Went for a long walk yesterday to Brooklyn Basin, and while strolling along the estuary near the Jack London Aquatic Center I came across a huge mess of at least eight decrepit but still floating boats, the rotting remains of broken piers, and piles and piles of trash.
It looked like Wood Street on the water and made me really angry. This is our waterfront, a place of beauty and tranquility, and someone had befouled it with this hideous garbage-scape. I took out my cell phone to take pictures, with the intention of sending them to the authorities and asking them to clean it up (not that I thought anyone would respond, but still…). Suddenly, before I could click the shutter, a guy walked over to me.
He was youngish and Asian. “Hi,” he said, “need some help?” I quickly realized that the guy had a proprietary relationship with the boats, and that a stranger—me—had wandered into his world, possibly with the intention of harming him. A delicate moment. So I offered him my hand, smiled and said, “I guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here. I want to take some pictures.”
“Go ahead,” he said. Now, I was feeling a little anxious. The area is almost totally deserted. I don’t know this guy from Adam and he doesn’t know me. He’s physically fit, got some tatts, a shaved head, and some missing front teeth. I figured him for a druggie. Nothing to stop him from punching me out.
I put my phone back into my pocket. We got to talking. I’ll call him “Tom.” Turned out he was in his mid-40s (looked way younger) and had come over after the Vietnam War in a boat across the Pacific with six families; they were part of the wave of Vietnamese Boat People of the late 1970s and 1980s. (I want to add at this point that my experience with druggies is that they lie a lot, so I don’t know how much of what he told me is true. But I’ll take him at his word.) Their boat survived the ocean passage of nine months until it hit the Seattle area. From there, the U.S. Coast Guard took control. Eventually he landed in New York, went through immigration, and then came to Oakland, where he’s been for a long time.
The guy was tough. He boasted of his gun battles, of fistfights won, of doing muay thai, of time in jail. He showed me his scars. He never asked me a single thing about myself, but loved talking about himself. Fine with me. He was colorful; I found myself liking him. He had a fine smile, a lopsided grin that was almost charming (despite the missing teeth). He was smart, too, obviously educated. He said that his mission in life was to help other people, and claimed to have provided food and shelter (on his boat) to many. The mess on the water, he claimed, wasn’t his fault; it had occurred during our Bomb Cyclone event last March, when (he said) an entire pier had washed out from the Fifth Street Marina, blown across the inlet, and crashed into his boat and the other boats anchored there, causing immense damage. He said there’d been nothing he could do except watch.
He had a poetic side, telling me how much he enjoyed taking his boat out late at night, drifting on the estuary in pitch blackness and far from any noise. He made a distinction between his kind of homeless (which technically I guess he wasn’t) and the “bad” homeless guys, whom he said he protected the nearby parking lot from; he frequently got into fights when he caught them trying to break into cars. In fact, he added, the area would be overridden with encampments were it not for him: he made them leave, like some kind of local enforcer.
He offered me weed (I declined) and to take me for a ride on his boat (also declined). I don’t know if he expected me to give him money, but he never asked nor did he importune in any way. After an hour or so, I said I had to be going. We shook hands, declared ourselves friends, and when he invited me to visit him anytime, I said I would.
There’s a meme on the left side of the political spectrum that, if people would just get to know homeless people, we’d find out they’re human, but have had rotten luck. I did get to know Tom. But here’s my moral quandary. I liked him, felt for him, wanted to help him in some way, but I didn’t trust him. (I know it sounds paranoid, but if I’d gone out on his boat with him, would I have returned?) I thought about giving him $20, but figured he’d just spend it on drugs. So I had the choice of following through on my initial instinct to report him to the authorities, or dropping that idea and letting the guy exist in peace. Of course, the cops may already be keeping an eye on him, and someone else may report him, but I didn’t want to be that person.
The quandary—and it’s as much intellectual as moral—is that, while I don’t wish to add to Tom’s problems, at the same time his mess is unacceptable. Lord knows I’ve been tough on the homeless in this blog; I’ve called for them to be forcibly removed and relocated to a camp on the west side of town. I feel the same way about the boats. They’re a fire hazard. An eyesore. The boat encampment is illegal. Who knows what contaminants Tom and his friends are releasing into the estuary? The aquatic slum just shouldn’t be there, and Tom shouldn’t think that it’s his “home.” It needs to be cleaned up and Tom needs to find another place to live. Still, now that I’ve come to know and like him, I’m not going to call the cops, or 311, or whatever number you’re supposed to call. I don’t want that on my conscience. I wish Tom luck, I really do; but I don’t want him to continue to trash the estuary. And that’s my quandary. What’s a well-meaning citizen to do? There doesn’t seem to be any easy answer.
Steve Heimoff