Sunday Morning (Part 2)

I walked briskly toward the billowing smoke. A few minutes later, I stood on a pedestrian/bicycle path and watched a fire blazing 20 yards and 20 feet below me. Flames engulfed the shanty and the blackberry patch surrounding it. A power pole that had braced the shanty was also burning, Electric wires had snapped free and were flying around, sparking and crackling.

My first thought: did someone die in the inferno? An accident? Arson? Murder?

A firefighter materialized near me. I asked him about the fire. Had they found a body? No, not yet. They had to back off because of hot power lines. They'd hit it with water and all hell had broken loose.

I looked around and there was 20 firefighters standing near their vehicles waiting to get to work. The firefighter told me linemen were on their way. I described the two-storey shanty to him, its mattress walls, the plastic gargoyle perched on top, the fresh sod that led into the domicile, and he shook his head in disbelief.

Every day in the city a homeless domicile catches fire. One day, a conflagration in an encampment will kill a dozen or more people and their pets and everything will change.

I gawked for a few more minutes and then continued on my walk. Would I ever hear any news of a possible death or cause of the fire? I might if I started talking to homeless people I knew in the neighborhood. It occurred to me I was building an underground information network of the kind Sherlock Holmes built in Victorian-era London and solved crimes with.

Fire raced through my mind as I walked away from the smoke and flames down the path, continuing across a bridge over a busy boulevard, and then taking stairs that ended in the parking lot of mass transit station. No one was there except a man wearing a silver-colored emergency blanket and talking to himself.

I had never visited the transit stop so I wandered around admiring the design, sculptures and riffs of poetry etched into the sidewalk, wondering who originally wrote the words. I also toured a short interpretative walk over a wetland strewn with trash that explained the history of the creek, from Native American habitation to pioneer settlement, to ruinous residential and industrial development, to misguided attempts by the CCC during the New Deal to excavate and channelize the creek for flood control (it made flooding worse). The signage also told the story of the considerable attempts over the last two decades to restore a wrecked watershed that was vital to the ecological health of a big city. Some of the attempts, such as planting native trees and shrubs in the riparian areas, replacing undersized culverts, were working and the creek was returning to life in some stretches. Salmon, ducks, herons, otters, beavers and other species had magically reappeared and proved it was possible to remedy abuses in some watercourses.

Witnessing a subtle victory of healing one watercourse at a time always seems to elevate my spirits and here I was looking at some of this good work, below me, as the creek rushed by on its way to the river.

I exited the transit stop, climbed some stairs, and began walking across another bridge, this one with vehicular traffic. At some point the creek disappeared under the boulevard.

Traffic was light on this early Sunday morning. I had almost crossed the bridge when I noticed to my left a four-foot-wall of concrete and metal bars paralleling the sidewalk. The structure was obviously meant to keep people out of whatever was down below, probably a gully or storage area for highway maintenance materials, I surmised. I stopped and peered over the wall to see whatever it was.