Time, Place, and Manner

 

Two years ago, the state of Oregon passed a law—ORS 195.530—that “city or county law that regulates the acts of sitting, lying, sleeping, or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property that is open to the public must be objectively reasonable as to time, place, and manner with regards to persons experiencing homelessness.” The law went into effect in July 2023, so there was a flurry of activity as cities tried to figure out what to do and how to comply. Many cities determined that homeless people could camp in a specific area—in some small towns between two specific trees in front of city hall—but had to move in the morning, every morning. Corvallis decided on a broader approach, allowing overnight camping in city parks as long as it did not impact natural features or riparian areas, or playgrounds and playing fields, but the sleeping arrangements must be packed up and moved every day.

I have taken long backpacking trips, where everything I needed was in my beloved grey pack on my back, creaking as I moved. I have read dozens of books about thru-hiking and long walks and I feel the pull of being rootless every fall.  I have been on the road, living with my parents in a camper for eight or ten months and, later, in my van for long periods of time. I have couch surfed for several months. I have had my family double up with another family because of financial challenges. In all of these moments of shifting and unstable housing, I have always been safe. There has always been some sort of safety net beneath me and I have been mentally and physically healthy. Even then, there have been times when I have felt a deep disconnect from the society I am moving through, unsettled as night fell, and, sometimes, psychically frail. Each time, I have come through because I have chosen this path and there is an end.

In effect, what this new law does is turn people without stable housing into thru-hikers on the AT, packing up and moving on every day, with the crucial distinction that thru-hikers choose this life. Thru-hikers travel in informal packs, walking alone or in small groups during the day, carrying all of their belongings, and then landing on the designated campsites in the evening. They often eat meals on the trail, not in the camp. They pick up pre-packed supplies in designated town. They leave the trail for mental and physical breaks. Even so, it is a challenge to keep going, to be dislocated every single day and set up a new camp every night. So, most importantly, if they can’t stand it anymore, they return to their lives.

So, we, all over the state, are asking people without stable housing to move into an area after we are done with it for the day, set up a sleeping spot, and then be gone in the morning before we come back. Leave no trace. The vast majority of people living on our streets and in our parks are not able to do this. First, they do not have the means—the beloved creaking backpack—to pack up their equipment every day. “We’ve been posted,” one woman told me a few weeks ago, while her dogs leaned against my shins, asking me to rub their ears. “We have two dogs, our stuff, and no way to get it anywhere else. What are we supposed to do?” Then, they often do not want to leave the community they developed in their illegal camps. People often ask for a second coffee for someone else when we are out on Street Outreach—he’ll be right back, they say.  People look out for one another in the camps. Not everyone. Not all the time. But often enough. Finally, and most importantly, it is far more difficult to move out of camping if you are changing camps every day. Having a stable place to stay, even if it is a tent between the path and the river, is the first step to moving back into stable housing. Housing First.  If you are in the same spot, you can go look for help with your paperwork, set up an appointment for an interview, figure out how to charge your phone so you can learn about the pickup job on Tuesday. There is the first step towards stability.

I don’t have the answers to these problems. We need physical and mental health care. We need more affordable housing. We need drug treatment centers. We need group homes where people can be supported in their lives. We need to tax Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos back down to reality. What we do not need to do is ask our most vulnerable citizens to move camp every night so that we never see them.

Night light

         

Summer evenings….When the first heat wave hits, we move outside. Backpacking mats become our bed (which makes the cat very happy), piles of books and used water glasses settle next to the benches, the blue firewood bin becomes the foot bath, full of cool water, and I set up a light on the table for reading. When the temps drop back to normal, I dump the footbath and we sleep inside (Mark’s idea, not mine), but the light stays until the rains begin.

Around eight, we finish up our day’s work. The steam canner is turned off from whatever batch of food I have processed, Mark has finished the dishes, the rabbit has been sung into his hutch, and the chickens have argued about their respective perches. The cat wanders back from the front yard where she has been accosting passersby for pats. The solar lights shaped like bees that curve over the arch in the garden flicker on. Crickets set up their rhythms. The dude on the loud bike passes once more  through the neighborhood.  Mark makes the bedtime tea. I turn on the light. It shines down on the table so that we can read but also up into the sky, creating a quiet oasis of light in the darkening night. We sit, read and write, pat the cat until she settles down on an extra book or map, and dream.

 

Apple branchfall

 

Our apple tree is overproducing this year. It’s on a two year rotation for production but the stars aligned this spring and it is covered in fruit. It’s been shedding small apples for a month or so—they hit the roof of the van in the middle of the night and wake me up. It also seriously needs a pruning; I missed three years in a row and it is now too big for me to do well. The combined extra fruit and need for  a prune—along with, I suspect, a dry spring—led to a major branch break yesterday morning. I went out to haul in the trash cans from a pick up and a big branch was blocking the sidewalk. A couple of dogs were eying it nervously and crossed the street to avoid it. I sighed, brought out the loppers, and cleared the sidewalk. Later in the afternoon, I finished the job and cut back the branch, picked up all of the fruit, broke down the big branches into smaller ones that fit into the garbage bins (easier to haul back to the compost), and generally cleaned up.

We were left, after clean-up, with wheelbarrow full of apples. Mark came home, looked at the fruit, and headed inside, hoping it would go away. Are they even ripe? He asked. Yes, they were. We needed to press them. Pressing apples looms large in the tasks he would rather not do; we borrowed a finicky press for several years before we got our own, the summer of the pandemic, and that is what he remembers. Even with the new press, it’s a project.

1.       Gather all the fruit

2.       Haul the press out of the greenhouse and wash it off

3.       Find the knives, cutting boards, yellow bowl, and huge pasta pot for boiling the juice

4.       Set up the cuisinart and run the extension cord

5.       Quarter apples. Try and cut out most of the wormy spots.

6.       Chop apples in cuisinart.

7.       Dump in press. Repeat eight times.

8.       Press the juice into the yellow bowl

9.       Empty the pressed apples into a five gallon bucket to take back to the compost

10.   Quarter and chop more apples

11.   Press

12.   When all of the apples are pressed, clean up. Use the hose on the table and press.

13.   Compost all the residual apples, pulp, etc.

14.   Wash quart jars to hold juice

15.   Wash all tools

16.   Heat juice to kill the worms you may have missed

17.   Can juice

18.   Cool and bring downstairs

 

We actually moved pretty efficiently last night and pressed seven quarts of apple juice for the winter. The tree is still loaded. I am hoping no more branches break.

The Blue Wall

 

                Last December, Mark and I bought the house next door. It’s from the 1920s and has some beautiful details inside, but it had been neglected for 20 years. One big thing that was ignored was the garage, made of cinder blocks and settled on Oregon clay, which moves fairly dramatically over the course of a year. There have been repaired cracks in the wall as long as we have lived here and they only grew worse over the years. And the roof leaked. And the beam over the doorway had rotted through. The space over the garage door had a scary bulge to it. It had to come down; the insurance company refused to insure the house if it remained standing. Today, it began the process. The roof first, then he blue wall closest to our house and green house. It was fascinating to watch and I caught the wall coming down in a series of photos.

Mary's Peak

 

Mark and I climbed Mary’s Peak on Saturday.  We have done this hike every year; we no longer need a map. We mark the trail by plants—the logs where the Coral Root orchid lives, the seep for the Monkey Flower, the long slog after the bench that once looked out over the valley, but the view is now blocked by doug fir. We have learned how to hike together. Mark is a slow wanderer, attention pulled off the trail by whatever he is thinking about at the time. Right now, he likes to look at pampas (the fluff that disperses seeds in the wind). I am a quick and steady climber, matching breath to pace. When we need to Make Time, I take the lead and Mark stretches out his long leg to keep up. When we need to move slowly, Mark goes first and stops whenever he wishes. We often discuss speed before we begin.

Because this hike was late in the bloom season, I suggested not taking notes on every flower that we passed. But it had been a stressful week, so we decided to move more slowly, stopping several times to observe the world. As we climbed, we moved backward in time, in the season. At the beginning, thimbleberry was ripe. Then it was just a forming fruit, and, by the peak, still a blossom. The peak itself was quiet. The rock garden was past bloom so we were left with the wide view from the Pacific to the Cascades. We sat down for lunch amid a huge population of grasshoppers which were cheerfully munching on all of the lupine plants and being munched by the local robins. Several were mating on grass stalks; others were hanging out alone at the tips of other plants. An invitation, we wondered? Some were reddish, others were green. Lots of speculation while we ate bagels and blueberries.

On the way down, we considered rotting stumps. First we passed a tree that had fallen across the path and been cut away. There were fungi settled on the center older rings of the tree, but not on the outer younger word or the bark. A few feet further down, another tree’s younger wood had rotted away, leaving a stand of older wood in the center, like a volcano plug that has eroded.  Clearly beetles and ants had been at work here. A little further—a stump with the center rotten away and the bark shell standing.  Three Douglas Fir, all within a quarter mile of one another, all decomposing in a different way. We made notes. There’s clearly a Master’s Thesis in our observations—maybe even a lifetime of fulfilling work discovering why trees decompose in such different ways on the same mountain trail.

We have hiked some trails three, five, ten times a year, every year for 20 years. There is comfort in knowing a trail so well, of being rooted in your place so deeply that you know the specific plants along the way. That Phantom Orchid, not any other. We have also developed a sense of deep wonder of the complexities of our natural world because being so familiar with a place means that we have to look more closely to see something new, to break our minds out of the daily patterns.  We pack snacks, water, a notebook, and our curiosity, every time we step onto a trail.

 

 

Estate Sales

 

I love Estate Sales. I rarely buy anything—our house is full—but they give me a chance to step into someone else’s home, house, and material life. How do you arrange your cabinets? What do you value? When was the last time you painted your walls and what color? How are the rooms laid out inside that house—what does that layout say about the era, its values and esthetics? What can I learn about daily life from this house? I call it intellectual curiosity. Mark says I am just nosy.

There was an estate sale in the neighborhood on Friday. I was on my way to water the trees at the school garden, but I stopped in. The house fronted our local neighborhood park and was built in the 1920s. There was some remodeling—more like redecorating—done in the early 1970s, when they also added a garden shed. The place was packed. People were everywhere—and the interior of the house had exploded into the back yard, but that did not empty it out. The basement held an entire series of metal shelves, all full of stuff. I wandered around, stunned. It was chaos. There were big boxes and bins full of hot wheels and matchbox cars, still in their packages. There were at least three hundred cookbooks. There were shelves of board games—versions on Monopoly that I did not know existed. Upstairs, one room was fill of plastic model horses and other animals. A closet held three sewing machines and paper patterns.  The kitchen held shelves of stemware—fifty heavy wineglasses, the kind that you might use in a restaurant with a clumsy dishwasher. Boxes of canning jars. Wind chimes. Tools. Bins full of dishes—full sets of Good China from the 1950s. Clear cut glass. It was hard to know. Some stuff was still wrapped up. People were digging through the piles, finding treasures.  None of it was truly antique, or expensive, or valuable at any point in its life. It was all the stuff of working people’s lives that, when cared for, made a home.

In the lowest corner of the garden shed, I spotted some pink glass. I squatted down to look more closely. Under a ceramic coffee pot, a knife wrapped in cardboard, a set of binoculars, and some paper, I found four pink glass coffee mugs still priced and wrapped from a past yard sale. There were four larger pink glass plates from the same time. They went with some teacups and plates I already had at home—and with my Aunt Jean’s Good China in my cabinet—so I carefully hauled them out and replaced the other stuff into the milk crate. I paid eight dollars for it all—which is the same price that last owner paid, who knows when, before it was buried in a milk crate in the garden shed—took it home, and washed it off. We used it for breakfast on Saturday morning.

In contrast, Mark and I went to our friend Maureen’s small house concert yesterday afternoon. We sat on her covered patio, surrounded by things there were not, in value, any different from what had been at the estate sale on Friday. But they were all loved, cared for, clean, and arranged. Maureen has said, over the years, how much she enjoys keeping her house. When she cleans, she remembers where she found her objects or the people who gave them to her so that she feels surrounded by her life and love in her home. I feel the same way; I love having an orderly house, surrounded by objects that I love, although my home and garden will never be as tidy as Maureen’s. Our stuff is the story of our lives.

If that is true, then something went wrong in this house on the park. The people who lived here loved objects, clearly, as well. At one point, they had a good eye for inexpensive treasures.  But something happened and it went from a cared for home to something else that did not feel healthy, sane, or safe. What happened? How? Could we, as a community, have done something to help out before it ended in this chaotic Estate Sale where rumors suggested that she “had” to clear out and sell the house to live somewhere else?  How many other elders are tucked away in small houses, surrounded by not only the beloved objects of their lives, but stuff that has just….accumulated because it might be useful someday?  What is the story of their lives?

 

Wheelbarrow Starts

     

Summer starts can be challenging. First, most seeds that I plant after the summer solstice do not sprout. Those that do sprout—planted, usually, on June 20^th, need extra care. Spring starts thrive in the greenhouse. In summer, it’s too warm—and it is occupied by my classroom plants, who need the blast of summer sunshine after a long winter on the north side of the building.

                Summer starts need to be right where you pass by several times a day, so you can check on them. For years, I kept them on a rickety table/bench, under the plum tree, right on the path to the tool and bike shed. They had strong morning light, dappled afternoon light, and a stable space above the munching level of the rabbit. The jays came down and inspected them occasionally and the bees loved drinking from the damp soil. When I needed the table, I moved them. It was pretty perfect—but the bench was slowly breaking down. When a friend moved the plants to sit down and I yelled “Don’t” in the middle of a Pie Social, I knew we needed a new system. I tore down the bench, turned it into firewood, and looked around.

                The starts can’t sit on the dining table—it’s too hot in the middle of the afternoon. They can’t sit on the ground—the rabbit would eat them. They can’t rest in a garden bed because they are all packed with plants right now. The greenhouse is too hot unless I check on them constantly and one hot afternoon would fry them at the bases. It has happened.  Then I found an old, still functional wheelbarrow. It’s shallow with a wide, flat bottom, perfect to hold six packs of plants. It has a few holes in it already for drainage. It is above the head of the rabbit, even when he raises himself up to check it out. It is moveable. I am already using wheelbarrows for strawberry plants…. The starts moved in. I park it in the same area as the old bench, but I shift it around, depending upon the weather. Cooler days, it is in full sun; days above 90 degrees, I move it into dappled shade.

                Right now, the wheelbarrow is holding all of the starts, some of  which need to be bumped up, as well as some cuttings that I am hoping to root. They will stay until they outgrow the pots, when I will push the barrow over to the fall garden bed, pop them in, and return the barrow to the lineup against the shed.