Our town

An essay by Slabtown resident Joe McAvoy

“Well, it’s official,” Donan told me the other night while I sat at the bar of St. Jack restaurant on the corner of NW 23^rd and Raleigh. Donan is St. Jack’s general manager. He was referring to the formal (calendar) end of daylight saving time and, unofficially, the start of the rainy season that needs no calendar to mark its arrival for longtime residents of these parts. The early dark and the downpour from an atmospheric river on the other side of the bar’s massive windows reinforce his point.

Back home, watching the evening weather report on the TV news after that 5 p.m.“constitutional” at St. Jack, swirling storms queue up offshore, preparing for their journeys over the Coast Range with a fresh supply of moisture to drizzle down upon us and our beloved Willamette Valley through most of the upcoming Spring. It drizzles upon our psyches, too. Mine, anyway. The vibrant splashes of foliage that just days ago spread across the hills and lined our streets are thinning fast now; the leaves of brilliant yellow, singed gold, burnt orange, tarnished bronze, rust, plum, mauve, crimson and scarlet framed within a palette of greens that is too long to list, shimmering and swirling in the blustery winds are, like a watercolor painting left out in the rain, dripping off the canvas to now blanket our streets and sidewalks and lawns and cling to the bottom of our shoes for a surreptitious sneak into our homes. Ladders, rakes, push brooms and, alas, gas blowers are out, clanking, scraping, swishing and bellowing in what feels like a never-ending, futile effort among their bearers to unclog gutters and drains, clear sidewalks and reveal, again, the verdant grass lawns that ruled the summer. We hunker down in growing layers of sweaters, gloves, scarves and puff coats on our walks through the neighborhood; our focus slowing, hypervigilant on every step planted down upon the slippery surfaces and flooded streets.

Fall, for me, is all about slowing down, focus and hypervigilance. The existential storms arrive as well. I find refuge in longer bouts of quiet, bigger books, more ruminative music, writing.

But, hey, that’s just me.

I imagine the storms are less likely to fuel such reflections when you’re not experiencing them from a lovely neighborhood bar with an Old Fashioned in your hand or from your living room couch with your spouse sitting next to you and your dog’s head resting on your feet with the thermostat set to 68 degrees watching the evening news and you are, instead, outside in the midst of the squalls, penniless, soaked through and chilled to the bone, perhaps (or not) drug addled and/or in the midst of a psychotic event. I imagine the leaves on the trees are less prone to drive you to search the color palettes to describe them when you’re on the other side of the windows I look out. I imagine any lyricism characterizing the change of seasons falls flat for those of you living on the streets.

I have sad news for you. Get used to it. The streets are exactly where your city government appears to want you. A contingent of City Council ideologues in the extreme, a mayor looking increasingly inept who sold us a can of worms (not that we didn’t tell him), and a Portland Police Bureau Chief who would rather keep his job than call out the disaster occurring on the streets he is chartered to protect with a workforce equal to the task, are doing their best to ignore how to make a city vibrant and safe for ALL of its citizens. The City Council members, especially, are too busy working on their primary objectives to eliminate class inequality and fix “systemic” imperfections implicit in our social structures than petty needs like you dying of exposure in inclement weather. These “systemic” things are tough nuts to crack , you know? So, you’re going to have to wait. But know this and be comforted by it: Mitch and Angelita and the gang have your long-term interests at heart. The pragmatic, short-term concerns about getting you OFF the streets and into recovery and/or rehabilitation and revitalizing what was, just five years ago, a metropolis on any shortlist for best in the country, one whose motto was The City That Works (how can one not blush here?), forcing the adults in the room to roll up their sleeves to run things with something akin to a balanced agenda are not on the near-term horizon. These quotidian details are just not as satisfying as changing the world. It’s déclassé (ahem) for you (or us) to even discuss safe, secure and vibrant streets or avoiding an economic and physical (for some) death spiral that is gaining strength like those queued up offshore storms without all of getting into that whole NIMBY, privilege argument. Take solace. The Gang of Six (Seven?) or Peacocks or whatever they call themselves are probably huddled around a conference table as I type, finishing off what’s left of the Sacher torte and Apfel strudel from their lovely, late summer jaunt in Austria debating whether tent campsites should be included in the metrics used to measure the success of their “housing first” strategic implementation. Heck, if they decide that tents count, then their job is done, and they can ride off into the horizon. Oh, that that were so.

Apparently, the council has just now realized that the insanity of not getting the homeless (not houseless) off the streets when the weather changes is “cruel.” Their solution? More tents. Keep them on the streets. Again? Really? This has all the efficacy of putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. The cruelty, dear council, is in your ideologically driven inaction, your hubristic notion that you own the moral high ground when it comes to compassion. Housing is not they primary issue for those addled with drug addiction and/or mental illness. They don’t want your stinking housing. While Mayor Wilson and his band of merry public service announcement content creators, the same ones who fed us data about crime going down around community shelters, comb the country to find the families of our street afflicted to persuade them to take their loved ones back, the afflicted themselves fall further into their individual, desperate crises. A once-great city goes down with them. How can it be that Portland Police Chief Bob Day is not screaming down at us through a bullhorn from the top of Big Pink about the insanity of the latest council proposal? How can his stretched-thin officers who work brutal overtime shifts across several fronts (um, that ICE thing down at the South Waterfront for example), stay silent any longer?

I was damned close to being houseless—or thought I was—when I was a kid. I’ll spare you the details. I was never homeless. There was family—aunts and uncles and older siblings who had settled lives—to ensure shelter for my mother (a woman of indomitable will), sister, brother and me in a period of soft itinerancy. It wasn’t always clear to me that we weren’t inches from the streets. A recurring nightmare returns every fall. I am stranded outside with the night descending, unable to find my way back home. I am cold, alone and scared. The fear running through me is primal. I shudder during the few minutes it takes to shake that dream off when I am jolted awake.

I wish that fear—or worse, that reality—on NO ONE. For many, there is no waking up and shaking a nightmare off. They are homeless, not houseless. Don’t let the not so subtle language shifts of the ideologues fool you. Many, if not most, are incapable of helping themselves. It’s likely that some are veterans, or victims of other traumas, suffering from PTSD. They deserve better from us. Their situations will not resolve on their own as the council apparently would have us believe.

Mayor Wilson, buck up. Take the gloves off.

City Council, grow up. Get your heads out of your Linzer tortes, roll up your big kid sleeves and get to work for ALL your constituents.

Police Chief Day, speak up or put your badge on the table.

You are, all of you, failing us.

Help the homeless, NOW. Help Portland, NOW.