Restoring a Human Watercourse

(Readers: What follows is a new essay formed from three other smaller pieces about the homeless. I submitted it to the Oregon Humanities magazine last month for a special currents-themed edition, but it was rejected. The editor said it wasn’t the “right fit” for the publication.)

In late December of 2020, I returned to Portland after a 23-year absence living on the Oregon Coast to move in with my 89-year-old father. My beloved stepmom of 30 years had passed away from cancer and my father could not live alone in his home in the tony southeast neighborhood of Sellwood. A year and a half later, he began falling and I no longer could properly care for him, so we decided on assisted living.

I had a long and wonderful history with Sellwood. When I attended graduate school at Lewis and Clark in the late 80s, I lived in a dilapidated rental home in the neighborhood with four other people (rent: $75 a month). We played touch football in Westmoreland Park and drank in the dearly departed Penguin Pub (draft of Hamm’s: 75 cents). I met my wife while she clerked in an independently-owned video store a quarter of mile from the house. A decade later we got married in Sellwood Park in a grove of Douglas firs.

And now I was in Sellwood again, but in my long absence from Portland much had changed with the Rose City, all across Oregon, and the nation—the crisis of homelessness.

Despite its wealth and status, Sellwood suffered from a festering case of homelessness. That appeared obvious to me the first day of my return. I walked out the front door and strolled to Westmoreland Park where I happened upon a homeless encampment alongside Crystal Springs Creek. It consisted of tents, tarps, plywood shanties, a dog igloo (a man lived in it), vehicles, trailers and RVs. The presence of garbage, weird accumulations of inexplicable shit, and extremely addled homeless men and women near the riparian areas braced me. How can the sight of a homeless man barbecuing crawdads harvested from a creek with a blowtorch not brace you?

In the spring of 2021 I also discovered homeless encampments in the neighborhood or a short distance away that were destroying riparian areas along Johnson Creek, Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, and a wetlands adjacent to Sellwood Riverfront Park on the banks of the Willamette River.

In the previous two decades, various agencies had spent $20 million dollars to restore Johnson Creek to fuller ecology. That restoration included property buyouts, bringing back wetlands, planting 25,000 trees to stem erosion and provide shade to lower water temperatures, and placing large woody debris to improve salmon habitat.

Several millions more had also been expended to restore Oaks Bottom, Crystal Springs Creek and the wetlands adjacent to Sellwood Riverfront Park.

The restoration efforts proved wildly successful and on my morning walks through all the aforementioned areas, I saw otters, muskrats, blue herons, turtles, skunks, beavers, beaver lodges, all manner of waterfowl, bald eagles, ospreys and coyotes.

Almost none of that was going on when I lived in Sellwood in the 80s, certainly not in Westmoreland Park.

Now, many stretches of these watershed restoration projects in my neighborhood and father upstream on Johnson Creek had been severely undermined or pulverized by the residency of homeless people that on close inspection bordered on malice.

I say that because I inspected a dozen of these sights at ground zero level.

Such as the time about a year ago when I caught wind of a major sweep/clean-up of a homeless encampment planned for a ten-acre wetlands adjacent to Sellwood Riverfront Park that was home to the rare northern red-logged frog and countless other species of flora and fauna. This wetlands even had a short trail around it with signage to educate visitors.

I walked to the hill overlooking the encampment for several days after hearing about the possible sweep and each time, nothing had changed. Then one day, something had.

A sweep removed approximately 15 bombed-out RVs, cars and trucks parked single file on a narrow shoulder 50 feet above the encampment. Garbage was strewn and piled along the shoulder, including two refrigerators. To prevent reoccupation, the city had placed approximately 75 large concrete barriers blocking vehicular access to the shoulder.

Was I happy at the sweep? Yes. I wanted the miscreants out of the wetlands. It would take half a decade to heal, but it would, with hands-on restoration. I knew that from coordinating of a coastal watershed council and decade-long tenure as caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In both roles I helped restore thousands of acres of wrecked land in riparian areas, estuaries and uplands, land wrecked by natural resource extraction industries.

I trekked down the hill to the shoulder and concrete barriers. Someone had spray painted many of them with words. The words read:

The blocks kill

Stop the sweeps

Fuck the government

Fuck the city

Fuck ur $

Fuck ur laws

Fuck NIMBYS

Fuck you

Fuck me

People lived here

My response to that was FUCK YOU!

These people were bitching about NIMBY while destroying the homes, front yards and back yards of hundreds of species of flora and fauna with their insidious residency. Go ahead and ruin the concrete under a freeway but don’t ruin a micro ecosystem and wipe out habitat for a rare species, possibly extirpating it from a place it had flourished for eons.

We don’t allow the willful destruction of a rare species of flora or fauna in the construction of dams and resorts or because of logging and mining operations. Why allow it here?

I rarely get angry in my interactions with the homeless. I’ve worked with them the past several years in several capacities (even writing a book about one small band in my neighborhood) and had my eyes and heart opened after learning their stories.

But after I investigated the encampment I got angry, verging on rage.

I crossed the road and walked between two barriers. I stood on the shoulder and looked down the embankment to the encampment.

It had not been swept. The wetlands had not been cleaned up. There were more discarded appliances and several china hutches better suited for palatial mansions.

The city had performed cosmetic surgery. What was needed was a full-blown operation to save a wetlands from critical condition.

I walked roughly 300 yards down the shoulder, paralleling the encampment. Up close, the devastation was much worse than I had imagined: massive erosion, mounds of garbage, compacted soil, drug paraphernalia, trees stripped of branches or chopped down altogether, car batteries, dozens of propane tanks, dozens of shopping carts. There were also considerably more tent/tarp domiciles than I previously thought. I stopped counting at 15.

The smell emanating from the wetlands was not the natural smell of a wetlands. It smelled like a rural home with a malfunctioning septic system.

At first, I heard only white noise of distant traffic. Then I started hearing voices, and staccato bursts of loud and strange, unintelligible words. They sounded almost prehistoric, or what I thought prehistoric language might have sounded like.

These voices were eclipsed by the sound of crackling fire. I saw it burning somewhere in the foliage. I saw an outline of a person feeding the fire wood. Then came unmistakable sound of someone hacking branches with a hatchet.

It was discombobulating, this hearing in real time the further destruction of a wetlands. I almost cried out, but refrained because I didn’t know what to say that didn’t involve profanity, and that wasn’t going to help the cause. The stupid cursing on the blocks already proved that.

The advocates for the homeless claim sweeping the encampment would traumatize the human residents living there. They don’t seem to recognize the trauma (actually death) inflicted upon nature by destructive human residency. As anyone who has ever camped near a creek or wetlands knows, camping, even in the long term, does not have to end up murdering the place.

Not long after observing the destruction of the wetlands, I was walking in Westmoreland Park along Crystal Springs and observed a crew of men and women maintaining the restoration of the riparian area that began in earnest a decade ago. This maintenance consisted of removing non-native plants and planting willows here and there. It was all about improving the health of this tiny creek so it could improve the health of Johnson Creek and the Willamette and Columbia Rivers farther down the watershed. It was about doing something for the future.

I watched the crew for ten minutes. I missed doing that kind of work for a living. It was the best work of my life, infinitely more rewarding than teaching and publishing books.

As I stood there, it occurred to me that a hundred yards away was a mini encampment of three tents and and five rigs, including a battered Oldsmobile SUV from the 90s that housed a man who sometimes wore a box over his head to more efficiently capture vapors of the fentanyl he was smoking at six in the morning.

Interesting, I thought: a project to restore a damaged creek in close proximity to a small community of damaged humans, and one human in particular, the man with the box over his head.

These humans were in dire and immediate need of restoration, but didn’t give an earthly damn about their destruction of the creek that was nourishing them in obvious (access to water) and possibly unknown metaphysical ways that creeks often provide.

What did this juxtaposition of destruction of human beings and restoration of nature say about us? I believe they’re connected. How can they not be when we’re all mostly made from water and need water to survive? Why wouldn’t you restore both at the same time since we, indeed everything living, are part of a watershed. The healthier a single watershed, the healthier everything is in the world, ecologically and spiritually. I wish preachers and politicians would start talking about this, but most of them don’t know what a watershed is, much less the one they inhabit.

I wondered how you would apply the lessons of successful stream restoration to restoring a damaged human community.

To restore a salmon-bearing stream in Oregon requires culverts that don’t impede fish passage, cool, clean water not subjected to erosion/pollution from development, logging, grazing and mining. You also need native vegetation, stream channel complexity with pools, side channels, abundant gravel, in-stream woody debris, insect life, native critters, diverse tree cover to provide shade, and wetlands to protect rearing fish when high water flows occur.

I sat down at a picnic table and turned my attention toward the encampment. Could I apply the lessons and metaphors of restoring a damaged Oregon stream to restoring a damaged stream of Oregon humanity? These were people, my neighbors, flowing down a terrible and deadly current.

It seemed like an almost impossible mental, let alone a material task but I gave it a try.

A couple of geese waddled past me. I heard some daffy ducks in the creek and noticed new gnawed signs of beavers. I pulled out my notebook and jotted down some thoughts and ideas.

My notes:

We must think of a human being as a type of watercourse.

We must never use herbicides in restoring this stream of humanity. What might those herbicides be?

Remove other man-made poisons that create addictions in people and render them unable or unwilling to live in such a way that doesn’t destroy watersheds.

We must create a wetlands because frail and even healthy human beings need places of refuge during high flows. What would something like a wetlands for human beings look like? Places of friendship, faith, service, fun, employment, learning and solitude.

Streams are meant to meander. Too often human beings try to straighten a stream or river for greedy, short-sighted purposes. Let damaged humans meander as we try to restore them. Nothing on the straight and narrow in life really works, except zealotry.

This stream of humanity needs better flow. There are too many artificial barriers and plugged or misaligned culverts for people to succeed.

The destructive erosion of capitalism into this stream must be abated. So many homeless people have been eroded to the point that no soil exists within to grow anything.

Plant! Plant! Plant! Plant love, work, food and pathways.

Bring in the damn beavers! (No metaphor here.) Wait, they’re already lurking in the creek near the encampment! Look to their lodges for ideas for tiny homes! The men and women who work on restoring the damaged human beings must labor as industrious as beavers!

We must relentlessly maintain, monitor and evaluate watershed and human restoration projects. Sometimes restoration fails and if it does, you start all over again. At some point, it won’t fail. I know this from planting one stretch on a coastal creek called Neskowin three times. The trees there are now 30 feet tall.

Successful watershed restoration requires teamwork by professionals and volunteers. The same goes for successful restoration of homeless people.

Everything we do must be done with alacrity.

AN IDEA! A POSSIBLE GREAT NOTION struck me while sitting at the picnic table:

What about designing a creative thinking workshop for employees of government agencies and non profit organizations tasked with solving Oregon’s homeless crisis that paired themwith watershed restoration experts with track records of success in Oregon? These experts are legion around the state. Why not have all the participants dive deep into the reality and metaphor of successful watershed restoration work and apply it to working with the homeless.

Perhaps something extraordinary might evolve from such a unique workshop and produce a model that might succeed and then be replicated across the various degraded streams of humanity all across the country.

Why not look to the lessons of healing a damaged watershed for answers to healing damaged human watercourses?

Pilot a project. Give it a try. I know just the place. We have nothing to lose.