Park Ranger

A white pickup rested in the parking lot of a city park on a weekday morning. Its tailgate read “Park Ranger.”

At long last, I had sighted a representative from the city of Portland's Park Ranger program, established not that long ago to largely assist with the homeless crisis that overran many of the city's parks, making many of them inhospitable to visit.

According to city, county and non profit agencies/officials tasked with alleviating the crisis of homelessness in Multnomah County, a Park Ranger was one of the few designated personnel who had the power to make an on-the-spot “assessment” of a homeless person to see if he or she qualified for admittance into temporary housing such as the Safe Rest (tiny home) Villages.

ASSESSMENT! ASSESSMENT! ASSESSMENT! This was the Holy Grail for Mark from the Old Crow Book Club. He had been seeking such an assessment while wandering in the bureaucratic maze of molasses and mayonnaise for two years trying to secure a spot in one of the villages or the subsidized apartments or even some of the motel vouchers. Without an assessment, Mark could not gain admittance into this type of housing. Or so he and I had been told.

We had tried multiple times to obtain the assessment and each occasion were met with colossal indifference, misinformation, incompetence and once even downright cruelty. Here was a homeless man in his late 50s, an alcoholic, who had recently suffered two heart attacks and had a cardiologist and social worker through the Providence system (neither of whom could make the assessment) who wanted off the streets but could not complete the process because the process was unknown and contradictory or didn't even exist at all.

It was time for action. I was going up to the pickup and knock on the window and get some answers on this Park Ranger/assessment business.

Elmer the husky and I exited the car and walked over. I saw a man sitting in the driver's seat scrolling on his phone. I knocked on the window. He powered it down. He was young and looked Native American. He smiled and said hello and asked how he could help me.

Our talk lasted 15 minutes. I got the skinny. Here it is:

Yes, he could make an assessment. He had done so many times. He entered the homeless person's information into the system via a phone and then the system searched for available housing options. Yes, that included the Safe Rest Villages. Sometimes there were immediate openings, but usually the wait list was long, very long, sometimes 80 people. A vast majority of the assessments he made involved homeless people in the downtown area camping in or near city parks. He was unsure how many people he assessed and referred actually went into housing. He didn't know how long someone remained on a list for a particular place of housing.

I briefly told him Mark's story with the bureaucracy. He nodded his head. He'd obviously heard a version of it before, possibly many times. There was no communication between the partners, he said.

I asked if I got Mark to pitch a tent in this park, then called a Park Ranger to intervene because it is illegal to camp in a city park, the Park Ranger would show up, make an assessment, (maybe write a ticket?) and Mark could take it from there, perhaps even secure a spot in a Safe Rest Village?

Yes. That might work.

In other words, I said, Mark should break the law to obtain his assessment, the critical second step to getting off the streets. (Having a valid ID was the first, but we took care of that last summer.)

Yes, the Park Ranger said.

I liked this guy. He was a Jim Rockford kind of man. I asked him how he liked interacting with homeless people. He said it was always different, challenging, but his background had led him to practice novel deescalating techniques that seemed to work more often than not.

It was time to go. I thanked him for his time and work on behalf of the homeless. He thanked me for caring.

What next? I've got a tent in the garage, a massive REI model courtesy of a friend that had sheltered him and his family all across Oregon for decades. It was big enough to host a meeting of the Old Crow Book Club! We'd read something by Kafka!

Perhaps the tent could serve a new useful purpose. It wasn't doing anything in my garage. We could scatter some colorful and inexplicable possessions and empty cans of malt liquor around the tent for extra aesthetic homeless measure. That would generate more complaints, for sure.

I'm not sure I'm joking. I've written this before, but it bears repeating: doing it by the book isn't cutting it for Mark and probably countless other homeless people in Oregon.

Should I go full on Rockford and break out the phony business card and go for it?