It’s a mild winter in Kansas, the encampment along the sandbar on the big river just keeps growing. Summer is not even a promise yet, but dreaming of summer is easier than heading south. It’s the perfect spot – out of sight below the bank from the bike path, and, even in winter the trees obscure the view from the boulevard across the river. The late afternoon sun gives the camp a final burst of semi-almost-warmth before twilight falls.
I hope they don’t think I’m here to report anyone, I just like to walk along the sandbar. I like to think I can leave my privilege back on the bike path, but it ain’t so. My sturdy boots, my wool sweaters, my pants that fit, my underwear that’s clean, my nearly new socks – they all tell the tale about how I don’t have a clue about their life. With proper sympathy, it can be intellectualized, rationalized, or, my least favorite, the blame can be laid directly upon the shoulders of these weary campers. What rotten choices, when you think about it.
This particular river’s headwaters are up in the Sawatch Range near Leadville, Colorado. I was living in Denver as a twenty year-old when my white-bread illusions of American society were shattered. The pain I saw in the faces of my inner-city neighbors was a shock to my suburban anglo sensibilities. My response was escape, denial. I hiked those headwaters back then, not knowing I was destined to follow it’s waters to Kansas. I stayed for a short time in a tiny cabin in the high plain above Leadville. That helped. Not looking in those eyes allowed them to disappear. Full dispatch from Denver was inevitable. I did not have the background or fortitude to stay and comprehend it all. The open skies and wheat fields of Kansas were calling, safer, less confusing, minimal confrontation with prejudice and fear. But I remembered.
My journey since then has been much like the path of this river – sometimes twisty and winding, sometimes straight and true, sometimes calm and steady, sometimes raging with water from deep and dark clouds.
I am profoundly aware of the fact that it could just as well be me sitting under that ragged blue tarp watching the warmly dressed white guy wandering along the sand bar in front of my winter camp along a muddy river in a medium-sized Midwestern city. . Would I envy him, fear him, or ask him what the hell he was doing in my front yard?