Liz, the shelter manager, scrunched her face as if seized by a toothache. “I believe you’re sincere when you say you’re not anti-homeless. At the shelter we enforce rules against drinking and throw people out based on their behavior. But as a community we don’t judge whose suffering is most worthy. We should recognize why people need the park, for good or bad reasons. Exclude them and the issues just surface somewhere else. Help people in crisis and maybe the parks won’t need rescuing.”
“I wonder if some of the fear comes from criminalizing more of the poor’s turf,” said Eric from legal services. “Once you define resting in public as loitering, the public’s more likely to regard someone who’s tired as being dangerous. It’s perception.”
Meg was only beginning to learn the continuum between discomfort, perceived threat and actual danger. She knew from Officer Martin’s reports that the outreach team spent most of its day dealing with homeless people in distress, disorderly conduct that caused alarm in others and petty theft. Actual crimes against the general public were very low, compared to the cases where the homeless were victims, often of each other. She understood how Jennifer Barnes felt; she’d been in the same place only a few months ago, and as a woman, would never be able to fully let down her guard.
Sister Rose made the clasping gesture again and addressed Jennifer. “Your family is rightly your first priority. And your love for them naturally provides all kinds of nurturing and support beyond food and shelter. If only everyone had loving and intact family ties. To help the dispossessed of the community, we must enlarge the boundaries of kinship.”
Jennifer Barnes’s eyes flashed. “If you’re saying the solution is for my family to form relationships with alcoholics and mentally unstable individuals, I must tell you that is not going to fly.”
Meg felt embarrassed for everyone. Jennifer had come with concerns about protecting her children only to be lectured for her insensitivity. It seemed a potential ally was about to slip away, perhaps to join more extreme adversaries. Meg caught Jennifer at the door.
“We should talk later. Maybe I can help.”
Jennifer looked at the card Meg had thrust in her hand, shook her head and kept walking.
“Communities can get tired of dysfunction the way families do,” said Sally, a mental health caseworker. “That’s when you start to see support for more severe measures. Some pressure’s good for nudging the hard cases but making them criminals doesn’t produce change.”
Tony Martin bristled. “That’s not what we’re doing.”
Zack held up his hands. “We don’t mean you, Tony. But the police department’s outreach team used to be three and now it’s just you. I don’t see the city’s commitment there anymore.”
“We’re short-staffed. The department’s holding Amy’s slot open.”
“See how it works? Every turn of the dial has a rationale. Not filling the outreach position is a budget and headcount problem. Crack down on panhandling—it’s all about traffic safety. Tear out the camping habitat—river beautification. And now the library, for cripes sake!”
“Banning backpacks was not my idea,” said the library’s representative.
Zack crossed his arms and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Right, it’s never anyone. Nobody’s anti-homeless. The library isn’t banning people. It’s only banning the backpacks holding the valuable stuff carried by people who have no safe place to leave it! Look at the big picture. More and more resources are going from helping people to pushing them around and nobody wants to call it oppression.”
This was where Meg was supposed to speak up and back Zack down, tell him that if he wanted more resources, he should stop treating the business community like robber barons and browbeating mothers worried about their kids. It was like no one was allowed to pursue their own interests as long as Zack perceived injustice. Everyone at the table was there because they believed the town could be better. He didn’t have a monopoly on virtue.
As if drawing a curtain closed, Sister Rose lifted her hands and pressed them together. “Some of you have met Wesley Chambers. He has proposed establishing an official, sanctioned tent city as an alternative to the current situation. He’s here to give a progress report.”
Wesley Chambers stood and tucked in the tail of his blue cotton check dress shirt. He had likely found it in the free store and didn’t know that it originally cost at least a hundred dollars. The two men in town who had shared that shirt had no awareness of each other, Meg thought, and I might know both of them.
Stepping before the room’s chalkboard, Wesley crossed his thick arms and adopted the glower of a football coach about to conduct a health class for indifferent teens.
“This town thinks it has a problem with transients. I wish that lady had stuck around so I could say this: Please don’t call me a transient. Everything is transient. Everyone is. Some of us know it sooner than others.”
Meg noted Wesley’s lace-up boots, not so different from the pair she had seen on the island. Amy Hostetter had said Wesley was on the river for a reason but not what had happened to him. Maybe she didn’t know. At some point the reasons for things didn’t matter any more.
“You all know what a weed is. A weed is a plant that pops up where it’s not wanted, like a camper is a person, like a person becomes this transient.” He enunciated the word with an arched brow. “Now, if the City considers me a weed, they’re going to chop me down and mulch my butt. Naturally, that tends to make me less enthusiastic about participating in your community affairs. But I do care about where I live. I have friends here. I enjoy the natural surroundings. How I live is not who I am. Living in a tent doesn’t make me a scumbag.”
And living in a big house didn’t make someone a model citizen. Meg knew that but she had never heard the other side put so plainly.
“Sorry. You know that stuff. The town’s solution to its camping problem is to get rid of the so-called transients. My solution is a lot simpler—allow it. Treat camping as a form of self-reliance instead of a crime. Don’t make it illegal to consume less.”
He took a half step back and thrust his hands into his pockets.
“A tent city won’t solve the law’s problems with troublemakers, but it will stop making troublemakers out of people who don’t cause problems. The camp I’m calling Thistletown will offer some security and dignity to folks who need a break, who don’t have money and don’t like walls, who want to set their own rules and act like adults. So where do we start?”
He scanned the chalkboard tray. “Looks like somebody stole your chalk.”
Wesley clapped an eraser on the green surface, creating a dusting of yellow. With his finger, he traced three words. Land. Location. Legal.
“Land’s the obvious requirement. An acre is about minimum. Some communities like this are on five acres or more, but if you get too big it starts to be a crowd. I don’t think you want to go more than about twenty tents or thirty people per camp, so everybody knows each other. The ideal would be a place with utilities, sewer and water access where you were allowed to put a finished ten-by-ten structure on the tent platform. Do we own, lease or occupy with owner permission? That’s a whole topic in itself.
“Location matters, too. For the most part, our work and services are in town, where residents and merchants don’t want us. Locating out in the country makes it harder for us to get around without transportation. That’s why the river worked so good—out