Perspectives and Identity in Corvallis’ Homeless Population
Author: Joanna Danias
ABSTRACT
Small town Corvallis is home to over 800 housing insecure residents, some of whom support themselves through panhandling around the downtown post office. There are countless perspectives on the ‘problem’ of homelessness, but often one viewpoint is left out and that is how the homeless view the world through their own eyes.
“Trailer for sale or rent Rooms to let…fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets. I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but…two hours of pushin’ broom buys an eight by twelve four-bit room.
I’m a man of means by no means King of the road.”
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
What happened to Roger Miller’s kings of the road? Released in 1964, the song has been covered by artists from Dean Martin to R.E.M. However, the song itself seems to have outlived its subject matter, the happy vagabond. The turn of the last century, Charlie Chaplin made an entire career playing the character of the tramp and hobo and while his memory continues to this day, the character he played has disappeared from our social consciousness. Somewhere along the arc of history, the concept of the honorable, nomadic American has fallen out of favor and replaced with the more contemptable ‘homeless’ or ‘panhandler’ icon. Looking over the din of political ideology, economic theory, and social engineering of our modern world it begs the question, “Who has changed, the hobo or society?”
In the microcosm of small town homelessness, I sought to reveal what has happened to vagabond culture in the United States and, in a more personal journey, I sought to follow myself down the rabbit hole of economic poverty and find out what my own struggles might have looked like If I did not find academia at the most vulnerable moment in my life.
In June 2015, my world was completely turned around. I had been married for 18 years and after a series of financial downturns, including losing my home in the real estate crash of 2008, I found myself moving to Oregon. My husband and I had made plans to transfer to Corvallis, he with a new job and I was transferring with my company. I moved early due to a deadline. After packing my entire house up in Chicago, where we had been living since losing our home, I took a bag of clothes, a few boxes of kitchen stuff, and a mattress and drove the 2200 miles to Oregon alone. Three weeks after arriving in town and moving into my new rental, my husband called me up and told me he was no longer moving out with me but instead had fallen in love with another woman and she was pregnant.
I had no money left in my savings because of the move, but I had my job and while I was devastated emotionally, I could plan my finances and survive. That was my reality until my company laid me off suddenly a month later. The same week I learned that my soon to be ex-husband was selling off our collected things to finance his own new life instead of keeping his promise to sort the things during our divorce proceedings. Within two months I went from a relatively stable life with a well-paying career and a decent savings account to complete and utter poverty.
I lost everything I had. I imagined each one of those boxes I had lovingly packed a few months earlier with all my family heirlooms and prized collections, realizing I would never see them again. My unemployment was going to take seventeen weeks to pay out and I had no income. The second month in my rental I met my landlord to pay the rent. I sat across the small table from him in the Starbucks and cried when I had to tell him that paying the rent would leave me completely penniless. I was embarrassed at my life. Nowhere in my life plans did the concept of being near homeless at forty-one ever factor in. Through my weeping, I told my landlord the story and what had happened with my husband. His eyes filled with compassion for me. He had met my husband and was holding our lease in his hands with his signature on it. Thankfully, my landlord could take less rent for the short term to keep me in the house while I attempted to sort out my life.
Sorting out my life with no income meant doing something I had never experienced before, applying for aid from the government and local organizations. I needed to eat, so I applied for food stamps. I needed help paying my bills, so I applied for energy bill reduction programs. My entire summer was spent squeaking out an existence while I sorted through my finances. I waited in long lines, filled out endless forms, sat in front of judging eyes with hands in my lap and eyes downturned in shame. I begged for help. I begged for people to help me save my life. In the end, these programs would bridge the gap until I was able to recover my retirement savings and finally get my first unemployment check in the fall. In that time, I realized that returning to my career was not something I wanted to do; finishing my degree, after putting it on hold for twenty years, would mean accomplishing a dream in the worst moment in my life. By the winter I was enrolled in school and managing my finances enough to guarantee I would be able to complete my degree without having to take on a full-time job. I would also starve for money most of that time, never buying a new piece of clothing or even small reward for my work in the two years it took to graduate. I knew the work was going to be hard and my poverty would be psychologically draining, but I was motivated by the pain in my heart and the words that a stranger whispered in my ear when he found me crying, “Just remember the best revenge is a life well lived.”
It was Spring of 2017 when I had the opportunity to return to the place where I felt most vulnerable in my life, the moment when I realized I was going to become homeless. In my summer of entitlement programs, I had come to shun my rental and found solace walking the downtown streets and parks of Corvallis. My dog and I would wander the town with a few dollars in our pocket and watch life pass us by. I looked the part of the homeless character with worn clothes and holes in my shoes and soon, the ‘urban campers’ and panhandlers in town befriended me. I never felt a part of their group, but their conversations came to stand for the dichotomy of my life, one where I saw myself as that middle aged, middle class, white woman with status and not the reality of being a woman only two steps away from camping with the homeless on the eastern banks of the Willamette. I was going to return to that group again, at the end of my college career, not to slum with the vagabond crew as I had done, but to do research in the role of Anthropologist as my degree would soon designate me.
Downtown Corvallis looks much like any mid-sized city in the United States. It has the ghosts of its small-town roots in the feel of it, with decades old shops dotting the main streets weaved in with all the trappings of modern materialism. The Willamette River snakes along the eastern edge of the city creating a natural boundary where a park and river walk stand as it’s heart. Even in the grey, damp, and chilled days of Oregon’s winter, people can always be found taking in the outdoors with a slow stroll that starts at the old black, gun-metal colored trestle bridge leading out of town to the north and ends at the typical institutional red brick building that houses the Post Office in the south. Little benches and focal point art installations make pausing with friends and strangers alike, easy and brings out the best of the Pacific Northwest attitude that many people attribute to the people who call this place home.
There, at the Post Office, you will likely find a small group of people gathered on the benches of the river walk biding their time as they take turns panhandling at the entrances of that red-brick government building. The two entrances to the building are panhandling posts for the urban campers, homeless, transient, or poor that find themselves in Corvallis. The term “Urban Campers” is used to define a set of people who find themselves without traditional shelter, while maintaining some version of traditional life, within an urban center. They are often forced into soft shelter tents or home-made shanties located in camps just outside of town.
In the early 2000’s the state of Florida was planning on expanding a section of US highway 301 outside Sarasota. When planners arrived on site to assess the planning stage they found small camp sites within the interior median land between the North and South bound lanes. The Florida Department of Transportation decided to create an impact assessment of these urban campers, the first of its kind, and revealed an interesting demographic study of that community. Of the estimated 3000 Sarasota urban campers, a third of them had substance abuse issues, a third had mental health issues, and a third came from traditional living situations but could no longer afford rent. Additionally, 40% of them were women and a majority of campers had day jobs. When digging deeper, the researchers found that those people who fall into the urban camps for over a year were 90% likely to never reenter society because they became too familiar with the lifestyle. (Poiter-Brown & Pipkin, 2005) Urban campers apparently fall out of society for a handful of reasons but then choose the lifestyle once familiar with the way in which one can survive. Florida DOT researchers also found vibrant inter-governmental systems inside of camps that included ‘food sharing’ rent paid into a communal pot that would cover all the individuals. In the end, it was those camp elders that helped engineers slowly remove the camps without need for police or harsh tactics. (Poiter- Brown & Pipkin, 2005)
Returning to the small city of Corvallis, I sat for weeks observing the comings and goings of the panhandlers at the Post Office building. From afar, I could tell that there was a system in place at both entrances and seemingly created for two different groups of people. The front door group appeared to be populated by older individuals, both male and female, that seem to be coming from within town and further observation showed, at least a few individuals, were residents of low income or senior housing located in downtown. The side door group were more social, frequently seen with bikes, and gathered, near daily, at the end of post office hours to ‘hang out’ and share food, alcohol, marijuana, and conversation. While their panhandling was almost exactly similar in technique, the two groups almost never interacted with each other which left me questioning the reasoning.
In 2017, the Corvallis League of Women Voters did a research study on the population of homelessness in the area. Using data sets from all the major government and private welfare groups they estimated the population to be between 855 and 1257 individuals. Of that group, there was a rise in homeless persons over the age of 65 from 2012 to 2015 of 2% which contrasts to the middle age groups between 20-64 which dropped off by an average of 10%. If there is a rise in the amount of homeless within the senior population, then most assuredly, there was an increase in economic insecurity of housed or housing insecure elderly as well. (The League of Women Voters-Corvallis, 2017)
Recently the National Council on the Aging reported that since 2008 they have recorded 3.5 million elderly homeowners are underwater on their loans and have no home equity, 2.9 million were experiencing food insecurity, and one-third of senior households had no money left over each month or is in debt after meeting essential expenses. (National Council on the Aging, 2017) Seemingly the individuals populating the front door panhandling and observed senior citizens housed at the Hotel Julian in town are suffering from the same fate as many of our elderly in America and their solution is to turn dollars and cents donations from local citizens into food money or pay for medication expenses not covered by Medicare.
Third boxcar, midnight train, destination, Bangor, Maine. Old worn out clothes and shoes,
I don’t pay no union dues,
I smoke old stogies I have found short, but not too big around
I’m a man of means by no means, king of the road.
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
On a sunny spring morning, I set up at my observation point toward the front door and watched the senior group interacting with the post office customers. A woman, thin with long grey hair sat on the landscape curb a few feet from the stairs leading inside. Perched on top of her knees she held a brown, dog-eared, cardboard sign that reads “Anything helps”. For about forty-five minutes she sat motionless in her spot looking up from the ground at the people going about their day.
People move in and out of her world in defensive ways. A woman with a child gets out of a car and walks toward the front door. Upon seeing the woman with her sign, she takes her child’s hand and walks to the opposite stairs and enters, walking approximately ten feet out of their way. Averted eyes, long pauses as they pass, or the quickening of steps as they draw nearer to the woman sitting motionless on the curb. However, that is not everyone’s reaction.
A young African American man wanders along the sidewalk and stops to talk. He disappears into the post office and a few minutes later returns to her. He smiles and hands her a few dollars and moves along his way. As he passes me I ask him if I can talk to him for a few minutes and he agrees. I ask him about the woman and how he feels about the homeless situation. He is bright eyed and well dressed in a crisp red plaid shirt and jeans. He has all the hallmarks of a typical twenty-year-old from the pacific northwest and he admits he is from Portland and acknowledges that their homeless problem is much worse than ours. “Nothing changes in society. I know that giving money makes more of them come but at the end of the day I’m lucky to have stuff, you know.” he says to me as he fidgets with a box containing cymbals for his drum kit. I wonder, as we exchange goodbyes, if it is true that more panhandlers come if there is a reason to be there.
Over the last year there has been an uptick in community opinion on the homeless in Corvallis. I returned home and dug into the online representation of this tiny town on Facebook to see what the range of opinions were. In a post on a proposed bill that would make camping in Oregon parks legal a woman wrote about the homeless, “I say give them a bus ticket to where ever they want to go. Would be cheaper than giving them all our city parks and then trying to clean up behind them! Where are there [sic] families? How come there [sic] families don’t want to help them? They already wore out there [sic] welcome??”. (Facebook, 2017)
Further down a man responds, “They are not part of our community. They are not our neighbors who fell on hard times. They are here because we enable them. I have empathy for even the worst humans. But do not confuse empathy and sympathy. People who are homeless by choice because they want to drink, smoke and shoot their lives away have made their choices. When they want to change of course they deserve help. But enabling their behavior makes you complicit in their crimes.” I pulled out dozens of such comments from thread after thread on the local Corvallis People board. A theme in which local citizens see their homeless populations as outsiders who do not belong to the community. Their ire at the ‘invasion’ of these people is palpable and fueled by the anonymous nature of internet social media. A constant state of ‘us versus them’ spews out from posts that have no connection to homelessness. A photo posted of garbage overflowing a receptacle and the first comment is about ‘getting rid of the homeless’. A picture of feces along a trail and a commenter connects it to the homeless and how they ‘shit everywhere’.
From September of 2016 through April of 2017 the cycle of homeless discourse exponentially increases to a fury where commenters are going out into the woods and photographing evidence of homeless camps and forcing massive police escorted sweeps to clean up and remove them. “Our laws need to become tougher on homeless not more beneficial to the population. This way the choices for their continued survival become limited and they either live like responsible community members or they move on down the road to another state that will provide for them.” a woman writes. For me, I was the outsider that suddenly fell on hard times before even settling into a life in Oregon. These statements cut deep into me, but my own experience may not be the reality I was seeing at the Post Office. I needed to find out where these panhandlers were coming from. If the commenters were right then it would only bolster the opinion of the Portland man that if you build a place to feed the homeless they will show up to be fed.
I sing, trailers for sale or rent, rooms to let, fifty cents
No phone, no pool, no pets, I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but, two hours of pushin’ broom buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means, king of the road.
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
John, in my observations, was a constant at the river walk and post office. His grey-white beard and hair gave him the appearance of a frontiers man lost in the city. I had been observing him for a few weeks and his antics were always peculiar. I had spoken with a small group of panhandlers of which he was a member and watched him barely make any eye contact, only smiling at my dog as he rocked back and forth.
On another afternoon I saw him performing an act of pure anarchy which I felt like he was doing for my benefit. It started with him finding a glass bottle near the river walk and walking back to his bench. There he sat methodically peeling off the label as he looked up and watched me watching him. I felt like I was being performed to. He then slowly got up and looked around suspiciously as he casually tossed the ripped pieces of paper down the embankment. Then, with measured steps, he walked out toward the street and looked around the cobble stones that created the intersection of two streets. Circling, he found a suitable spot and placed the glass bottle down on the road and walked back to his bench. It was a rare sunny day and there was not much vehicle traffic. About 10 minutes went by when suddenly a pickup truck rolled into the intersection and right over the glass bottle. POW! It exploded into little shards scattering the street. The loud diesel engine must have muted the sound from the driver because he didn’t stop.
I had forgotten about the bottle at that point and the sound of its shattering snapped my head up to see. Out of the corner of my eye, John was staring back at me as I had been observing him for these last few weeks. Looking out and looking back in. I felt my ethnographic research of these panhandlers had suddenly become a stereoscopic experiment in perspective: my perspective of them, their perspective of me, the community’s perspective of them, and their perspective of the community. I needed to move in closer but with a constant and suspicious gaze coming from the panhandler group I was going to have to get passed this veil of distrust.
“Hey, do you mind if I ask you some questions?” I approached John on a rare quiet day at the post office. “I’m doing some research for a college class…” my words trailed off as I notice him averting his eyes. “No.” his voice muted, “I don’t think so.” This was my first experience with him one-on-one and I realized that he had the most brilliant blue eyes that were barely clouded behind cataracts from age. I had been sitting for an hour that day with no panhandlers to observe and was walking up the road to meet up with an appointment. “Well, are you going to be here for a while?” I asked and he shrugged. “Ok, think about it, I don’t want to pressure you but when I come back I’m going to ask again.” I smiled and walked on.
An hour later I turned the corner and found John still at the side entrance of the Post Office. His bike was parked in an alcove and he was standing near the stairs. He had pulled out an old cardboard sign that was lovingly placed in a safe place behind the newspaper bins that said, “Anything will help” in blue marker and placed it near his feet. He saw me walking up the sidewalk and gave me a look of annoyance. I knew he didn’t want to talk, but I was going to try. I said “Hi.” and he responded. “So, did you think about it?” I brashly asked. “Yea, but No. I don’t have much to say.” “That’s ok,” I said,” I understand.” but didn’t stop talking. I explained to him my story and how I was near homeless recently. I told him I had met him before, with my dog and I thought he was nice. A few more minutes went by as we shared small talk and then I asked if the panhandlers had some sort of system because it seems like they take turns. He told me that they don’t like to crowd the sidewalk because “well… they let people sit around here, but they don’t like it when they block the sidewalk and all.” I agreed and told him that I had only been here two years so I could not gauge the people but I submitted that “people get scared easily.”
“Yea, well I’ve been here for 60 years.” John proclaims. Born and raised in the area, he slowly reveals his story to me with much prodding. He grew up in the town just west of Corvallis. Philomath is the working-class answer to this city’s middle-class suburbia and trappings of academic snobbery. There the timber industry was the engine of that city’s economy until the late 1980’s economic recession and then hit a second time in the 1990’s when environmentalists moved to reduce the ecological impact of clear cutting. By filing for wildlife protections, they slowly squeezed out the ability of loggers and their companies to make money. That double hit to the timber industry reduced the percentage of people working in Benton County’s forests from 3.7% in 1978 to .85% in 2008 and apparently John was one of those who lost their income by attrition. (Lehrner, 2017) “I was a logger most of my life. Coast range. Yea, I was doing that” he tells me. I ask about the Spotted Owl environmentalists and he responded, “Yea…that didn’t involve us though…it didn’t bother us too much. I lucked out…when I was young I worked on the machines. Got to sit inside the driver’s seat and push buttons all day” he laughed at his own depiction of himself.
At that moment, I realize something about John, he wasn’t outwardly mentally ill as I had believed. In truth, I had been wrong about a lot of things with him. Soft spoken and cripplingly shy, he revealed to me pieces of his life in short sound bites as we talked. That merry prankster with the glass bottle who also cared about how the community saw him. He shrank into the alcove by the side door and leaned behind a concrete and metal railing. He looked as if he was in jail behind black metal bars. Was he doing this to protect himself or as a sign to the people walking past him that he was ‘safely’ behind bars?
A young Muslim couple exits the Post Office and walks down the stairs and they pause. The man takes some bills from the lady walks to John. Our conversation on pause, he takes the few dollars and nods in thanks. The man smiles at me, then him and moves along the sidewalk.
No words spoken. ‘Why did I get the smile first?’ I wonder about the exchange. What is it about social status in public areas that makes all these panhandling exchanges feel so stunted? I look over at John and he’s rolling himself a cigarette. I am aware now that I may be hampering his efforts to make money so I politely excuse myself and thank him for his time. As I pull back I encourage him to not be ‘a stranger’ when we see each other again in hopes of getting some more information from him in the future. He laughs and smiles at me, the impish twinkle in his eyes catches me for a moment. He has a perspective on me and I am curious, but this story is not about me.
A week later, tragedy would strike the panhandling community. A man I had observed on several occasions and spoken to, Cisco, had been found dead on a sidewalk in downtown. His body was found by a passerby at 6:37am lying on the sidewalk. He had been released from Benton County jail earlier that morning after being arrested for trespassing in the park. It was concluded that he had a fatal medical event and passed away. His full name, Jose Franscisco Semademi, was published in the paper underneath his mug shot from the county jail. (BRUTTELL, 2017) It seemed dehumanizing to several commenters on the article that they used that photo. However, how often are homeless people photographed in their life? I thought about that idea of being unrecorded in one’s life, without the humanizing qualities of birthday celebration photos and memberships to community groups. The anonymous self of the homeless and panhandlers creates a void that is filled with the social and cultural group definitions of the Corvallis community.
I know every engineer on every train
All of their children, and all of their names And every handout in every town
And every lock that ain’t locked, when no one’s around.
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
How does one define an identity in a state of homelessness or home insecurity as I have observed in my ethnographic research? Self-identity comes to us in many forms, from our families, friends, society, culture and economic class. We appear to ourselves often in the reflection of others near to us. However, while that is a more static assigned status there is also a continuum of identity molded and formed by our habits over time. This identity comes from not only our daily interactions within a locale but also over a series of events, a timeline through space continuity.
Gidden’s writes, “Repetitive activities, located in one context of time and space, have regularized consequences, unintended by those who engage in those activities, in more or less “distant” time-space contexts” (Giddens, 1984) For example, most every day I stop at my local coffee shop and order a large hazelnut latte with an extra shot of espresso. Over time, the baristas remember me, know my order, our small talk has framed each other in a quasi-friendship, they know my dog and give me dog treats for him and from that I absorb that identity as a ‘regular’ client, the girl who loves extra caffeine, the big dog owner, a hopefully generous tipper, and other pieces that fill in my self-identity. However, this is just one location, one field, as Bourdieu would say, in which I represent and are represented through acts and actions like the way in which we pass money and coffee between the barista and I. (Bourdieu, 1977) How does a lack of positive continuity, as seen within the homeless and panhandler community, effect the self-identity of each individual?
While the locale and social networks exist for the homeless in peer groups, shelters, community charity centers, and places like the river walk and post office, their discontinuity in the variability of the transient lifestyle damages any ability to formulate a positive self-identity. When one’s social fields are fractured because of the variability in socio-economic class, it has to affect the constant treading of self-identity that we create for ourselves and is often our own positively defined self-identity that comes out losing. We reflectively as well as consciously create our habits of identity because we have a ‘feel for the game’ being played, but when there is no anchor point, no home court advantage, how do we defend ourselves from being defined completely from the outside? (Adams, 2006) Perhaps John’s glass bottle anarchy is a sign of that state of irregular habitus.
I smoke, old stogies I have found Short, but not too big around
I’m a man of means, by no means King of the road
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
“Yea, well I know all sorts of shit like that. People think I don’t know shit, but I know how to live off the land.” Cisco said to me a few weeks before his death. I was walking to class and had bumped into three known panhandlers sitting on a wall near campus. I recognized two of the three. Joyce was an older lady with a penchant for conversation and a deep love for my dog. A few months earlier she asked me if she could roll around on the grass with my dog and when I said it was ok she threw herself down and rolled in the grass with my 140-pound Newfoundland as if she had been friends with him forever. Her long grey hair whipped back and forth as she laughed at my dog’s floppy tongue and silly antics. Cisco, I had both observed and talked to before and during my observation times, his dark black hair always pulled back under a cap or knit hat with a face that was distinctly influenced by Meso-American genetics.
Until I realized his name, my field notes just described Cisco as ‘Tall Man’ because his stature was so much greater than my own. At 5’4’’, I use to have to speak up to him when he was standing, but like most of the panhandlers, he sat low to the ground most of the time.
The three of them were sharing a bottle of presumed alcohol between them as I passed out cigarettes while we chatted. “What’s wrong with your leg?” Joyce asks and I tell her how my dog ran into my knee. “You should tell your class about ‘Bone Knit’.”, she responds. I ask what that is as I pull out my phone to look it up. Joyce in her frantic state goes on to describe this plant that grows all over that helps in the healing of bones. Finally, I searched ‘Bone Knit’ and find out it is Comfrey, an almost weed like plant that is used in home remedies. “These kids, they don’t know anything.” Cisco chimes in. “Wait! I’m not a kid” I snap back with a smile.
Joyce continues, “People don’t know shit like that anymore. They just take a pill…take a pill…take a pill.” Pantomiming pulling a pill out and eating it over and over for effect. Cisco waves the paper bag covered bottle, “…and then they worry about this”. “Well, everyone thinks their way is always the right way.” I say as I roll my eyes and he tilts his head with a sly smile, “Well…” he trails off “I wouldn’t say my way is the right way.” We all laugh at Cisco’s self- deprecating humor as he brings his hand to his mouth and makes an ‘oops’ face to bring the point home.
There is a certain eloquence to the critical nature in which Cisco regards himself. John carried himself in much the same way with both verbal and body language. Joyce, in her own way, used her self-deprecation as an in-road to my acquaintance when playing with my dog. At the same time, they were critical of the people in society that revolved around them and yet, as in John’s case, reverential to the norms and rules that required them to maintain some level of decorum when panhandling and moving around town. It was the appearance that they did not want to lose any more social ground; at the same time self-aware of their position at the bottom of the social/economic/political hierarchy.
When reflecting on the Facebook community comments we can see the constant reinforcement of that demeaning and scapegoating that my informants need to navigate day in day out. “They don’t even let us have signs in Albany.” John tells me about the closest big town near Corvallis, saying that they’ve made being homeless illegal there. When one’s existence is illegal and regarded as the source of all the problems of society we can see how managing a self-deprecating view of one’s own identity while simultaneously believing that the community you are a member of is much greater than the normative community.
They sing, trailers for sale or rent Rooms to let, fifty cents
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1964
In 1914, Charlie Chaplin created the character of The Tramp and continued to use the face of the hobo throughout his early career. The Tramp was a vagabond, a panhandler, and a person apart from civil society. In truth, he was the anthesis of the laissez-fair capitalism at the time that would eventually lead to the great depression a few decades later. Chaplin was quoted as saying, “I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large” (Charlie Chaplin , 2007) The character itself was played as a contradiction, civil, courteous, noble, and a romantic surrounded by sinister thieves from within his community of panhandlers and greedy, unwavering, high society on the other. Yet, each movie The Tramp is not moving through a story but a circumstantial victim in somebody else’s story.
Chaplin was British and portrayed America through the eyes of his characters, a perspective filter, where individuality and human agency was being buffeted by greed, social decorum, and political gamesmanship. Much like I have said about my own life, nobody chooses to stand on the lowest rungs of society, but when found there, we make the best of it we can. Chaplin agreed saying, “Life is a tragedy in the close-shot, but a comedy in the long-shot.” (Charlie Chaplin , 2007)
What of the loveable vagabond? Do they exist in our time or have they fallen from grace and redefined as the vermin society needs to rid themselves of? My observations and conversations with the homeless, panhandlers, urban campers, and poor have shown me that these people, for the most part, are those same Americans that Roger Miller sang about, Chaplin represented, Nick Nolte played in Down and Out in Beverley Hills, Robin Williams in the Fisher King, and the beloved Lady and The Tramp. Joyce is a hard-living woman with a few compelling mental disorders but a bright, sunshine attitude that brightens the river walk when you speak with her. John, an old-time logger whose life took a wrong turn somewhere and has learned to live outside the conventions of society. Cisco, a guy with a drinking problem who seemingly always found a way to walk the streets with a lady or two, a bottle of cheap alcohol, and a penchant for blowing off criticisms with a smile. The other’s that loiter about the post office as well: the veterans who have had trouble functioning in society when their life experiences are filled with horrors and self-medication, the abandoned women (like myself) who dig deep to attempt a comeback or just give up, the kids who have been abandoned or have abandoned harsh homes for the roadside campsites because there is more security, and the transients who move in and out of towns as ghosts setting up ‘home’ in places where others wouldn’t dream of living and working low level jobs for little pay.
This cast of characters are often the victims of circumstance, of lost jobs, homes, spouses, and dignity. The League of Women Voters found that in the overall population of Oregon, only 46% were actually born here. In terms of the homeless population of Benton County, 36% of homeless women and 22% of homeless men recorded birth homes in Oregon with a massive number of unknown birth circumstances which we can conclude a percentage are born and raised Oregonians. Veterans make up about 20% of the male population of homeless and 5% of the females. In age, the average client of the cold weather shelters in Corvallis is 43.5 years old and there are just slightly more men than women on the streets. (The League of Women Voters-Corvallis, 2017)When the community says that these people do not belong here, they are either not aware of the demographics of the homeless community or they actually mean that homeless people do not belong in Corvallis no matter what the circumstance.
“I’m staying in one of those apartments up on Harrison street and uh…and I got an eviction notice the other day. (I asked) What am I getting evicted for? No cause. What?! I didn’t do nothing wrong. I don’t know.” John told me as we were standing outside the Post Office. I asked if he was living with other people and he said that he was and it was their antics that caused the whole group to be evicted. Doubling upping on a rental is a typical way for several of the poorest of Corvallis to get off the streets, even for a short time. However, living inside a moderated community of apartments looks very little like living out on the eastern banks of the Willamette. There are rules to abide by in apartments, but less so in the camps. When those who come off the streets are placed in apartments they are ill prepared for what is expected of them and many, with drug addictions and mental health issues, are not capable of abiding by those rules. John’s roommates got him evicted and now he will be back in the homeless camps by the time summer finally breaks the Oregon winter rains.
The first day I set out to do my ethnographic research I came upon the panhandler group sitting on the benches by the Post Office. I smiled at the group in passing and one complimented me on my red boots. I stopped and we talked. They were sitting outside on a rare sunny day rolling a joint and joking around. One older gentlemen with a grey beard and sparkling personality even got me to sing and dance to Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots were Made for Walking. We laughed and had a moment, not unlike my moments with friends or family. My experiences with this specific group of homeless, home insecure, and panhandlers has had none of the violent and criminal behavior that those online seem to portray. I am not deluded by the belief that crime does not exist in areas of homelessness, however, there seems to be a disconnect between the community of housed people and the community of homeless people. Perhaps, it may have something to do with the perspectives we have internalized on both sides of the equation. At least from my observations of the conversations, there is plenty of innuendo, emotion, and myth involved.
“My thoughts are how well it will do when the house will be 2 blocks from Greek row and the area is mainly those of students? Very young, possibly immature students who don’t understand homelessness or attributes of those who are chronically homeless is a combination I could see failing.” (Facebook, 2017) Said one man on a post about a homeless shelter close to campus. Apparently, without any facts, he connects students and the homeless as being a flash point circumstance with dangerous repercussions. This proved wrong in my observations over the ten weeks in downtown. The truth, as I sat watching the comings and goings of the Post
Office panhandlers, one thing became very clear and that was younger people were more apt to approach, speak with, and donate to the panhandlers. Returning to my conversation with the African American young man, he said he was lucky to have and glad to give to those who have not. Younger adults gave to panhandlers at the Post Office four to one over older community members. They were more likely to stop, even chat at length with individuals on both sides of the building and were engaged in the homeless community. Day after day, I watched students and others smile at the homeless as they passed unlike older adults, primarily women, look away and ignore the people they were walking by. Unlike the commenter online, young adults were not immature nor naïve, but aware and thoughtful about the plight of the homeless. Moreover, the panhandlers engaged them in much of the same way they engaged me, with smiles, fun conversation, and a sense of appreciation.
In a study on self-identity and the chronic homeless, researchers found that the constant state of being reminded of the lower status of un-housed individuals throughout their time and space continuum had great effects on self-esteem. (Rowe, 1990) In my own experience at the verge of dropping out of housing, my days consisted of moving from one organization to another to fill out paperwork and speak with representatives who would continually ask me what I did to get in this position. When I received free healthcare, the nurses and doctors at my first visit asked me no less than eight times if I was an IV drug user; I had never been nor did I have anything resembling track marks on my body. At unemployment, I was under investigation for months for being responsible for my own lay-off, despite my company never responding to requests for documentation. My first time using my food stamp card I was demeaned by the man behind me who needed to tell me that his tax dollars were paying for my food and that I “shouldn’t have had children if I couldn’t afford them.” I do not have any children. I imagine the homeless moving through their days, reminded that they are unwanted by the community, questioned by the people who are there to help them, pushed out of camps at night by police and having their possessions thrown away, and constantly being ignored as if they do not exist. Is it no wonder that John is painfully shy and could not even look me in the eye after a long conversation, nor days later, when I passed him along the street and said hello.
In the past, as media has portrayed, the act of not having a home, being a hobo, or panhandling was not always considered among the dregs of society. There were criminals and then there were the homeless or home insecure poor. Roger Miller’s song in its last lines shows that interconnectedness of the vagabond and his time and space continuum. He knew the engineers, their children, the people who gave him money because he was a part of the community unlike today where he would be seen as apart from it in the most severe way.
Perhaps that is why the online community views the homeless in Corvallis as a hostile and particularly damaging population; they themselves have not pulled those people into the fold. Unlike myself, many panhandler supporters, and the young adults I have seen be so warm to that community, these people are the same ones who avert their eyes or scowl at the homeless presence. Joyce, John, Cisco and the others never appeared hostile to me because I entered their space with a smile and gave them dignity. The same happens to those who pass money to the Post Office panhandlers or those who stop and talk to the group at the river walk. When treated as members of the community, with some purpose and some connection, they are drawn out of their impenetrable protective shell. A shell that protects them from the hostilities of society which has levied a heavy price on their heads for their lifestyle, ironically, that was levied upon them by that same society.
As I finished my research, I sat back and engaged the online community which was once again tormented with the question of “What to do with the homeless of Corvallis”. My response was simple, when looking at the statistical data from the Florida DOT study, there is not much you can do to bring many people back into society from urban camping. What we can do is provide a place for them, access to bathrooms and garbage facilities, a presence of security without pushing them out, acknowledge that they are a part of the community, and in the end perhaps just look them in the eye and speak to them with dignity and kindness. Cisco did not deserve to die alone on a sidewalk. John, at 60, does not deserve to cast out into the cold because of the infractions of those who are unable to live within strict rules. Joyce deserves better than to wander the streets with her infectious smile but un-treated mental illness. However, if they felt a part of this community they would be more likely to work with it to ferret out the criminal element we should care about; the violent ones who not only attack the other homeless in town but create property damage, theft, and commit violent crimes to average citizens. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, while as stubbornly individualistic as many of the homeless I have met, cared about the people who cared for him. The King of the Road was an integral part of his community, doing small work for people who needed it for little pay.
In closing, I would like to honor the memory of Cisco, as I knew him, by filling in his backstory. I knew him as the happy, often drunk, homeless panhandler who always had a smile and a quick wit about him. Other’s new him better and their words drive home how much a part of the community Cisco was, despite many people seeing him as a detriment to Corvallis way of life. I dedicate this research to him.
Jose Francisco Semadeni was born in Rovira, Columbia on October 23, 1982. In May 1987, he was adopted by Enrique and Kay Semadeni, joining siblings Jenny, Noemi and John, who were living in Lugano, Switzerland at the time. In November 1987, the whole family moved to Corvallis to take over Corvallis Cyclery and be near Grandpa and Grandma. In the ensuing years, Frisco had many fun times with the family; traveling, camping, hiking, biking and hunting. He enjoyed playing soccer and later on basketball, as well as running on the CHS cross country team, where he was a natural. He was an avid collector of basketball cards and spent many happy hours with them. Frisco always had a smile and a hug for everyone, and had a heart for people. He was proud that he was a help to his fellow homeless in the Corvallis area, showing them how to get clothes, food and services. He is survived by his parents Enrique and Kay; siblings Jenny (Marcus) and daughters, Noemi and John (Claire) and children; many aunts, uncles and cousins; and grandmother Glenna Carter.
Bruttell, N 2017
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