Sweet Home(less) Part 1

In the course of writing about the New American Diaspora I have never once purposely left the house in search of a story.

That was, until not too long ago when I decided to visit Sweet Home, a small city in the eastern Willamette Valley situated along Highway 20. The last time I'd spent any time there was in high school over 40 years ago when I played a doubles tennis match on a court adjacent to a sprawling lumber mill belching smoke and reeking of rotten eggs. I lost that match and two decades later Sweet Home was no longer a thriving timber town. In fact, it was a dead timber town. Unfortunately, unlike other formerly dead timber towns such as Sisters, McMinnville, Silverton and (almost) Grants Pass, Sweet Home, like Rainier and Molalla, never bothered to reinvent itself. I knew that for a sad fact because I'd driven though it a couple times in the past decade and the place looked shell shocked. But at least a far flung corporation had opened a Dollar Tree.

Still, that wasn't the reason I wanted to explore Sweet Home in connection to the New American Diaspora. I chose Sweet Home because it was called Sweet Home and the irony of writing about the homeless crisis in small town with such a name was just too delicious a hook to pass up.

I know, I know, a pretentious writer's conceit, but that sums up many American writers who take to the road to write about America from a position as interloper. I pray I never become that phony.

My editorial strategy prior to visiting Sweet Home was to conduct absolutely no online research. I would simply drive into town and look for homeless people. It wasn't exactly a scientific method, more like a routine a private detective investigating a case in the mid 70s might have tried. It was, after all, the same gumshoe method most people learned interesting and useful things about their surroundings before the Internet and smartphones came along.

It's still the best way and the only way where you can bump into the unexpected.

I wasn't worried about finding homeless people in Sweet Home. I knew I would because in the course of living and probing around Oregon in recent years, they were living everywhere, from the wet willows outside of Klamath Falls to the dry bottom of a derelict fountain in downtown Portland. I might add that you will never forget the sight of someone living in a tent at the dry rock bottom of a derelict fountain in a big city. The water might not be gushing forth, but the metaphors were.