The Tent

I don’t know how to feel about it. I really don’t. It’s there. That’s incontrovertible. And it’s not going anywhere. The city will make sure of that. By not doing anything. No response. There are laws, but they’re not enforcing them. They only enforce laws when it’s convenient, or money to be made. So it’s there: a tent. It’s a nice one. Big. Light blue. Haven’t seen the tenants. Tenants of the tent. But they chose a great spot, a small section at mid-level by a lush rhododendron shrub on one side and laurel on the other. It’s a three-tiered park: a lower section with a playground and a stretch of grass that’s been taken over by people flinging sticks for their dogs while staring at their smartphones. People used to lie in the grass and read a book or soak in some sunlight on a warm summer day but the grass is gone, it’s all dirt now, packed down by the paws of a thousand dogs running after sticks. It’s become a de facto off-leash dog park. The top section is a little more complex, at the far eastern end is a small concrete wall in a gentle semi-circle and a fountain and a bench and a panoramic view of downtown Seattle and the Cascade Range to the east. Mount Baker is sometimes visible to the north, a phantasmal mass of white rising into the blue on cloudless days and a faint implication on the gray ones. Extending to the west is an open space of grass for picnics and just hanging out. Another section that bends in an L shape to the south has also become a de facto off leash dog park (one of many city ordinances I’ve never seen enforced), yet (for now) the grass has somehow managed to persist. The mid-section is private. Good place for romances and private meetings among friends. But now the tent is there. There’s a switchback trail of cement that takes you to the top. I wouldn’t stray from that trail. The people in the tent have to be taking care of their biological needs off in the bushes, and to guess by some of the smells, they haven’t been shy about helping themselves to whatever privacy the shrubbery affords. Not that they have a choice. The closest public rest room is a QFC and a coffeehouse at the bottom of the hill, about a quarter mile distant. We can live with that. But they’ve also been using our trash bins. We discovered a big sack of garbage laid on top of what was already a full bin. I went to empty some trash in the recycling bins after the garage was picked up and discovered two syringes on the ground that must’ve spilled out of the sack when the bin was emptied into the truck. Thankfully, there were no needles. I’d be lying if I didn’t say this pissed me off, and was a cause of alarm. So that emotion gets added to the other emotions, which are an incoherent mixture of sympathy, worry, guilt, dismay, frustration, incredulity, and rage. Rage at the pharaonic income inequality and plundering of public funds and social nets that put so many people at risk, at the extortionate and insanely exorbitant medical bills that bankrupt so many people, and all the predatory loans and shitty jobs with shitty wages that have been the cause of so many evictions and misery while the billionaires and sharks on Wall Street horde more and more money. Incredulity that a country once praised for its fairness and decency has become a failed state, a shabby banana republic with a crumbling and dangerous infrastructure where wealthy corporate myrmidons tool around in electric sports cars and Elon Musk gets to play with his expensive space toys and Bill Gates refuses to lift the patent on Covid vaccine formulas. So far there is just the one tent. Other neighborhoods have seen their parks taken over by much larger encampments, many of them rife with drug dealers and prostitution, the kind of employment that evolves out of the ashes of a fallen empire. One of the encampments, ironically, has grown in a vacant lot behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Where is the philanthropy for them? “The opposite of love is not hate,” said Elie Wiesel, “it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”