Sweet Home(less) Part 2

So I drove into Sweet Home and down the main drag on a bright and frosty afternoon. Nothing. I turned around and drove it again. Nothing. I drove various side streets paralleling the main drag. Nothing. I did see a female panhandler standing at the entrance of a chain grocery store. I didn't know if she was homeless so that didn't count.

Thus, Sweet Home had no homeless people that I could see.

Like I said, it wasn't a very scientific method but it had worked for me every other single town in Oregon I'd visited since the Great Recession and that was about a hundred.

I was making a final pass when something arrested my attention—a used bookstore that supported the Sweet Home Public Library. I always patronize these establishments and have found some of my greatest literary gems on their shelves.

There was nothing else left to see or do in Sweet Home, so I parked the car a block away on a deserted street near an abandoned cinder block American Legion post and walked to the store.

The facade was distinctly unappealing, almost crumbling. I stepped inside a tiny lobby and then halted because I had just beheld something never heretofore seen in all my years of haunting used (or new) bookstores: a stand-alone shelf of hardback Westerns on sale for $2 a book. I counted over 200! Most had their original dust jackets!

I perused the collection and to my utter astonishment didn't find a single book I wanted to purchase.

Next, I ventured inside the bookstore itself and a few seconds later found myself standing in front of what surely is the largest number of volumes of second hand, paperback Westerns in any bookstore in America, including the one founded and once operated by the late Larry McMurtry, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas.

I estimated over 3000, 500 by Louis L' Amour, the king himself! Holy Zane Grey! It simply wasn't possible. I asked a clerk about the collection. “How in the world did all these Westerns end up here?”

He didn't know. He supposed the good people of Sweet Home loved reading Westerns and the righteous ass kicking and simplistic moral outcomes that must go along with the genre. I hypothesized on the spot that the further Sweet Home spiraled into economic decline, the more Westerns the locals read. (The bodice ripper section also numbered in the thousands, quite possibly ten, but their supernatural abundance here required a separate hypothesis that I was unprepared to formulate then—or ever.)

Half an hour later, I had purchased several books, but not really a Western unless you count a single volume edition of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, which I don't because justice didn't prevail, meaning the Indians didn't slaughter the disease and imperialism-riddled invaders.

I walked out into the sunshine feeling pretty damn good. No great homeless story revealed but a helluva Louie L'Amour one! That was good enough for me because at times I have wanted my creative mind to escape engaging with homeless issue and walk into other stories, and finally I had.

One never knows what can happen when you roll into Sweet Home so that's why you roll into places like this.

I walked toward my car. I opened the door and tossed the books on the passenger seat. I was about to seat myself and hit the road when a tall, boring and shabby building farther down the block caught my eye. Its faded signage read City Hall.

Surely this dump wasn't Sweet Home's current city hall? Perhaps it was the old one. I've always had a fascination for houses, farms, RV parks, cemeteries, buildings and yards that have gone to seed so I decided to investigate.

A few seconds later I approached the building, looked right toward what was the driveway to the building's parking lot and stopped dead in my tracks. I issued a two-word phrase of profanity. I stared.

In the roughly half acre rectangular parking lot stood a homeless encampment comprised of around 20 tents, a van, and a pallet and tarp shanty. All domiciles were evenly arranged around the perimeter of lot. Outside one of the tents, a fire crackled in a cannibalized barbecue shell and three or four people, including a woman in a bikini top, gathered around in lounge chairs drinking something from cans and generally partying around a camp fire like campers do in county parks. There was even a pit bull snoozing on a pad.

Welcome to a different Sweet Home.