1997-1998
PART ONE
Once when I was parked on West Fourth Avenue, a man whose house I was in front of came out and introduced himself to me. He said he had seen many campers come and go, some good, some bad, and I seemed to be one of the good ones. He thanked me for not dropping trash in his yard, or coming home drunk at 2:00am and throwing up on the sidewalk, or other such things that the bad ones did. I thought, if everyone was this easy to please I'd be fine!
But my pleasure at this didn't last long. The next thing that happened was the cops coming to my door at 11:30 pm, saying someone in the neighborhood had complained (they didn't know who), and I had 24 hours to get out of that space or they would "Arrange a tow" (meaning to the impound.)
People who haven't lived this way cannot fathom the psychological torture one goes through at times like this. My engine wasn't running, so I had to get someone to either tow or push my truck to the next block. I am a very shy person and it's hard for me to reach out to people for help, and I had to do it a lot. It drained a lot of energy out of me to run around trying to gather up a crew to push, especially when my stomach was empty because my food stamps had been cut, and I was literally going hungry. I spent a lot of time praying in my camper and trying to use my intuition to figure out when and whom to ask for help, and trying not to panic. I often wrote rhymes like this:
This is, of course, part of that war:
The genocide upon the poor.
I can't think straight if my belly's not full
Of who might come over and give me a pull.
It made me angry that I had to go through this just because of one NIMBY complainer, when everyone else on the block seemed perfectly happy to have me there. And sometimes I wondered if I should just call the cops' bluff and stay a little longer.
That was the typical scenario two years ago. Now fast-forward to almost a year later, the spring of 1998. The Eugene City Council had amended the camping ban to allow us to park our vehicles in the industrial zones on a 24-hour basis.
So now I was parked 'way out on the western edge of town. There were three cul-de-sacs that extended south of West Seventh Ave. where I was, which were occupied by campers' vehicles that were mobile, semi-mobile or non-mobile. Mine was now semi-mobile as I had the engine running, but I still wasn't licensed to drive it. The city had had the good sense to install a portable toilet for the campers' use at the end of the second cul-de-sac, and this acted as a magnet attracting more campers to the area.
At this new mini-camp there was a relative amount of peace at the time, as the 24hour limit wasn't being enforced. So a lot of the campers like myself were relaxing a little and getting fairly settled. As I observed one family that lived in a trailer, I saw how badly they needed this stability.
They had two daughters, aged six and twelve, who walked down the adjacent bike path to school every day. They also had a cute little dog that was especially adored by the younger girl. When these girls came home from school, they needed to know that the trailer would still be there. It just wouldn't do for them to come home and find that it had been towed, their parents had been hauled off to jail, and there cute little doggie was in the pound. This family seemed to be managing pretty well considering their cramped living conditions and their state of poverty. The girls looked healthy, had nice school clothes, and acted as if they expected to have some kind of future. They were a very good example of why the camping ban should be repealed altogether.