Dear Diary,
We're almost done with this stroll down memory lane, which ends with visits to places of your memory as well as of mine.
Laurelhurst
In Laurelhurst I found, again, different circumstances. There were far fewer homeless people around, but there was competition for doorways again, because there were also fewer of those. Laurelhurst is a pretty wealthy neighbourhood, and people gave me money again. Although I was in a certain amount of shock from the disasters of 2016 (my Milwaukee storage unit's sale) and 2017 (my laptop's theft) and from my frequent changes of address in 2016-2018, I wasn't anywhere near as lost and lorn as I'd been on Broadway, so I suspect the changes reflect more on the neighbourhoods I've lived in, as well as on the prevalence of homeless people in those neighbourhoods, than on my own bearing. I'll mention specific gifts below.
3717 1/2 NE 45th St
I was a very bad neighbour during the couple of years I slept here.
Open Street Map well represents the jagged outline of the building at the southwest corner of 38th Ave NE and 45th. This results in a whole series of doorways with differing amounts of dry suitable for sleeping in. There's also considerable complexity where the individual soffits that furnish that dry meet.
So, in particular, the doorway I'm talking about here slopes downward toward Marlai, whose only connection with it is Marlai's west wall. People therefore slept on the high ground, at the MQF end of the doorway. But that's where the soffits meet, or actually, don't quite meet, and as a result, when it rains, it rains right down on those people. Thanks to good drainage (and the whole doorway's facing north, the first north face I'd slept in), the low end, towards Marlai, stays dry through the most relentless rains. I was frankly contemptuous of these peers' fecklessness. I'd learnt on Broadway already to scope out new places on rainy nights - that's why I think I went back to Galerias in spring 2013, as a base from which to reconnoiter - and couldn't believe they hadn't bothered.
I had a weapon against them, too. I'd by that point for years been sweeping any doorway I slept in. When I found the doorway I preferred occupied, I just switched next door, to the actual doorway of MQF, and started sweeping; I tried to be quiet, but didn't exactly weep when I failed. Of the two people I think I drove away from their bad spot, one tolerated that, but after a few days went away; the other reliably got up and left right away.
The first, the one who stayed through my sweeping, looked Hispanic, and I think he was probably an employee of the taco truck across the street. Frankly, I thought they should've done better by him, and maybe they did once I showed up; for much of the time I slept there, music blared from that taco truck until the wee hours of the night. The other, I eventually concluded, the one who responded immediately once I started sweeping, was a white guy who was a sort of modern-day hunter-gatherer, following a set rotation; I noticed that he arrived on the same day of the week, the same number of weeks apart.
I forget why, but when leaves started falling in autumn 2018, I missed a few days, and came back to find an artistic arrangement of leaves across the doorway. Obviously I couldn't sleep on that, so the best I could do was sweep the leaves toward a dryer part of the high ground for the night, and then try to produce my own artistic arrangement in the morning. At any rate, nobody took the trouble to complain to me. By autumn 2019 the leaf thing was old hat.
This was a pretty heavenly place to sleep. There were almost no passersby at night, except when the bars back west on 45th closed, so I had endless privacy for building my bed. There was lots of space. The taco truck wasn't close enough for its music to keep me awake. I very slowly unwound. This is where I was sleeping when I got my first cart, and at first I was determined to sleep under it, so I'd know immediately if someone was stealing it. Gradually I got less concerned about that. This was the first place I took my shoes off to sleep. Sometimes when I was too tired to build my bed properly, I would get as far as laying down my sleeping bag and just crash on that for an hour or two, or a few times for the whole night, waking each time to find the as-yet un-emptied satchels around me untouched. On many nights, homeless people did pass the doorway, but apparently none were tempted by my stuff. (Once, one did rather insistently want a book, but happily settled for one I hadn't enjoyed.)
Once, in 2020 I think, after UW had closed, I slept late enough for the MQF opener to arrive, but otherwise I had few interactions with that store (which has a side door on this doorway that they consistently put furniture in front of). Only, once a week a truck would arrive delivering glass, which was interesting to watch the first few times, and consistently woke me. I remember that during the lockdown there was some reason I needed to get MQF's attention, and I had to try several times before getting through.
I had more contacts with Marlai; I may have done the opposite of conflating here, remembered more nights than there actually were, but I don't think so. Once after they'd closed, but before they'd left, and so before I'd done more than sweep, a distraught woman showed up begging me to call the police. The Marlai employees came out, and eventually the man she was running from arrived too; at one point he attacked one of the Marlai group. Turned out they were a couple from some small town whose child was at Children's Hospital; she'd been worried about his stability for a while, but under this new stress he'd gotten drunk and violent, and she hoped a night in jail would calm him down. None of us bystanders was all that comfortable with the outcome, and the Marlai employee chose not to press charges.
Once Marlai got a steam cleaning, and for some reason the guys doing it couldn't park in back and work from there, but had to park on 45th. They apologised for delaying my sleep - and one of them, to make it clear he meant it, gave me a really large, really warm hooded coat, that I can wear over other coats. At the time I told him I mainly wanted it to cover my cart, because with only one coat I had to choose between protecting my books and protecting myself. But in fact I relied on it heavily while hiking for you last winter, dear Diary, and I expect to wear it again this week.
Not long after those events, the snow of 2019 came. Marlai's crew the first night were amazed that I was willing to try to sleep there under those circumstances - though there wasn't much snow in the doorway - and pooled their tips to give me that night.
Richer people of Laurelhurst gave me much larger amounts later, that in fact contributed to my being housed now during the snow of 2021. But the gifts I remember from that doorway are the coat and $24 in tips. Both contributed to my welfare immediately. When I went downtown, thinking I'd need to go inside the coldest night (but the forecasts were wrong), and anyway wanting to warm up by day, my backpack was stolen, and that $24 enabled me to buy what I most immediately needed to replace.
I've often thought I ought to pay some sort of rent to the spaces I occupied while homeless. I did little things in the HUB and Savery Hall, and submitted call number corrections at Suzzallo Library, in that spirit. I made a point of shopping at Half Price Books during the years I slept in their doorway. But I haven't, yet, visited the surviving locations of Samurai Noodle; I'm relieved to hear that American Apparel is still in business; I've yet to replace the glasses I got while homeless, both pairs broken, but I should probably get one pair at Sound Eye and Laser (source of the new pair in "Stealing from the Homeless"), and another at One Hour Optical.
Well, Marlai had closed by the time I got there on Christmas Eve, MQF long before, so they too have to wait. But I haven't forgotten.
3717 NE 45th St
I'd continued acquiring books relentlessly even after Half Price Books closed, at Little Free Libraries and from the University District Food Bank. I stored many at Suzzallo Library (which turned into months of worry when the lockdown came), but also carried many with me. As a result, I needed to build a pretty tall stack wallward of my head, when building my bed. This doorway has an architectural feature that gets in the way of that. Also, its dry is smaller. Finally, this is the doorway used by the glass deliveries. So I didn't like sleeping here, which made me as ruthless as I've described over the other spot.
3605 1/2 NE 45th St
I think I tried to build my bed here several times, but succeeded only once. Its orientation was opposite what I was used to, there's a small electrical fixture marring the right angle I relied on, and there's what I think is a permanent stain on the concrete that looks just like a wet spot. And you can see, dear Diary, the dry isn't all that wide.
University of Washington
For the first six months, the students were away, and the mice, they did play. Things got gradually more crowded on campus during the 2020-2021 school year, but I was housed before the UW finally sort-of-fully re-opened this past autumn quarter. There was never a large number of homeless people on campus during the lockdown, never an encampment, but I'm not sure the number shrank much from when the buildings were open, either.
UW normally doesn't allow anyone to use its outdoor electrical outlets. And it normally doesn't allow anyone to sleep on campus. Both of these rules were waived once the lockdown started (as the electrical one had been waived during 2019's snow, far as I experienced), but everyone knew they could be re-imposed at any time, in any particular circumstance.
The main places I used on campus during its lockdown, the places I took photographs of on Christmas Eve, are places I'd used before the lockdown, places that were among the reasons I always reached Laurelhurst, and before it University Way or even Roosevelt, after other homeless people did.
4205 Mary Gates Memorial Drive NE
This building is in the East Campus, which is downhill from the main campus. It has a west-facing courtyard that can be a good place to rest after the hike downhill or before the one uphill, and there's a bench for the purpose. Also, it has University Wi-Fi, though not an electrical outlet. But it has very, very little reliable dry. I slept on that bench, sitting up, watching out for the police who liked to take breaks in the parking lot adjacent, any number of times in the summers of 2019 and 2020, and each time fantasised that that could continue, forgetting what this photo shows all too clearly:
Some faculty member or administrator took the trouble, in September 2020, to warn me that I couldn't continue using that bench that year. The first students to return, that quarter, were the athletes and the artists, and thanks to social distancing, several classes were expected to meet in the courtyard that fall. It was kind of him to give me that warning, but both of us had forgotten the rain which would've enforced my absence anyway.
4110 East Stevens Way NE
Then and Now: Padelford Hall
Padelford Hall and a connected multi-level parking garage sprawl across the hill between Central and East campuses. I became familiar with the intricacies of the climb through Padelford in my first months in Laurelhurst, before the cart. I liked to work late at night in this space near the top, which as you can see, dear Diary, has a sort of desk.
Once I had the cart, I couldn't do that any more, had to hike outside the whole way, but come the lockdown, I remembered a plaza towards the top with acres of dry (OK, that's an exaggeration, but ...). You, dear Diary, were born there. I say you were born of a visit to Magnuson Park, but the place I actually got Blogspot to accept your first pages was this plaza.
It had several disadvantages, however, as a place to spend the lockdown. It had electrical outlets and Wi-Fi, and even a vending machine, but every place to sit within reach of this plaza is subject to rain. I also had to disassemble my cart to get it down the stairs to the plaza, which wasn't any kind of fun in the rain.
It's also heavily frequented, and as we learnt more about social distancing, that became more and more problematic. I took to hiding in the deadest corner of the plaza, traffic-wise, this one:
Another disadvantage, for me personally, at least, was harassment. This mostly took the form of theft. I experienced, I think, six thefts at UW during the lockdown, and four of those were here. But also, at one point someone called the police on me. This is when a police officer informed me that removing my satchels from my cart constituted "camping", and as such was illegal. I wish I were making this up. And on the day in the summer of 2020 when my phone was stolen while charging on a bench outside this plaza, someone took the trouble to do Number One in the corner I'd been using. I thought the photo above would show the remaining salt stain, but apparently not. The friend who gave me the carts knows a criminologist who agreed with me that there was a pattern here. Many, many departments are headquartered in Padelford Hall, and while one of those is Mathematics, most of the rest are pillars of the academic left: English, Gender Studies, you name it. But someone in that building, I think, did not like coming into regular contact with a smelly homeless man.
(That said, that isn't why I'm not linking to Padelford's home page above. Padelford has not physically closed this plaza off to the homeless, which is my criterion, though I assume the rule against sleeping is re-imposed. I'm not linking because I can't find anything suitable as a home page for Padelford.)
So I moved on. There are outlets in the Allen Library mall, and there's a bench, but it's carefully placed so that when it rains, rain will usually blow onto it. And when it's not raining, that bench is pretty popular. I didn't spend much time there (though enough for one of the other thefts to happen), but rather in two other places.
4069 Spokane Lane
Then and Now: Kane Hall
Again I didn't find a reasonable home page for the building. But in this case there's also a clear sign of disapproval of how the homeless behaved here during the lockdown.
Kane Hall has two doorways on its north side with electrical outlets. As of March 2020, the western doorway's outlet didn't work, but the eastern doorway's did. So on days I wasn't lucky enough to get a better place, such as the one next on this tour, I would charge my phone here, or later in the lockdown, the battery I used to charge my phone.
There's no seating within the doorways, but near the eastern doorway, there's a bunch of seating on a plaza.
So for one thing, that's the remaining theft; in summer 2020, while I dozed on that plaza, the battery was stolen while charging. I tried a couple of ways to replace it before finding one that worked, and that discouraged long hikes for you those weeks, dear Diary. After that, I only allowed myself to doze when I wasn't charging anything, which made for some pretty weary six-hour stints of battery charging.
But for another thing, Kane Hall's doorways were often appallingly messy during the lockdown. This is because some kids, probably from Roots, made Kane their headquarters, and some of these kids evidently hadn't learnt anything at all about cleanliness in their lives. Most of the activity was actually upstairs from the doorways; Kane has a gigantic semi-outdoor second floor, maybe even really an acre of dry, partly protected from the wind, with outlets ... Pretty much all that a crowd of homeless kids could want.
But it seems this particular epicene couple were most often the ones crowded out from there, to spill their sodas and tear apart their ramen cups in the same doorway I used. I normally considered the cart's wheels enough insulation between my stuff and pretty much any kind of dirt, but hesitated on a regular basis to drive them through what those kids laid down. And the thing is, I'm pretty sure I saw the woman of the couple. once, presenting herself as the hip edgy person appropriate to her age online and in conversations, with no sign of the filth she seemed content to live in.
Well, there have been consequences.
That's the outlet in the doorway, not one of those upstairs, but they're all covered like that now.
4275 East Stevens Way NE
This was the place where I wrote many of your pages, dear Diary, where I did many of the other things I whiled away the empty hours of the lockdown with. For some reason the builders of this building put a huge porch in, and then ran a bench along the long side of that porch.
I'd stopped at this location before the lockdown to work or watch K-dramas late. Only once had I encountered anyone who belonged to the building, a couple apparently of South Asian descent of whom the man sneeringly insisted that my only goal was to sleep there. I think, a few weeks later, I took him up on that offer once or twice, but mostly what I wanted that bench for, in 2018, was a place to use Wi-Fi. Once I'd moved to Laurelhurst, it was out of my way, and I don't think I turned to it early in the lockdown.
But as Padelford became increasingly untenable and Kane increasingly awful, I was more and more inclined to come here, carefully sitting at the far end of the bench from the door for social distancing. The reaction from within the building was split. I'm pretty sure ordinary employees didn't pay much attention. One, a Muslim, once gave me a sandwich she'd bought, which had turned out to have bacon in it. But the UW had inaugurated an unarmed security force, alongside its armed police, shortly before the lockdown, and someone within that building thought it was a good idea to get these security guards to get rid of me. They threatened me with prosecution for loitering, and called police on me, who wearily explained that loitering laws were not enforceable on public property. This cycle happened two or three times. But compared to the problems at Padelford, this was trivial.
I don't think anyone in my earlier life would've predicted that English scholars would persecute me, but business scholars would embrace me, but that's more or less what I found during UW's lockdown.
As my time to get housed approached, I changed many of my ways. Some events had led me to realise that the Stranger issues I'd been using under my sleeping bag weren't actually doing anything to keep me warm, and I finally pitched them all into my storage sometime, I think, in January. In February I lived in SeaTac, as you know, dear Diary. And in March I simply could not convince myself to build my bed again, so spent essentially every night, until I moved into the home whence I'm writing, on that bench.
But months before that, I'd moved to a different neighbourhood altogether, off and on, for the Wi-Fi.
View Ridge
After my phone was stolen, my new phone didn't have University Wi-Fi until a friend on the faculty figured out how to confer it on me, around Thanksgiving. So for several months, if I wanted to do anything with Wi-Fi, I had to trudge to a public library. For things like updates, the University branch was good enough, but it was hard to find a place to sit that also got a good signal from inside the building, to say nothing of the competition, so sustained work had to happen elsewhere.
6801 35th Ave NE
I've more or less told you this story before, dear Diary, when it happened, and it doesn't really need much re-hashing. There was competition here too, both for the Wi-Fi and for the three sheltered benches on the library's porch. There was a man who never spoke to me, but made his disapproval of my sleeping there, far too close to where he wanted to sleep, very clear. Library staff were unhappy with me but took no definite actions until "curbside pickup" came along, which they used as an excuse to remove all three benches. By then I'd already tired of my silent critic, and told him I'd be elsewhere at night, so slept in the View Ridge Playfield shelter.
The main reason I've put this byway into this page is that two of the benches are back, and actually have been back for months - I took the photo below in late September. The backed one on which that man preferred to sleep, the one honouring Sahir Dibee, has been replaced with an unbacked one similar to the other two.
I'm greatly relieved that at least one thing "those awful homeless" could have been blamed for has not, after all, come to pass.
Well, dear Diary, this is the end of our walk down memory lane, and of part two of the current series of pages I'm writing in you. Part three is, like part one, much shorter, and I hope to write it this evening, but, well, this series has repeatedly frustrated my timing hopes, so we'll see. Happy hours, and if necessary days, until then.
