of a watershed and later celebrate their collaboration.
This book was inspired by my discovery of a children’s Lassie book published in 1970 where Lassie leads a litter clean-up of a national park on Earth Day. I wrote it in similar kid-friendly style, but perhaps with parody also in mind. I have long wondered how parents today talk to their kids about homelessness, since it is all around us. Perhaps this story will help.
Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day is available through Amazon and also through my web site via PayPal at nestuccaspitpress.com and right through this blog.
If you order it through my site you do not need an e-book reader. You will download the story in the E-pub or PDF formats and then easily read it on any device.
Thanks for your support of an independent Pacific Northwest publisher.
Mark, charter member of the Old Crow Book Club, and a homeless man, sat across from me at the same picnic table in the park where I’d staged the launch for the book about us, nine months ago in what turned out to be the greatest experience of my literary life. I didn’t sell a single book that afternoon, (gave away 50!) but that hardly mattered. What mattered how that event created a special community for the neighborhood’s homeless community.
If only I could have followed up on that special moment by building more camaraderie between the homeless and the housed in the neighborhood, but I did not.
It was a bright sunny morning and the creek ran swift behind us. Mark and I conversed as a filmmaker shot footage for an upcoming documentary about the book club, Mark, and my unsuccessful efforts to obtain housing for one Oregon-born homeless man in his late 50s who had suffered two heart attacks ten months ago.
It had been a long time since Mark and I had really talked about books, history, politics, Oregon, his plight, and the fate of other members of the club. Winter rain, wind and snow was part of that, but also, Elmer the husky had taken up a lot of time and pulled me into other stories about the homeless. Funny, how a dog can change your editorial mission!
Mark was drinking a can of malt liquor and smoking a cigarette. I was wearing my beloved corduroy car coat because it felt like spring, real corduroy weather! Both of us were in voluble mood and we riffed away on the book, his homelessness, books, mutual friends, and frustrations with the city, county and non profits’ chronic and farcical indifference and incompetence when it came to housing him. For almost three years, Mark, with help from me and other residents of the neighborhood, had been trying and failing to secure housing.
But today, this very day (!) the City of Portland had launched a new outreach program through something called the Street Services Coordination Center to assist the homeless find housing based on referral from a concerned member of the community. The program was chronicled in various media outlets, including the Oregonian:
“An outreach worker will respond to where the person is living outside within three days, though ideally they’ll be able to respond within one day, according to Hank Smith, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s policy advisor who led the effort…
“This gives us the ability to be more responsive,”Smith said. “We heard a lot from the community that this is needed and I agree.”
Smith said he has heard from concerned neighbors asking how they can help unhoused individuals obtain services…”
In fact, Smith heard repeatedly from a resident in my neighborhood who complained about the multiple problems of helping homeless people, namely Mark, into housing. The resident had read The Old Crow Book Club and sent Smith a copy. Maybe it played some small part in having the City establish this outreach program. Clearly, the conventional methods for housing someone like Mark and other members of the club were not working and this newfangled outreach program offered a new direction, at least in my mind. A paid City employee was going into the field and try the one-on-one approach and meet a homeless person who wanted off the streets where that person lived or hung out.
We had to give the program a try. So we did. As we told the filmmaker, we weren’t going to quit.
Naturally the new program involved a website and filling out a form online and then waiting for something to happen.
For those interested in what the form looks like, go to:
https://www.portland.gov/sscc/homelessoutreach
I had read the form before meeting Mark and planned on filling out it with him. Right on camera.
After a rowdy conversation and answering questions from the filmmaker, I briefed Mark on the program and asked if he wanted me to refer him. He said “Yes” and thus we began another attempt to get him housed.
I began filling out the form on my phone and had almost completed it, but couldn’t pin Mark’s location on the map because my fingers couldn’t do it on a small screen. If his location wasn’t exactly pinned, the form could not be submitted.
My frustration mounted. I cursed and eventually gave up. I told Mark I would complete the form at home on my computer and would pin his location in front of the grocery store where he was practically every afternoon selling the weekly newspaper advocating for the homeless. He had to be there for this to work. He understood.
The very odd aspect to the program states that the person making the referral, in this case me, would not be informed if Mark was contacted. That made no sense at all. Shouldn’t I know if outreach was attempted? Successful? A failure? And if Mark wasn’t contacted, should I keep filling out the form and pinning his location at the grocery store? Should I fill out the form every day for the rest of the year until Mark qualified for housing? How about signing up 50 people to fill out the form on behalf of Mark every day until something happens? That might move City Hall.
The program prioritizes certain people for outreach/housing, although it doesn’t say actual willingness to go into housing is part of the criterion. Mark is ready, willing and able. He’s not out of his mind on fentanyl or impossible to locate or communicate with. He’s not so physically incapacitated that he can’t take care of himself, like many homeless people are.
As I submitted the form, I wondered if it would make a damn’s bit of difference.
Four days later I stood on my back deck talking to an outreach worker responding to the form. I was utterly shocked to have received such a call from a real person whose job entailed going out into the field, meeting homeless people, establishing rapport, and trying to secure them housing.
At long last!
The staffer was new; the program was new. His team had trained for two months and now they had the green light to take action. It felt like Mark was going to be his first attempt.
He had called me because I had listed my number for Mark, who had no phone. Otherwise, I would have never known of any attempt at contact. I briefed the staffer on Mark’s location, back story and his desire to reside in a nearby Safe Rest Village that was close to the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the staffer informed me that he had no way of knowing of availability at that particular site, which made no sense to me, but I let it go, as I did other serious gaps in his knowledge about the system. Stay positive! No time for cynicism!
As we conversed I felt myself having high hopes for Mark and this staffer. We hadn’t quit. We were nearing the goal line and I wanted paydirt (football metaphor) for my friend.
I asked the staffer why I couldn’t just schedule an appointment for Mark and made sure he showed up at the grocery store. Apparently, and inexplicably, that’s not the way it worked. I told the staffer I would drive Mark to where the staffer was! No, it didn’t work that way, either.
So, I didn’t push it.
The staffer said he would try to make contact with Mark at the grocery store during the window of time Mark was normally stationed outside the grocery store, selling papers. The staffer said he would attempt to contact Mark three or four times and then, “I have to move on.”
I said I understood his position but if this initial series of outreach attempts failed I was referring him again, again and again. He didn’t respond to that. I thanked him for his efforts.
He said he was speaking from a nearby Safe Rest Village and was about ready to head out and search for Mark. Today!
We ended the conversation. I felt fantastically giddy. I roughhoused with Elmer the maniacal husky. We then went out for our fourth walk of the day and I thought about how all of us would celebrate if Mark got housed.
Then it would be on to help other members of the club and continue to build an effective relationship with this one particular staffer.
The next afternoon I would search for Mark and see what had transpired. If nothing had happened, I would fire him up with profane football coaching cliches from my youth and make sure he was stationed in front of the grocery store for the next three days—weather be damned—and he better lay off the sauce!
Rain was falling the next day at noon. I drove to the store. No Mark. I returned an hour later. No Mark.
I drove to the store the next day at noon. No Mark. I took Elmer to the wildlife refuge for a long walk. I returned to the store. No Mark! But I did encounter three other members of the Old Crow Book Club in the parking lot and it was a grand reunion, mostly because I always think one or more might end up dead.
Donnie was fresh out of detox and shilling papers like a carnival barker.
Sean and Jacob were hanging out in Sean’s new mobile domicile, a tricked out van from the 90s, drinking malt liquor and sharing a joint. Sean was looking better than I’d seen him in a year. Jacob told me he’d quit his job at a deli because too many people were using hard drugs there. He’d just put in application a a burger and beer joint across the street from the grocery store and was confident he would score the gig.
I asked where the hell Mark was. They didn’t know. I gave them the lowdown on the new outreach program and how it imperative it was for Mark to camp out in front of the store in the afternoons the next three days. He had to hear the news that a worker had called me and said he was going out to look for Mark. Something was in the wind! I gave Donnie a note I had written Mark with all the particulars and told him to give it to Mark if he saw him.
Another vendor of the paper came up, a formerly homeless man and military veteran named Troy who had let Mark crash in his subsidized apartment during the recent cold snap. He said Mark was on his way, walking down the avenue.
Upon hearing that news, I started running toward Mark’s direction. He had to hear about the new positive development from me.
It’s a strange and incredible feeling to be jogging toward a homeless man who is your friend and needs help and you may have some help to offer.
Three blocks later, I saw Mark, somewhat hunched over, walking very slowly toward me. I came to a walk and yelled out to him. He saw me and waved. We met. I gave him the news and informed him of his duty to be at the grocery store during the designated hours. It might not amount to anything. It could be everything.
I walked back to the grocery store with Mark and said I’d check back the next day to see if contact had been made.
The next day I met Mark in front of the store. He was reading a book and sipping a can of malt liquor. It was 41 degrees and raining. I asked him if anyone from the city had contacted him.
YES! YES! YES!
The outreach worker briefly interviewed Mark, apparently inputted some information, and said Mark was now on a waiting list (of some kind) for a spot at a nearby Safe Rest Village. Apparently there was new money allocated or finally being spent to place the residents of Safe Rest Villages into subsidized apartments, thereby opening up spaces.
Mark wasn’t sure how the worker would contact him once a space became available. I still didn’t understand why the new program didn’t allow a staffer to call me.
I was downright giddy at the good news. Mark was substantially more subdued. He said he’d believe it when it happened and I couldn’t argue with that.
A song popped into my mind, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” I loathe that 80s schmaltz classic, but I started belting it out and Mark nodded along. I saw a couple of people watching me sing and they looked a little sour, kind of like those folks did in the opening title sequence of the Mary Tyler Moore Show when Mary tosses her knitted hat up in the air in the middle of downtown crowd because she’s so on fire to live and put her special positive energy into everyone around her. Who can turn the world on with her smile?
“We’re almost there Mark,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“I didn’t even have to go full on Jim Rockford. I’m almost sad.”
We laughed, said goodbye, and I drifted away while Mark went back to reading his book.
Almost a week passed. One of the residents of the neighborhood who had advocated relentlessly on behalf of Mark emailed me and asked for the phone number of the outreach worker. She was considering calling him to check on the progress of finding Mark housing. I provided the number and then she emailed me again, suggesting since I had already talked to him and he knew me, that I should make the call.
I had a better idea. Mark would call the outreach worker on my phone and advocate for himself and share the news that the place where he normally slept, the back porch of a vacant church, wasn’t available in a week because of a new congregation renting the church. Mark had slept on the porch for over a year. It was private, safe, and the neighbors never blew the whistle because Mark kept a very low profile.
The resident thought that a good idea and also wrote she would follow up with further communication to the new program.
The next day, I found Mark in front of the grocery store hawking newspapers. I asked if he would call the outreach worker and give him an update and generally keep him on the front burner. To me, it would sound much better coming from Mark.
Mark agreed and called the outreach worker. No one answered and Mark left a voicemail. I bought a paper from him, told him to keep the faith, and went on my way.
Later that night, I received an email from the resident saying she had received a call from the Mayor’s office about Mark. He had been offered two placements in Safe Rest Village but they were not his preferred choice of the nearby Clinton Triangle, so he had turned them down.
What? My emotions took off like Olympic sprinters when the starter’s pistol fires.
Mark had said there hadn’t been any further in-person communication from the outreach worker since initial contact. Had everything gone down after we left the voice mail message, a narrow time frame of roughly five hours? That seemed impossible. The outreach worker hadn’t called me to discuss Mark’s refusal, but then again, he wasn’t officially obligated to do so.
I could not, would not believe my homeless friend would lie to my face and stage a phony call. We had traveled too far together to find him housing and never once had I felt he had deceived me or embellished or omitted any part of his story of homelessness.
Something didn’t seem right. I emailed the resident in the morning asking for clarification and/or confirmation. She wrote back an hour later saying she didn’t know the timing of Mark’s refusal.
I had to know the truth. I would seek Mark out that very day and ask him. It would or would not be a confrontation.
Elmer the husky and I took our second walk of the morning, this one through the wildlife refuge, and thoughts of my impending conversation with Mark dominated my mind. My preoccupation was so intense I didn’t even stop and marvel at a peregrine falcon perched in a leafless oak.
I found Mark at noon sitting in front of the grocery store reading a book, selling newspapers, his one bag possessions resting neatly next to him
Jacob from the Old Crow Book Club was there.
I got right to the point. Five minutes later I had learned:
Mark had not turned down placements at two Safe Rest Villages because no one had offered them. He hadn’t seen his outreach worker since initial contact a week ago. No one else from the program had contacted him in person.
Jacob confirmed that he had been with Mark for most of the last 24 hours and no one had shown up and offered Mark housing.
Mark had said he would accept any placement. It didn’t matter anymore, if it ever did.
What the hell was going on?
I let out a stream of profanities. Once more into the breach of bureaucratic maze of molasses and mayonnaise indeed!
Obviously and predictably, there had been some kind of colossal miscommunication or incompetence at some administrative level, something that has distinguished the city, county and non profits’ attempts at alleviating the crisis of homelessness.
There was no time to dwell on this. I pulled out my phone and walked around the corner to muffle the street noise. I called the outreach worker. He picked up! I asked if Mark had turned down two placements. He’d didn’t know what I was talking about. There was nothing as yet available for Mark. I told him about the communication from the Mayor’s office. He didn’t know anything about it. I thanked the outreach worker’s effort on behalf of Mark and said I was ready to assist in any fashion.
I walked back to Mark and Jacob. I told Mark I had made contact with the outreach worker.
For the next few seconds we hashed out possibilities of this snafu. Then I asked Mark to swear he told me the truth, and said to place his hand on a copy of The Old Crow Book Club while doing so. We laughed but he complied.
We all laughed and then Mark said, “I always tell the truth…except about getting laid.”
That broke us up again.
I said goodbye and returned home.
Two hours later I received a call from Jacob.
“Matt,” he said, “you won’t fucking believe what just happened!?”
“What?” I said.
“The outreach worker showed up about a half hour after you called, and arranged for a taxi to take Mark to a Safe Rest Village!!!”
I could not believe it. I started crying. Jacob provided a few more details. Mark seemed a little shell shocked at the whole prospect, but he got in the taxi and left to a new life, if he wanted it.
Jacob also said the outreach worker took his information and he was now on a waiting list!
I told Jacob I would try and find Mark tomorrow in front of the grocery store and see how his first night went at the Safe Rest Village.
It had been years, perhaps decades since I’d felt this happy. I knew there was still a ways to go with Mark, but it didn’t feel as long as before.
Two days later I saw Mark walking toward the grocery store carrying his possessions. It was one in the afternoon, cold and raining. He saw me and waved.
I had tried finding him the previous afternoon for an update on his first night in the Safe Rest Village but wasn’t successful.
Mark was here now. He crossed the street and we stood under the store’s awning. I slapped him on the back and said, “Well done!” He smiled and then I grilled him about his experience in housing, or “pod” as he called it. “I’m a pod person now,” he said.
We laughed at that. We always laugh together.
It was definitely something different, according to Mark, having a roof over his head, a heated and private space, with communal restrooms and showers. And it was secure; he finally didn’t have to worry about his stuff being stolen.
There were some “tweakers” about and the management of the village hadn’t provided any real orientation, but he would figure it out as he went along. He was sleeping reasonably well that first night until the sounds of raucous sex from a nearby pod awakened him.
We laughed at that!
Mark spent most of the next day in the pod reading, barely venturing out because of the terrible weather. He probably had a lot to sort out, too, in the solitude of his new home. He’d been living on the streets since 2016.
I told him once he figured out what he needed for the space, make a list and his friends would procure the items. I said he certainly needed a bookshelf and he agreed.
It was a 45-minute bus and train ride back to the grocery store, and I said, “So what? Just read.”
I told him of my pride in him for boarding the taxi and trying to make a monumental change. Many people cared about him and were elated to hear the news. He nodded his head.
At some point, I told Mark I wanted to come visit, see the village, and celebrate. He said there were some outdoor areas with tables and chairs. Perfect! I’d bring a pizza. No Old Crow, however. Gotta follow the rules.
It was time for me to go. I loaded him up with five copies of The Old Crow Book Club to distribute at the village and said goodbye. I told him I’d come around in the next couple of days for an update and that list of supplies.
I was almost gone when I turned around and came back to Mark.
“Mark,” I said, “today is my 60th birthday.”
“Happy birthday!” he said.
“Thanks for the gift.”
We both knew what I was talking about.
I gave him another pat on the back and walked away.
A week or so later, I caught up with Mark at the grocery store. I bought a copy of the newspaper and opened it up to see a feature story about Mark as a vendor. The piece also contained a mention of the Old Crow Book Club. Mark was in a great mood as he described his new life in the pod. It seemed like it was really coming together for him in less than two weeks in residence.
I told Mark I had procured all the supplies we’d discussed him needing a few days ago, and that tomorrow at 11 in the morning, would meet him at the Safe Rest Village.
What exactly does a now formerly homeless man need for a tiny home in a Safe Rest Village to start anew? I had the list but it seemed incomplete so I winged it and threw in some goodies.
A collection of writing by Harry Crews, a novel by Kenzaburō Ōe, Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness, (perhaps the greatest all time title for a novel), and a history of the French Foreign Legion; a Magic 8-Ball; fine pipe tobacco; a Norm Thompson sweater; writing materials, a clock radio…and….a brown and gray tweed jacket with suede patches (!) that I’d worn teaching probably 5000 hours in various Oregon high school classrooms. It was the Super Teacher Coat and when I donned it, the students knew it was serious.
But that life was long, long gone to me and the jacket needed new purpose, as all tweed jackets do when a certain purpose dies.
Mark would give it new purpose wearing it around the village. The ladies would love it!
The plan was for Mark to wait outside the village because management wouldn’t let me inside without notification from Mark and Mark had no phone for me to call ahead. Or perhaps management wouldn’t allow me in under any condition. Mark didn’t seem to know.
He said he’d be ready at the appointed time and I knew he would be.
At that moment, the documentary filmmaker unexpectedly rolled up. He came over to us and said he wanted a final shot of Mark recounting his life in the village. He also wanted a few minutes of me and Mark talking about…whatever!
It was too loud in front the store to film, so we walked around the corner. Mark and I sat down on the sidewalk. You know how much it hurts your ass and back to sit on a sidewalk? Mark had been doing it for eight years.
The filmmaker set up his gear and I noticed a long-haired and bearded homeless man, probably in his 20s, carrying a skateboard and umbrella, had slipped around the corner, sat down on the sidewalk near us, out of camera range, watching us, obviously listening. I had the seen the man before, but never met him.
Then the resident from the neighborhood who had advocated for so long on Mark’s behalf, writing emails and making calls to the the city, county, going gadfly, buttonholing elected officials about services for the homeless or lack thereof, unexpectedly showed up as well!
Over the course of next ten minutes, a beautiful chaos ensued of the filmmaker filming Mark, Mark and me riffing, the resident explaining her advocacy, interjections from the young homeless man what were a little spacey, and me trying to get the man’s story of homelessness (ten years up an down the West Coast). I filled him in on Mark’s situation, the film, and asked if he wanted me to refer him to the new agency that had assisted Mark into housing. He said, “Yes” and I told him to meet the following day at noon and we’d start the process. He said he’d be there.
I felt a palpable sense of anticipation driving to the St John’s area of North Portland, to the Peninsula Crossing Safe Rest Village. Elmer the husky was in back, ready for a new adventure. I got some jazz playing on the socialist jazz station.
It took almost half an hour to reach the village, which is situated at the end of a narrow dead end street, right across the street from a goat farm, yes, a goat farm, and indeed, about a dozen goats of varying shapes and colors were frolicking when I pulled up.
Goats! The residents could step outside the village anytime during daylight and watch goats play! I suspect that might be better therapy for many of the residents than conventional therapy with its cliches and nostrums.
It surprised me to discover how many houses abutted the village. I mean they were fence to fence. They were neighbors.
I arrived at 10:36 and Mark was standing out front. He waved, came over, and said I wasn’t allowed inside. That perturbed me, but it made sense. We briefly talked about the village and then I unloaded a box and drove to another side street to park. I returned on foot with more supplies. I walked back to the car to get Elmer and take him for a walk around the perimeter while Mark set up his pod.
During this back and forth from the village to my car, I observed many of the residents coming and going, with bags of cans, a guitar, pulling a wagon, bicycling. Some were pleasant when I greeted them; others seemed incoherent or menacing.
Elmer and I passed the goat farm and several of the beasts came up to him. Elmer didn’t know what to make of them. We kept moving, accessed a green belt behind the village, and I could see towering oaks and Doug firs inside where Mark lived. Living under those trees has to nourish some of the residents, or at least I like to believe.
I noticed a spacious outdoor common area of grass and bark chips with chairs and picnic tables that was a perfect dog run or place to read or write or just stare up at the sky.
A few minutes later the filmmaker showed up and began setting up to film Mark in front of his new home. I put Elmer back in the car and joined them.
Forty-five minutes later, I was driving Mark back to the grocery store. We talked of this and that and both of us were in excellent spirits. At one point, I saw a man reading a novel while standing up in a bus shelter. I told Mark to check it out; it was such a novelty to see in our culture anymore.
“Mark,” I said, “you realize that’s the only way we would have ever met? Because you were reading books?”
“I know,” he said.
I dropped him off, we said our goodbyes, and I searched for the young man to begin the process of referring him to an outreach worker.
I was walking the neighborhood on the morning of December 4th when I heard siren after siren and thought nothing more of it than a probable automobile accident on a dangerous stretch of Highway 99 that parallels Westmoreland Park.
That evening, I watched the news on television and learned what the sirens were all about: at approximately 7:30 AM, high water on Johnson Creek in SE Portland swept away a man under the Tacoma Street bridge, the site of a homeless encampment.
Television crews broadcast from the bridge site and interviewed a resident of the encampment, who said the deceased man was his best friend, a tattoo artist, and they’d tried to save him but the current was too wild. It was unclear from the reports whether the missing man resided in the encampment, but he was there nonetheless. I did know he wasn’t a member of the Old Crow Book Club and that fact greatly relieved me.
The man’s body was discovered by a downstream homeowner two days later.
Five days after the death, the weather front that had produced record rainfall had moved east and the morning was dry and bright. By then, I’d read more media reports of the drowning and failed attempts at rescue. The man had yet to be identified to the public, perhaps he never would.
It was time to visit my father at his assisted living center. We would discuss the man’s death and converse about homelessness, one of our main topics of conversation.
I set out on foot. Not far from the house, I decided to detour to the exact site where the sweeping away occurred because I wanted to see it for myself. There was something about this death that really got to me. It seemed so much more awesome a tragedy than an overdose under a highway overpass. As soon as I reached the bridge, a thought overwhelmed me: what an immature writer’s conceit to consider this man’s tragic death something literary. I felt ashamed.
In the moments when I talk to my father about the deaths or imminent deaths of homeless men and women in my neighborhood, he always quotes a line from John Donne, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,” and he undoubtedly would again after hearing the terrible news of happened a quarter mile from where he lived.
I stood on the bridge and peered down to the encampment. It looked like a mortar round had scored a direct hit. People still lived there. I saw no makeshift memorial at the creek’s edge but perhaps that would come later after the water level receded. It was still running with fury.
Unsatisfied with the view from above, I took a side street off the bridge for closer inspection. I saw a well-worn path that led straight into the encampment but didn’t take it. It didn’t feel right—at this point in time.
What struck me about the entrance to the path was seeing several neat piles of split firewood. This was grade A Doug fir, seasoned and obviously not harvested from the woods in the area. Someone in the neighborhood was supplying the encampment with the firewood.
I kept walking. Fifty feet from the encampment a newly razed former manufacturing plant on a roughly two-acre lot was being graded and prepped for future construction. A thought materialized: this was a perfect spot for a temporary homeless encampment. It had water and power already on site. It had sewer hookups. It was surrounded by concrete and railroad tracks. There wasn’t a residential dwelling in site. There were already 20 or 30 homeless people living along the creek and in nearby RVs within shouting distance. The neighbor across the street was a public golf course.
If there were any urgency addressing the emergency of homelessness in Portland, this site could host temporary housing for 30-50 people in purchased second-hand trailers and fifth wheels. It would take two weeks to set up. Hire an onsite manager. Establish a residents’ council and draw up some rules. No accumulating shit. One strike and you’re out.
It was so obvious to me as an ad hoc solution.
I saw two men coordinating the grading and surveying of the site. I went up to them and asked what was planned for the space.
“Storage units. We’ll break ground in a month and have them opened by late spring.”
Storage units. Heated no doubt. I walked away knowing that my state probably builds more heated storage units than it erects unheated temporary housing units.
Swept away. Such poetry in that vivid image; it has the force of a folk song commenting on monumental loss. (Think “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or that song Dylan wrote about a bear mauling people at a picnic.) Someone should write a song for this drowned man, but it wouldn’t be me, Someone should write an elegy for this drowned man, but it wouldn’t be me. I didn’t know what to do with the story.
A day later I walked to my local dive to drink a dark beer and begin writing up the story. Everything was so incomplete with any possible editorial approach, but sometimes you just start and see where it goes.
I ordered my beer at the bar. It was just me and the bartender, Cassie, who had once been homeless herself years ago and lived in an encampment downstream from where the man had been swept away. Cassie and I have discussed the homeless issue many times when business is slow and she knows many of the homeless in the neighborhood because they often come in a for a drink or to play the slot machines. When they do, they also charge their phones, use the restroom, keep to themselves, and try to keep it together. Most do. Cassie and the rest of the bartending staff treat them with incredible patience and compassion.
The joint had a new stout on tap, and as it settled before taking it to my customary table, I asked Cassie if she’d heard about the drowning.
Cassie knew a lot. She’d spent the past two days consoling Kenny, the man who had appeared on television after he witnessed a raging creek sweep his friend away. He shared with Cassie everything he remembered from the incident, but it was still so raw.
Half an hour later, I had heard what Kenny had told Cassie of the death and Sean, the person. It wasn’t the full story, or at least the full story I wanted to know, but it helped fill out the picture of a human being who was gone forever.
At least with this information, news the media will never report, those of you reading this can consider the loss of another person in connection to the homeless crisis and assay how that one loss diminishes us all.
His name was Sean Struckman and he was around 40 years old. He had a young son who lived in the Portland area with his mother, Sean’s ex. Sean was not homeless when he died, but perhaps had been at some points in his life. He lived in an apartment in North Portland but often traveled to Sellwood for days at a time to hang out in the encampment with friends. Sean was a small man and exuded a skater sort of vibe. He admittedly suffered various mental illnesses.
Sean was a tattoo artist and tattooed housed locals and homeless people in the neighborhood in their residences. He was not affiliated with a shop. Cassie had bought some of his tattooing equipment for her daughter when she became interested in tattooing as a possible career. After Sean’s death, Cassie gave Kenny one of Sean’s tattoo guns as a memento of his friend.
Kenny said Sean had thrown a seat cushion into the current before he ended up there. He wasn’t sure why. He thought Sean might have jumped into the creek as a kind of joke or was just horsing around with nature, but he didn’t believe his friend committed suicide. Who really knew? No one would ever know for sure.
What Kenny did know for sure was the last time he saw Sean. The current was ripping and roiling and turned Sean momentarily around. Kenny got one final look at Sean’s face before he went under and it registered a look that he would never forget: I fucked up!
Kenny hadn’t slept since he’d last seen Sean’s face.
As I sat at the bar listening to Cassie tell the story, a stillness overtook me. I wasn’t taking any notes. I didn’t drink my beer.
Cassie concluded the story and I went over to my table and sat down. I drank my beer and pulled out my notebook. I wrote nothing.
I returned the next day to see if Cassie had learned anything more about Sean’s death. I asked if she knew anyone who had one of Sean’s tattoos. She told me Johnny had one. He was right outside!
Cassie retrieved Johnny and introduced me. Johnny rolled up his left sleeve and I saw NATIVE inked on his forearm. Johnny told me it was very recent. He said, “I think I was the last person he tattooed.”
Johnny went to the bar and sat on a stool. I bought him a whiskey. He recounted the night before Sean died. He had been with him near a convenience store. Sean was extremely upset about a breakup with a woman. He had two black eyes. In the morning, he ended up in Johnson Creek at flood stage and lost his life.
I left Johnny and Cassie and went to my table and took a few notes. A few minutes later, Cassie came over with some of Sean’s artwork. She remembered she still had it tucked away in the bar. I didn’t ask the provenance of it.
Cassie placed two pencil drawings of women on a pool table and I took photographs of them. (One is the graphic for this story.) Shadows made for tough picture-taking. Cassie said she could make photocopies for me. I said that was a great plan. I could scan them at home for whatever I was going to do with them. I told her if there was some kind of fundraiser for Sean’s son, I wanted one of the drawings. I was good for a hundred bucks. Cassie said she’d let me know.
On my way home, with the photocopies staring at me from the passenger seat, the idea of what to do with Sean’s story of being swept away hit me and hit me hard.
