December 6, 2007
Thursday

I wasn’t going to write about this today, even though I woke up thinking about it. In fact, I thought maybe I wouldn’t write about it at all, since what I have to say seems so clichéd and so inadequate. I worked on other things all day in order to avoid writing about it. That’s a real twist for me — using fiction work to avoid addressing nonfiction. I made progress on the story I’m developing, had dinner with my housemates, and then came out to my studio to write a Markings piece for Holidailies. And for a solid hour I have arranged items on my desk, answered e-mail, worked a little on my exit interview questions, and otherwise avoided addressing the only topic that tonight calls out to me to address.

The story came to my attention first just after Thanksgiving. We get the Sheridan newspaper by mail, so it comes a day late. I think it was Tuesday, November 27 that I saw the first article, “Lost in Open Spaces?” A woman had called the newspaper office to report that a man was camped at the edge of the northbound ramp of the I-90 interchange at East Fifth Street. He’d been there since at least November 3, and she was concerned that he might get hypothermia and die. She was also concerned that local authorities did not seem interested in helping.

One of my housemates had cut the article out and scribbled on the bottom “Karen [the other fiction writer] — a character for your next novel” with an arrow pointing to a picture of the man, who was scowling and pointing at the camera. He was wearing a brown watch cap, gray pants and a jacket that looked like cold weather gear, and heavy black boots. He was sitting on grass that still had patches of the snow that fell four days before. Behind him was a pile of stuff covered with a tarp, and beside him, neatly stacked, were plastic grocery bags and what looked like foil-covered casserole pans.

I had to admit that I had already done that — taken this man as a character. The article and the picture were both the work of a staff reporter identified as Josh Mitchell, a young man certainly, maybe not long out of school. I imagined him as not unlike a young friend of mine, energetic, talented, eager for a story more challenging than the business coalition and routine court case reports that had appeared over his byline since I’d started reading the paper.

Josh Mitchell had probably been directed by someone higher up to go out to the East Fifth Street ramp of I-90 and see what was up. “The Sheridan Press spoke with the man on Friday,” Josh Mitchell wrote, and I knew it wasn’t “the Press” that had done that, but this young reporter, who’d gone out there with a notebook and a camera and elicited a rambling statement from the man, who called himself “Satellite,” that said something about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Associated Press, and the seven continents.

Josh Mitchell stories about Satellite appeared the next day, and the next, and by Thursday morning I’d created a chart to use as a story development exercise. I’d write monologues from the point of view of the homeless man himself, the woman who had called the newspaper, the reporter, the managing editor who’d sent him out, the state and county officials who were giving conflicting opinions about the legality of camping out on the side of an interstate highway interchange, the patrol officer who said the man goes to the homeless shelter at night, the director of the homeless shelter who said the man hasn’t been there at all, and the nameless people who, the story said, were taking blankets and food out to the man. “Just how rude would it be,” I wrote in my journal, “for me to find the site and gawk at the guy when I get my car from Avis this morning?”

And I have to say, I did that.  And it must embarrass me that I did, because although I wrote about my change of pace that day, buying yarn and fancy paper and lusting after red cowboy boots that I eventually went back and bought, I didn’t mention that I also told my GPS to find Fifth Street, that I drove east on it until I saw the highway above it, that I slowed in order to see the pile of stuff that was obviously Satellite’s camp, and that, as I pulled into the convenience store parking lot just beyond the interchange to turn around, I came face to face, almost, with him. He was walking toward my car, probably back to his encampment from a visit to the store’s men’s room, and for a moment our eyes met. We held each other’s gaze for less than five seconds, and then he moved on.

The newspaper reported the next day that the man known as Satellite has been traveling in Wyoming since at least the beginning of October. He is 59 years old and says he wants to go to Montana. He has refused help, exchanging a bus ticket the Salvation Army provided him with for cash. His legal status is uncertain, with conflicting opinions being offered by the highway patrol and the county attorney.

Finally, the newspaper’s managing editor, the person who undoubtedly put Josh Mitchell on the story, published a long essay analyzing the community concerns and ethical questions raised by the presence in our midst of a man who apparently has no relatives in the area and who sleeps at the side of the road, with neither tent nor sleeping bag, through nights when the temperature drops into the single digits. Letters to the editor have followed, one of them calling for the man’s forced removal so that Sheridan does not become a haven for the homeless (“Sheridan County doesn’t have a ‘street people’ problem — let’s not start one”), and one expressing anguish at such opinions (“I pray for Satellite, and I will do my part to ensure he isn’t starving or freezing to death.”)

And that’s where I come up against both my desire and my hesitation to write about this. What is “my part,” if not for this man in this community where I am a sojourner, then in my own community? Recently a fellow member of an e-mail discussion list scoffed at my statement that I volunteer one or two nights a year (during the month my congregation takes responsibility for hosting it) at a homeless shelter in my town. “You call that charity?” he said. “That works out to a half hour a week, Do you think that means anything?” I didn’t say that I stopped doing it last year because I could no longer get up and down off the pallet on the floor without risking injury to my out-of-shape joints.

Something in me is ashamed that I am using this story as a story development or a point of view development exercise. Here is a real person in our midst, a flesh and blood person, and I take him up and out of that and put him onto paper. I wear an anti-hunger bracelet and I pray, or at least I imagine that I pray, for the hungry, and most weeks I even put a box or two of pasta or cereal into the collection bin at church and write a check to a larger organization that serves the hungry, but I never actually encounter a hungry person. I say I am concerned, but what am I actually doing? What can I do? What should I do?

I can’t think of a way to end this piece. Back in January I was wringing my hands about my neglect of action toward the social causes I think are important. I could say that I am finally going to do something this January, after I get back, after I recover and regroup from my long all-expenses-except-cowboy-boots-paid gallivant to Wyoming, after my party, but I am afraid, and ashamed, at how hollow such a statement might be.

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