A Living Magazine - Day 150 - Travel, Logistics and Technology

After my encounter with Wiley, and being woken up by the bit of rain that started to fall, I decide to get the hell out of Dodge before having to build an ark to do so. I took this shot of the tent before packing it up, to see if my night visitor had done any damage--besides to my poor little nose...

On the left, you may see the wet part where Wiley's nose was up against the tarp/fly,

and right below it is the place where he tried to scratch at it and nicked my nose.

Everything looked just fine. The material of the tent, while being quite light-weight is strong as hell. It would take another kind of animal - bobcat, mountain lion, bear, etc.? - to actually rip it open. Canid paws are not sharp enough, at least in a cursory swiping, to penetrate it. And, as I hinted in the last post, with the stakes pinning it down, it is solid and can't easily be turned over, dragged or moved around. Furthermore, even if some animal were to get through the tarp/fly, it would still have to get through the tent itself in order to get to the juicy filling inside--ME. Ha!

I started toward town on my typical route and made it about a half a mile (in the 3.5 mile walk), before the sky opened up and the expletives began dripping from my mouth like the so many rain drops dripping off my soaking clothes. Instead of continuing into the downtown area, as I had for the last six days, I took a left onto Lindsley Street, then curved around to Ash, and took another left; finally seeing that dog of wonder himself--the Greyhound, and the station he adorned.

I walked up to it and into it, a sopping mess.  Immediately the security woman came over and told me I'd have to leave if I didn't have a ticket. Nice welcome, huh? I asked her if I might put down my backpack and shake off the rain first. She did one those..."hmmmmmm"s.

I went to take off my backpack, and the woman at the ticket counter yelled, "SIR! You cannot stay here if you don't have a ticket!" Everyone in the place looked up.

I bent down, opened the backpack pocket with the ticket, pulled it out and showed the rent-a-cop. She said, "Mmmmm..." skeptically, "...o...k..."

I just looked her in the eyes and said sarcastically, "Thanks for trusting me..." and then sat down. A few other passengers later told me they'd had problems with security there.

This was only about the 1024th time I've faced what I call "the poverty prejudice" and "the backpack bias". In a way, it is part of what I want to experience/understand on these Journeys, as a formerly pampered, white, professional financial counselor, and call center supervisor. And, you can't understand something unless it actually happens to you--especially over and over again. I have a lot of posts here about similar issues happening to me

Honestly, this profiling is so rampant and common, and the excuses of needing to do it, because of the "homeless problem" is getting really old. Officially complaining does no good. The problem is embedded in our social system. It needs to be extracted like a rotten tooth. But let's not hold our collective breaths for a dentist to arrive!

If you are just joining this blog, you might be interested in the opposite situation that happened to me in Milwaukee. I met a security guard there with the biggest possible heart--a real saint, who gave respect to the homeless, let them sit in there when it rained, let them come in on cold nights, as long as they didn't drink or cause problems. And, you know what, the ones he took the time to help, never gave him or the station a problem. Perhaps LOVE really is the answer?

This is why I'm out here doing these crazy things. I want people to feel what it is like at the very bottom. No one else is doing it, so I guess it falls to me.

The saddest thing of all is that someday I may return to the world of the so-called "middle class", but all of these struggling souls I've met along the way will likely still be struggling to get into missions, sleeping in doorways, eating out of trash cans, being kicked out of bus stations; broken, defeated, lost and unloved--thrown away by society. If anything should break our hearts, dearest readers, it is that.

I recovered more quickly than I usually do after an unfair confrontation with "authority", sat at one of the tables, touching base at Facebook, while Saggy and I slowly dried off. It was 6:30 am, and I discovered that rather than the 7:20 bus I thought I'd be taking, mine was actually due to depart at 8:00. So, I sat back and relaxed (as much as a person can in a bus station).

The rain thinned out for a while around 7:30, and I stepped out into the bus area to check the clouds and get away from the constant stares of Cagney and Lacey. I saw three guys smoking out there and we talked. One of them--a kind-faced black guy, named William, who I got to know pretty well on the bus ride, told me that the last time he'd come through this station, security smelled alcohol of his breath.

Then they proceeded to open up the bus' baggage compartment, pulled out his suitcase, broke the lock off of it, and rummaged through it, where they found two UNopened bottles of whiskey. They told him he would not be allowed to get back on the bus, and would have to wait a day for the next bus on his route. THEN, they made him sleep in the utility room of the station over night, only letting him out to smoke a cigarette every few hours.

This guy was not a flake. He was a father of three and grandfather of five. He had spent his savings to take the bus to Birmingham all the way from Chicago (where he lives), to be with his mom and sister for the holidays that year. In fact, he was making the same trip presently.

When I told him just how many ways his civil rights had been violated (an illegal search and false imprisonment to begin with), he looked at me, genuinely surprised. He said, "Really?" I told him he should hire a lawyer and sue the piss out of Greyhound if it wasn't past the statute of limitations; not that I'm into or qualified to give legal advice. But, for godsakes, folks! No one else had even suggested it to him.

I didn't say so, but there is also probably a racial profiling issue involved. And, to top it all off, the guards who detained him and confiscated his property probably KEPT the whiskey for themselves!

We talked at each stop. He had been on the road for eighteen hours. Whenever he would get to Birmingham, his sister and brother in law (who had inherited his mother's house three years previously, after she passed) had a guest bedroom set up and waiting for him with a big bed, a closet and his own shower. I must have raised my eyebrows--having appreciated similar things from the people I've visited in the past year, because he smiled and said, "Not baaaad, huh?" No, William, not bad at all.

I dined with Greyhound again in Huntsville, buying two hotdogs, a bag of "Funyuns", and a Mt. Dew...

I've eaten enough junk food on this Journey to clog the arteries of a brontosaurus!

Good thing I get my exercise.

We had been blessed with a great driver who was very funny, flirted innocently with some of the older ladies and asked us frequently if we wanted "...more heat, less heat?... Juss let ma know!" He gave the whole run down of rules and federal regulations, in part, saying, "Federal regulations prohibit smoking or the drinking of alcohol on my bus. The air is not brought in from outside. It is circulated from within the bus. If you try to smoke anything on my bus, I WILL smell it. DO NOT tamper with the smoke alarm in the restroom, or drop your crack pipe on the floor as it could start a fire." Everyone laughed heartily. "If you DO smoke or drink alcohol on this bus, you will be dropped off at the next town." A reasonable consequence, I thought.

We arrived at the Birmingham station right on time. Each person thanked the driver as we deboarded. I went to one of the window ledges, pulled out the laptop and scanned Google Maps, Earth and Satellite for (1) Starbucks, (2) a sleeping place and (3) the general layout of the city. I made screenshots just incase I needed to refresh my memory were there no hotspot available for some reason.

I think I should take a moment and explain JUST how instrumental Google has been for me. First, Google hosts this very blog (Blogger), and despite my complaints about its several glitches and bugs, it has been reliable and efficient. I also have activated the "Ask Google for Suggestions" function under spell and grammar check.

Of course, I have become an absolute expert at using the Maps and related features. I don't know if you guys have had the opportunity to check out Earth's 3D fly-overs, but they rock my world (in a sense, literally). First, I examine the clean Maps function, then I look for patches of green on Satellite, then I use Earth to tip the angle and see land features, the heights of buildings, the direction of the shadows, etc. When I've found potential places to sleep, I use Street View to look for fences and/or other hidden obstacles to my physical sleep spot expeditions. Wikipedia, too, has been an invaluable tool.

By the time I am actually out on the street, I feel as though I'd had a full lesson in the civil engineering, geography, demographics, grid layout, walk-throughs, and history of a city I've never been to before. Having said all that, I still draw out a map for myself, as a backup source and easily accessible reference (on this night for example, pulling out the laptop in the rain to look at screenshots would have been highly inadvisable)...    

This all seems like a lot of work. But it is so automatic for me now, that the whole research experience usually takes less than an hour--in this case, only about a half hour.

All of this is done while writing posts. I don't set aside separate periods of time to write, research, answer emails, talk on Facebook, etc. They are all interspersed with each other--in one session. It may seem like multi-tasking, but it is really just handling each thing as they are thought about or needed, and having the tools at my disposal to do it all.

Additionally, I should give a shout-out to my trusty and reliable little Nextbook 10.1. This baby workhorse is the brain outside my head. I have had no issues with it at all. It was purchased for $189.00 tax included, in Pleasanton, California. It is fast enough to handle what I need to do, including word processing, video production, photo manipulation, multi-track audio production, deleted file recovery, any kind of browser, two calculators, and everything else one could want from a desktop computer. It is less than an inch high, eight inches long, and eleven inches wide. It weighs less three pounds, has a detachable tablet, bluetooth capability, two USB 3 ports, HDMI, a clean sound engine, and is water resistant. It even came with a free upgrade to Windows 10, which I'm using right now.

It is basically all I could ever need for what I do. The screen is a bit dim outside, but, shit!, beggars can't be choosers! One the greatest aspects is that it is solid state, with no moving parts, or spinning discs. I use a micro-SD 128GB card as its storage (only using internal storage for apps and programs to live exclusively), so if the unit (godforbid) dies, I can just buy another, click in my SD card and have everything I've been working on available to me again. I use only open source software (OpenOffice, Audacity, MovieMaker, Gimp, etc) for programs, all of which can be downloaded for free again onto a new machine if necessary. I love living in the future!

After publishing both of the day's posts, and catching up, I started out in the drizzle to my potential sleep spot, about 3.4 km away. I rounded the bend to the actual dead end road (humorously named, "Golden Flake Drive"--for a cereal factory that owns it) that I'd chosen. With a field and some woods by it, near the train tracks, I noticed a guardhouse for the factory, and that various trucks parked along it; engines running. The guards watched me pass by, but were so busy joking around with each other that they didn't seem to care.

The field was a mess, with rain-matted grass, pools of water, hidden streams, tightly spaced trees, a dumping ground for factory waste, and a red mud, that was the consistency of thick diarrhea, and hardened like cement.

I overcame my own objections to it all, and - knowing everything would be wet by morning - removed the tent, set it up very quickly, then covered it with the tarp/fly. I wasn't sure how the floor of the tent would handle wet grass--would water seep through? But it worked remarkably well, only letting a tiny bit of moisture through. The grass was actually quite soft, and I was relatively dry, as I slipped into the sleeping bag, and then into my slumber; exhausted, but satisfied that I'd done the very best I could on just another IWALLK work day.

Birmingham Sleep Spot (1?)