by John Henry Lionheart
CALIFORNIA - In June 1999, the Albany City Council announced plans to evict 80 homeless individuals from a colorful array of shacks they had built on an abandoned landfill in San Francisco Bay. The land had been littered with trash and construction debris until the squatters moved in, building homes, planting gardens and erecting sculptures.
Albany officials promised to provide housing support for evicted residents. But, after police raided the encampment, expelled residents and destroyed their belongings, the homesteaders found themselves forced to sleep in alleyways and under freeways.
Albany's only gesture of support was to install a portable trailer surrounded by a chain link fence in the middle of a large asphalt parking lot. More than 80 people were made homeless when Albany passed its anti-camping ordinance: The trailer only had cots for 21.
One homesteader, "Picasso Mike" Smith, repeatedly tried - and failed - to secure a cot in the trailer. When he returned to a tipi he had built on the landfill, he was arrested. Smith demanded a jury trial and, last December 15, he was acquitted. The jury ruled unanimously that, under the "necessity defense," Smith was entitled to return to his tipi, since the city had failed to provide "adequate and sufficient alternative" to sleeping on the street.
During the heat of the Albany debate, John Henry Lionheart, a formerly homeless poet, offered the following thoughts on the plight of urban nomads.
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth."
- Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road," from Leaves of Grass, 1856.
Surprise, Walt Whitman! Welcome to the 21st century! Try eating and sleeping anywhere "with the earth" around these parts, and your kiester will end up in the hoosegow. That's the story for people like you, buddy, with your "leaves of grass" and songs of freedom.
Poor people cannot bed down anywhere, without incurring a fine or courting arrest. Should one have to pay another to walk, sit, or sleep upon the earth? Is mere existence a condition that should require the transfer of wealth to another?
The Albany Bulb is a manmade peninsula that snakes out into the bay. Over the past decade, a community of homeless nomads built handmade shelters here out of cast-off materials. Slowly, the landfill was transformed into a beautifully bizarre landscape of trails and trees and brush and jutting rubble, all interlaced with thick twisted rebar and rusting cables.
"The landfill was a very beautiful place," marveled Osha Neumann, a local civil rights attorney, "There was coyote bush, pampas grass, fennel, dense thickets full of birds…. It seemed like a perfect match between people and the environment."
Some of the homesteaders had lived here for 10 years or more. Some were laborers or carpenters or trained in other manual arts. Some were unable to work due to illness or disability, and collected a small government stipend.
They were mostly shy people, sensitive to the unnatural demands of modern society. They lived on the landfill because it's the best they could afford. The Albany Bulb encampment may well have been the last stop on Earth for some who found sanctuary there. As one wheelchair-using squatter, Pat McMullin, told a local newspaper, "It won't be long before people like me are pushed into the sea."
Save Trees and People, Too
We recognize the value in allowing stands of trees to put down roots and grow in the open air, undisturbed. Why should human beings not have the same rights to live free? It is just as important to preserve our planet's last vestiges of ancient indigenous and nomadic cultures as it is to save disappearing flora and fauna.
Do you think this view is radical? Take a look again at Whitman's "Song of the Open Road."
To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all, without labor or purchase.
It's a bit difficult to wrap our minds around such a sentiment. How could Whitman walk so freely upon the Earth, and we not? Was he a fool? Or did he know something we have forgotten?
Perhaps we must re-examine our concepts of private and public property, morality and socially acceptable behavior. Some believe that the Earth and everything on it - including us - are creations of the Divine, and that ultimately ownership rests with the Creator. This view gives rise to the notion that we are stewards of the land, charged by the Almighty with preserving and enhancing his handiwork.
We don't how this philosophy could be integrated into law. Maybe it couldn't, at least not right away. There seems to be a strong force taking society in the other direction: There is a great taking-away of the public domain and transferring it to private ownership.
What can you do? Begin by being aware of how you feel when these issues come up. If you're paying another for living space, if you pay rent or a mortgage, how does that feel? Can you freely pick up and go? How would your life be different if it were possible to live as freely as Walt Whitman recommends?
And if you are currently charging another for living space, if you're a landlord or a mortgage-holder, how does that feel? Are you comfortable with the morality of what you do? Can you imagine not charging for what you do? What would you rather be doing with your life, if your own right to live where you want were less conditional on the permission of others? In Whitman's words:
"Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing...
Strong and content, I travel the open road."
A longer version of this article first appeared in the Street Sheet [65 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103-1401, (415) 565-0201], a monthly paper devoted to "justice news & homeless blues in the Bay Area" published by the American Friends Service Committee. Lionheart can be contacted c/o People Are Trees Too!, 2342 Shattuck Ave., Suite 108, Berkeley, CA 94704. www.iPoet.com.
Walt Whitman: Patron Saint of Nomads