Imagining

How It Was Before

Contrasting colours, going from green to grey, the dichotomy between forest and city.

I see the infrastructure of civilization all around me, its industrial guts, its smokestacks, the billowing fumaroles that rise above the resource town that was built in service to the smelter. Every day the chemical spirits are released into the atmosphere. The scent is always with me as I walk the streets of this town with a big duffle bag hanging from my shoulder. It’s filled with harm reduction supplies and nutritive supplements for people I am here to see in the alley.

Every city has at least one of these now-an alley where the untouchables go to score dope, to shoot up, to live under tarps, to sleep on beds made of cardboard, their bodies wrapped in tarps or dirty blankets. The alleyway where the businesses keep their trash out of view of the public eye is also the place where I can usually find the community I serve. They come here because they have no where else. It’s a place where they can exist with a little less scrutiny from the outside world.

As I child growing up in urban American cities like Houston and Detroit I would stop to peer down these canyons made of asphalt and concrete, trying to see what was happening in their depths. I was both frightened and fascinated by this subterranean reality. Sometimes I would see a human crumpled in a doorway and wonder if they were alive or dead, sometimes rats the size of poodles would scurry quickly by my feet. Another time I saw a young woman on crack bent over a garbage can. Her pimp was nearby managing a line up of men waiting their turn to have her, some ready with money in their hands. To this day I remember her face. Her eyes clutched mine like a bird of prey holding onto a branch with its talons. In the second or two that our eyes were locked she transmitted some information to me, a teaching without words about the reality of hell and the potential to endure it.

Glimpses of today.

The darkness behind the man standing in the doorway. The interior of the trap house as black as the Appalachian coal mine shafts my Grandfather worked in and subsequently died from back in West Virginia. The smell of marinated chewing tobacco wafting up from spittoons positioned around his old cabin is replaced in the present by the smell of methamphetamine sweat pouring off the man I am here to see. Speaking with him, I notice I am not as present as I would like to be. I have lingering visions of the previous man I saw in the alley-his bare knuckles literally split open from fighting, white line of bone visible beneath ripped flesh. Involuntarily I touch the scar where his machete sliced the top of my finger a few weeks back. Stupid me. Even though I had his permission, I knew better than to put my hand in his backpack.

Mistakes you make when burnt out and frazzled.

Down the street, a few kilometres outside of town, a piece of land on a bluff above the flood plane. Trailers, campers, and shanties. Carbonized meth pipes on the dirty table inside a marooned 5th wheel. Both clean and used syringes on the counter top. Broken open viles of Naloxone indicate several opioid overdoses-hopefully reversed. I glance out the window. On the ground the now ubiquitous discarded surgical masks, the rubble of a travel trailer that burnt down with one of the people I served inside it. Power lines stretched overhead, a roadway blasted through the cliff side with dynamite many decades ago. From here I can still see the smokestacks of the little city, and further out, clear-cuts on the mountain sides. The Columbia River runs through the middle of all of this, and I imagine what life was like, right here in this very spot, before the “civilization” that I inhabit replaced it.