Reflections on the Great Recession of 2008-09 (Part 1)
When I moved to Newport, Oregon in the spring of 2008, the Great Recession was about ready to rise up and wipe out a large swath of Americans and their futures. I started teaching at Newport High School later that fall, and for the next three years witnessed first hand the devastation that economic calamity wrought. Actually I did more than witness it. I was in the thick of it with my students, several of whom became homeless with their families.
I wrote a column about the Great Recession's effect on coastal Oregon for a weekly magazine in 2009. I look back on it today and see it was some of my first writing about the crisis of Oregon homelessness. Here is an excerpt:
In the course of promoting my new book, I’ve driven up and down the Oregon Coast a dozen times this summer and consistently encountered the same troubling image: weathered middle aged men walking Highway 101 with all their worldly possessions. I’ve lived on the coast for 13 years and have never seen so many homeless men on the road. I started keeping count in June but finally gave up.
Some sit in the shoulders holding cardboard signs reading “Hungry” or “Need Food.” Sometimes they have a backpack, wagon, suitcase, even a ragged bicycle. A few have dogs. Infrequently, a woman accompanies a man. Life looks damn hard for these men.
The only thing I haven’t seen is a bindle. There is no Jack Kerouac romance of the road for them. There is no John Steinbeck around to chronicle their stories, only a couple of radio and television charlatans who claim to speak politically and spiritually for them. These weathered men have no irony about them whatsoever. You can’t have irony when you’re invisible to the unwashed commentators.
I can spot the difference between a sojourner and a homeless man. A few younger, sturdier men obviously tramp the Oregon Coast on some existential errand or walkabout, most likely returning to something solid, dry. Where the weathered men end up I can’t even imagine.
Please don’t think I’ll sound flippant with what I’m about to write next: At least near the beach these men and their dogs can find some scrap of solace from the ocean, a free bed in the sand, and some of the amenities provided by the Oregon Coast’s vast system of federal, state local and county parks and recreation areas, which have become de facto social service agencies for all kinds of men, women and children dispossessed by the recent economic calamity.
Don’t tell me I exaggerate; I hit the various beaches near my home at dawn every morning and have seen plenty of weathered men sleeping in the dunes and willows. Although I could easily take their photographs and perhaps better document their plight, I will not do so; it feels wrong to me. To walk past these men and do nothing is a profoundly distressing experience to begin my day, but generally, that’s what I do, walk on by.
In recent weeks, I’ve given a $20 bill here and there to a few weathered men. (I also donate to various social service agencies.) I’ve also stashed cans of dog food in the truck and dole them out when I see a homeless man on the road with a dog. He gets the $20 if he promises to take care of the dog. Sure, I know some of the money goes for booze. But not all of it.
When the hard rains come, I suspect the beach will provide little psychic and absolutely no physical comfort for the weathered men. At that point, they’ll mostly disappear from my sight as I cruise Highway 101. I don’t have a poignant or prescriptive ending for this column. It just ends.