'"Trespassing" in the "Bettter than Normal Suburb"

A person can easily hide or camp in the thick Oregon undergrowth.

On our annual trip to visit family in Oregon, each morning, I put on a backpack and hit the streets to put on at least a few miles. I've called this a "better than normal suburb" in the past because it is highly walkable compared to other 80s to present suburbs since it features ample trails, sidewalk design to facilitate walkers, services like shops and stores just a short walk away and good transit connection. This time I lost my water bottle.

I've been walking this neighborhood on our yearly visits for nearly a decade and continue to discover new "pedestrian only " avenues like this stairway up the hillside which I discovered just this year that has a Little Free Library at the top. That is why I call it a "better than normal suburb", except of course for exclusionary affordability.

It wasn't just any water bottle, but a stainless steel 20 oz "Klean Canteen" that I'd had for around 20 years. One of my 6th graders this year asked me why I had such a dented bottle and didn't buy a new one. I told her that it was exactly because it was old and had dents that I kept it. I pointed out that each of the dents had a story behind it and the fact that it was old and I'd had it a long time was a source of pride. It is the value system that would rather buy something once and keep it forever than to purchase something newer of lower quality again and again. To me it is a symbol of how everything in our society needs to be and so I lament having to get a new one, though I have a cupboard full at home that have been given to me over the years.

Once I realized it was gone, I backtracked the two mile route sure that I would find it. I came up with nothing. While I have no clue what happened to it, as one walks, one sees clues of the homeless in scraps of detritus and whiffs of urine in secluded areas. In this middle class suburb, they hide deep within forested areas as out of sight as possible. In this area they are called "unhoused", which while well meaning, seems to be a example of hair splitting semantics to give people a pat on the back if they use the proper term, berate them if they don't. Campers are more visible in Portland, but they are much less so than a few years ago. I know there are ongoing efforts to attack a problem that has so many facets as to be intractable.

 I think of the homeless as a symptom of the sickness of our society. Fixing it is about much more than giving them houses and forms of "treatment'. They are like appendages of the collective human body crying out that something is wrong with how we live on the earth. They are the canaries in the coal mine telling us we need to change, since most of us are just a few misfortunes away in our precarious capitalist society from being homeless ourselves.

At the bus stop close to where we stay, one day I discoverd someone had tucked 5 dollars into the top left corner. The next day someone had left what must of been a bag of food and supplies with a kind message. Next to the stop is a tree and brush filled hollow where someone must be living.

As I hike through some of the wilder areas that plunge into the creeks and gorges, I assume there are unseen eyes hunkering down behind the thick screens of undergrowth. One could hollow out a safe shelter by tunneling into the thick, spiked blackberries and never be seen. I like to think one of these "watchers" saw it drop and grabbed it as a durable and useful object for their precarious life.If so, I hope it serves them well.

Walking around is my medicine. Instead of taking a pill, I like to put on at least a few miles every day. It helps my back problems, my mood, flexibility and circulation. In addition, it has benefits far beyond because we are a species made to walk. I tend to think a lot of our health problems can be fixed by walking. One day, I hope to hike the Camino De Santiago because it is the epitome of an ancient walk to work out the problems of not just mind and body, but soul.

It is fun to explore neighborhoods by walking , but the fancier the neighborhood, the more I feel like I am trespassing. Urban hiking is a favorite activity when visiting a city. I have been to this "better than normal suburb" as I have called it many times visiting family. It is the type of safe and secure place everyone should be able to live, but in America, like everything, safety can be segregated.

The more suburban, the more affluent, the more individualized and isolated the lives and spaces are. Suburbs are concattenations of little individual castles, set next to each other, but miles away from being community and not really communitties in the classic sense. They are an amalgam of individualized "nowheres" indistinguishable from every other cookie cutter nowhere.

 Happy Valley is an affluent middle class suburb in a country where people are sorted by socioeconomic status. A cheap house here sells for three quarters of a million dollars.That would buy a mansion in North Dakota, but here it gets you a two bedroom house less than 1500 square feet. Ths affordability crisis is front and center here in Cascadia I certainly couldn't afford to live in this expensive, privileged city. It is heavily Asian with a smattering of other diversity. Walking around, I hear more non-English than English and the air is filled with Vietmanese, Chinese and languages I don't recognize by sound. These are affluent, professional immigrants contributing their skills, knowledge and tax dollars to the American pot. It is too bad our government is attacking the very lifeblood and vitality of our country right now.

As I walk, I know I'm being surveilled by hundreds of cameras and posted signs for different security services. The greater the wealth, the more need for security in our most unequal of socieities.If I ever have so much stuff that I need a security system it will be time to downsize. I like the almost Buddhist sense of freedom of knowing if someone takes the modest things I have, I may be better off for it.

 Dogs invariably bark as I walk by protecting their "tribe" in hyper individualistic America of lonely nuclear family tribes. To me, if inclusion or exclusion has a sound, it is a barking dog. Inclusion means the dog walks up to you as a friend not a foe.  Here, little castles, surrounded by moats of fence and lawn, protected by cameras, dogs and alarms, exclude all those who are not included and watch and record the rest who move through this space. Dress "wrong", act "wrong", or "look wrong" and you will be removed from these sanitized islands of middle class segregation.

Whenever I walk in such places, I try to dress the part. There is a sort of middle class exercise "uniform" that lets one blend in.  I've got my Patagonia sun shirt (a badge of the eco-conscious upper middle class) which along with the privileged status of being a white male might let me go by unoticed. Though being a white male in this age of resurgent white male racism may also invoke fear thanks to the fools spounting scary crap out there.