Baby, I'd follow you to Oklahoma.
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Liminality
In our recent moves to relocate for new jobs we have been through
some interesting and in a few cases rather desperate circumstances.
Whenever you are moving house you are for at least a short while
technically homeless. If your financial circumstances are not solid
then you are not just technically homeless but are effectively
homeless as well. If you do not have a signed lease in your new
home city as well as plenty of money to get you there and a job
that will wait for you - or a support network that will step in and
bail you out - then one or two instances of bad luck can easily
land you in a quite desperate situation. For many people moving
house is an inconvenient, frustrating upheaval of daily life but
for others it turns into a crisis or a negative turning point in
their lives - mostly if you are poor or without a support network
to fall back on.
When we lived in Washington state we heard about an Amazon
distribution facility that had many of its employees living in the
KOA Campground across the street in trailers and tents. Driving
past that Amazon facility and KOA campground one day purely by
accident I realized where I was. Looking at the KOA it was pretty
obvious the situation was exactly as reported. Due to the truly
egregious stupid scarcity of housing in the reality distortion
field around Seattle, WA there was a real /booming/ market for old
beat-up RVs and campers because there is a vast population of
people in that area who simply can't find any other way to have a
place to live any more permanent than that. They can afford a
twelve-year-old camper that won't pass the state inspection and is
barely road-worthy though, at a price that the market will bear.
There was a business near us that was just buying up old junk RVs
and reselling them, with several old examples lying around half
stripped of spare parts to fix others that would still run so they
could be sold.
There are little Hoovervilles around the corner everywhere: people
in little two-person tents, RVs that will never roll anywhere under
their own power again. Late-stage capitalism and Darwin Days. Back
in the days of Herbert Hoover people at least had the decency to be
ashamed of this I think, now people blame the victims and talk
about how people want to live like that, that they all did it to
themselves.
None of this is unique to Seattle or Southern California of course,
it's just on the surface and more visible there. There are
Hoovervilles and people living in houses they can no longer pay for
all over the US. We live in the Detroit area now and it's
everywhere - neighborhoods where less than 10% of the houses that
were once neatly stacked one after another are still intact and
inhabited. You're driving along through a suburb and then pass
through an area that but for the occasional inhabited house and
disrepaired telephone poles and lines is swiftly returning to
prairie. The pavement is coming apart, phone lines drooping or
obviously failed and just hanging there. It is very similar to
scenes close to Chernobyl or bombed-out Ukrainian cities on the
news now: buildings falling apart, homes left to rot or burned-out
shells. Darwin Days came to Detroit and stuck around to see how the
movie ends - still lingering for sure in many neighborhoods.
Despite the narrative that Detroit suddenly lost a lot of people,
that they fled when the city government had to file for bankruptcy
during the Great Recession you can see in these neighborhoods with
their lone inhabited house per block the gradual drawn-out emptying
and increasing neglect of infrastructure that happened here. You
see the sealed-up small store buildings and storefronts with their
roll-doors closed and the padlocks rusting into uselessness waiting
inert for a time when someone is able to pay to use them again -
resting on someone's books like a third-string running back waiting
for a chance to prove something - potential held in place in case
it might someday pay off for the investers. Here and there you find
factory buildings sitting in this same mothballed inertia waiting
for someone to see them as an opportunity and buy or lease them to
start up some new prospective business, their paint flaking,
sometimes rusting equipment or old parts stacked in the yard
outside instead of being recycled for scrap value.
But those are merely more visible indicators in a major city that
everyone knows. This exists in subtler variants everywhere in the
US: houses in rural Indiana towns like Tab and Judyville that
hardly even exist, a collection of a dozen houses surrounded by
farm fields being inexorably consolidated into larger and larger
and larger successful farms with the houses left behind falling
into ruin. People living in conditions so desperate nearly everyone
wonders why they don't simply leave for somewhere else - except for
those who have themselves been too poor to gather the money to move
or unwilling to leave behind everything they own to try desperately
somewhere else. In Indiana we were offered a house for rent that
had one room that still had a dirt floor - in 2012. Overall I was
surprised by what counted as a rentable dwelling in Indiana, but
that landlady was married to some sort of preacher who was also a
lawyer, so... that dirt floor may have been an outlier. The
condition of some of the houses I was shown was still shockingly
bad. Somewhat wealthy people simply preying upon those less
fortunate by birth.
If you're moving and the company that has offered you a job
out-of-state was in actuality about to go into bankruptcy or to
close up shop you could find yourself with no income or even proof
of employment to secure a place to live - immediately your
circumstances could become vastly more desperate. Your willingness
to compromise things to have a place to live and not lose
possessions, your pets, things that really matter to you spikes.
You begin considering how you would make desperate choices, if it
comes to that. You begin working this out in your head so you are
prepared if it comes to that. When your only home is a sketchy
hotel room and having that place to live relies on not pissing off
the potentially unstable family running it you find yourself
contemplating what could happen if they decide they don't like you
or they could get more for that room if you were gone. Your wife
worries about just what the hell she would do if you for some
reason didn't come back from your job today - really, what fucking
options would she have? No benefits yet, so no company life
insurance. What could she possibly do to recover from that
situation? That's a terror that most people can just nope on away
from and get back to living their daily life of the job they don't
like or their ungrateful kids, gossip, shopping. If you're living
it there isn't much else to do but stew about it and try not to go
raving insane.
Once you have been in or near that situation the fear of it never
really goes away - that deep-down insecure fear of being in such
circumstances, or the imminent fear of such circumstances being
only one small serious problem away from you is what drives the
engine of capitalism. This is the truth that people do not allow
themselves to think about, that the shrinking middle class and the
somewhat financially-vulnerable echelon of the upper class are in
deep, inky, cavernous denial of. They tell themselves that they
could not fall into such circumstances, that they are not subject
to such calamities, that the poor are there through lack of talent,
work ethic, or decency. If they allowed themselves a moment of
honest introspection they would have to face the undeniable fact
that their circumstances are separated from those on the verge of
homelessness or living homeless by sheer stupid luck, random
chance.
My truck's drive shaft u-joint failed in Western Wisconsin. After
sitting beside the highway in the summer sun for a few hours hoping
I wouldn't run out of water, we got it towed to a shop just over
the border in eastern North Dakota. My wife went on ahead to find a
hotel room and get things set up for a stay. We spent three days
while they found a replacement drive shaft (which actually came off
of one of their beater shop trucks). They helped us out and charged
us very reasonably to help us out of a situation that otherwise
would have become a choice of abandoning the truck and most of what
was in it for the move and continuing in the car somehow or risk
running out of money and falling back on my family for help or...
something. They were very decent people helping us out like they
did, they didn't have to.
We made it to Washington state with a few hundred dollars to our
names beyond the prepaid first few weeks' rent for our reserved
room at an Extended Stay America and the next stage of our
continuing crisis of moving began. After about a week my cashout of
the 401k from my previous job arrived and money became somewhat
less of an issue with paychecks starting to arrive from the new
job as well. We managed to stay at the Extended Stay for a
month, putting up with stupid behavior from the staff and seeing
occasionally someone who had been staying there long-term thrown
out in the middle of the night - ordinary people who minded their
business packing their stuff back into their car suddenly and for
seemingly no reason. There were rumors that the staff had some
illegal goings-on on the side and rumors that the management
was throwing out unprofitable long-term guests to get in more
profitable short-term stays. My wife later found many reports in
forums online of people seeing this at Extended Stay America hotels
all over the US - it's a well-established pattern because they're
not doing well with their advertised business model. One night a
staff member picked a fight with my wife to justify throwing us
out, they called the police to 'report' it and make sure that we
just quietly packed our things and got out of their way of putting
someone else in that room. I called around desperately to find some
other hotel with a room and finally found one at a beaten-down
Econolodge and we put all of our stuff in her car and my truck and
did a late-night shift to the drug-den down-and-out Econolodge.
In that situation how do you put forward a mask of normalcy in a
salaried job as a department manager in a multi-million dollar
company? How do you face listening to coworkers bitch about the
homeless, comments about how they prefer to live like that, that
they're worthless scum when you're staying in a hotel with people
who are basically homeless? I don't know how really but I did
it. Mental compartmentalization and disassociation were certainly
involved. The Econolodge was serving a mix of marijuana tourists
from out of state and people without any other long-term housing
options, plenty of them obviously strung-out drug addicts (meth and
heroin).
Contrary to what you might expect the vast majority of folks we
encountered during our stay at the Econolodge either ignored our
presence or were decent and guardedly friendly. The parking lot out
front wasn't exactly a comfortable space, there were always a
couple vehicles there that were obviously packed with someone's
entire wordly possessions and there were certainly drug deals going
on out there openly several times a day. You didn't make eye
contact out there with people you didn't already know. Other than a
little paranoia - sleep deprivation, anxiety from our precarious
situation, and stress from the new job will do that to you - I
didn't really ever feel threatened while we were there. Shooting
deaths in grocery store parking lots were a repeating theme while
we continued to live in the same general area for nearly three
years though. The danger was there we just didn't stumble into its
path.
There were plenty of folks in desperate circumstances but they
weren't monsters, just people who got stuck in a bad situation,
mostly through bad luck or a series of bad decisions. They were
just people.
Having to keep re-upping our stay with the hotel's owners was an
ongoing source of stress - the possibility of having to suddenly
find yet another new hotel if they had re-booked our room was an
ongoing risk. How much money do you tie up with booking it out a
while versus having money in our bank account or capacity on the
credit card for any emergency that might come up? Eventually we
seemed to reach an equilibrium with the owners, they having decided
we were paying on time and not causing (or likely to cause) trouble
despite our three pets.
Meanwhile all of our wordly possessions that weren't in the car and
the truck (and then in the hotel room as you sure as Hell don't
leave /anything/ in your vehicle in a parking lot anywhere around
there) were in a rented storage unit over in Auburn. Furniture,
clothes, books, a larger cage for the chinchilla, dishes and
cookware, appliances... hoping that we kept making enough money to
rent a place (and actually find one) and to keep paying the storage
in the meantime and come back for them. Hoping that my job didn't
fall through or something.
Two months of /that/ and we found a house to rent, had the money to
rent it, and life began to somewhat return to sanity, although the
experience certainly traumatized us both. Eventually our finances
stabilized, the credit card balance was paid down, but by then the
situation at the new job was already not looking so hot. Less than
two years in we had to announce to the employees that the company
would be closing (at that point I had been keeping that fact to
myself for about four months). After a year spent winding things
down at that job and searching for another /new/ job - with
thankfully a generous severance for sticking around and helping to
close things down gracefully - the move back across to the East end
of the country was even worse if you can believe it. Recall as well
that our experiences were mitigated by having some savings and a
reliable credit card and a good long-term relationship with our
bank. In each case my new employer gave us some significant
relocation help without which it would have been much more of a
scramble and risk of serious problems. We have no illusions about
the fact that we had advantages over many of the people we saw in
more desperate circumstances that were largely a result of luck in
the big picture.
There is a romanticizing of the desperate circumstances of the poor
in American culture that works to excuse the way they are treated
by the political system, employers, and anyone with enough money to
be able to ignore their plight.
The myth that you can get somewhere in this country and improve
your situation based purely on hard work and your wits without some
measure of good fortune or outside support is just a useful lie
told by people who want a population of ready labor truly desperate
for work and a paycheck, without the means to readily look
elsewhere once you're working for them. If you don't believe me, go
back and read some classics by the likes of Charles Dickens or John
Steinbeck. They weren't making that stuff up. I recall being taught
in school about the results of laissez-faire capitalism run amuck
in early 20th century America: deadly tenement housing prone to
collapse, filth, poisonous food, disease, starvation, inhuman
living conditions, workers maimed and tossed aside for the next
sucker that needed a job. The iconic Hoovervilles. We didn't shy
away from that history back when I was growing up we were taught
about it in school as early as the fourth grade - Great Depression,
starvation, the Dust Bowl, the whole nine yards. The fucking
Hoovervilles that are still with us, all over the place now.
They understand these things and they don't want us to understand.
So go read up on our actual history, look at some photos of skinny
undernourished Americans living in tarpaper shacks clothed in rags
and compare them to the Hooverville down the street from you. Read
Barbara Ehrenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed' - read it slowly and let
the facts sink in. Go read a history textbook from the 1980's or
just look at the black-and-white photos of thin Americans slowly
starving. When we moved into Indiana some years ago, on the drive
west to our new home I saw billboards encouraging donating food for
Americans who didn't have enough to eat. Today while walking our
dog around the reasonably comfortable and safe neighborhood in a
'nice' suburb of Detroit I saw what from a distance looked like one
of those Little Free Libraries - a little box with doors on front.
It was actually a small 'take what you need, give what you can'
food pantry with canned goods and such on shelves inside. I had not
seen one of those before.
Cheer up, smile, nertz!
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In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for
ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal
happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left
alone. (Hunter S. Thompson)
NO CARRIER