The Freegans of Peaceful Valley

Hand made sign: notice it's made from real crayons.

I agreed to bring Jesse to Food Not Bombs (FNB) Sunday. I hadn’t kicked it with him for many months, only greeting him briefly at the Plaza on odd-occasions. He’d been getting over his relationship for the last month, and I’d just entered phase one of my own separation.

“We need to kick it man,” he wrote on Facebook.

“Come with me to Food Not Bombs on Sunday,” I replied. “I’m trying to do a story for the Inlander about it. I think you would benefit greatly from the experience.”

Over the last week my primary target had been getting away from everyone: starting fires in the backyard and writing by moonlight; going on long midnight walks around the river; and racking my brain for answers. Metaphysical questions lead people to madness, I told myself. Quit thinking.

It’s strange, it seems, that when you want people around, no one’s ever around. But when you want to be left alone, people seem to crawl out of the walls. Or you have responsibilities which bind you to others. In a way, I suppose, bringing Jesse was a way of reaching out, trying to heal.

I greeted him at the park: “What’s up, it’s been awhile.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

I told him I was meeting this girl Natalya that I had met on the FNB Facebook page. She was going to be our contact for this story. She had answered some questions for me over the last week and was down to let me shadow her while she helped cook food.

From what I understood, FNB was a vegan collective which fed the homeless, poor, or otherwise counter-cultural-minded people. Some groups, according to my friend Core in Portland, practice freeganism, where the participants went dumpster diving for the food they serve. Sounds good to me.

Most of the members I met were anarchists, but on their website it didn’t say that one’s political views had to be anything. But the whole thing felt like something aligned with an anarchistic ideology.

“This is straight D.I.Y. , they’re not messing around,” I told him as we were walking to the plaza. “And don’t let them know you smoke cigarettes.”

Just then Natalya walked up. Natalya, a Ukrainian girl, is tall and skinny. She wears glasses and carries a tiny can of pink pepper spray. Her accent is barely noticeably, mostly because she speaks at volumes that tiny earbuds can rival. But there is something sincere about her. I mean, what kind of person wakes up on a Sunday morning to go hand out fliers for hours to hobos and homebums just so they may eat a free, healthy vegan meal?   Someone who understands the necessity of eating.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” I said, shaking her hand. “This is my friend Jesse, he’s going to be tagging along today because he wants to see what FNB is all about.”

“No problem,” she said.

She tells me that they’re not doing so hot these days. Their leader, Bethany, was in a serious bicycle accident last month and is in the hospital.

“She can’t remember anyone’s faces,” she tells us. “And I haven’t seen some of the people who used to come here to help.”

We make the mile long trek down into the depths of Peaceful Valley. You can almost smell 1969 down here. Many of its inhabitants were hippies back when there were such things as hippies. Some were on Haight and Ashbury when it all finally came tumbling down. The old double-wide community center still retains some groove, as can be seen in the people who sit around the park below Monroe Street Bridge.

 Six punk rockers are present. Natalya gets the keys from one of them, a man who goes only by the name of Roscoe. I tell Natalya that Jesse and I are going to be writing out questions over on a bench.

“The problem with objectivity,” I tell Jesse at the bench, “is that it forces a kind of dehumanized censoring of self. It’s the enlightenment on crack! As if society can be found empirically. We’re turning into machines.”

“I see what you’re saying,” he says. “It’s like how we can’t really know Mars until we go there because a robot doesn’t have the intuition that people have.”

“Exactly!”

“And therefore, journalists having to remain objective, for the most part, forces them to compromise what they may feel is right.”

“But I am more opinion orientated anyway. This is why I’ve been struggling with the idea of journalism. But, I think if I can learn to base my writing on a universal morality, and by universal I mean basing it on the material universe, I can make an ethical argument for the way I write.”

“Where does FNB fit in?” he asks. “I mean, if we put your universal-thing to the test.”

I think for a minute.

“FNB is trying to feed the people who society regards as inconsequential. These kids come out here, seemingly wasting their time every Sunday, so they can help. Their fight is for the planet, because they believe that modern food industry is destroying the land, which they’re partly right. They believe that current food production is unhealthy and leads to obesity and sickness. They’re partly right.  They believe that this sickness leads to debt from hospital bills. They’re partly right. And they understand that it all stems from something simple: greed. How can we cut corners to feed more, make more, and go about business as usual. What’s funny is that they’re reactionary in one sense: looking back to ways we used to eat; but at the same time revolutionary. Those two things meet in the middle and seem to be more universally objective than any objective journalist could make them.”

But this is nothing new. 

I told Jesse I’d teach him journalism. This is what he gets.

But as a writer, he understands the struggle that becomes the human condition when trying to put it on paper.

We watch people come and go. A couple, far off in the park towards Monroe Street Bridge, smoke a joint.  We can smell it this far away. The woman wears glasses which are taped in the middle. But the big strips of black duct tape go half-way over her lenses. I couldn’t see how she could see out of them.

“Let’s go interview these people,” he says to me. “I want some action.”

            “Sounds good to me.”

We walk through the field, trying to notice all the little things. They’re clues, I tell him. There’s a black man in his mid-20s doing homeless Karate with a lead pipe not far from the couple. He spins the pipe vigorously, stepping in line with what looks like a Bruce Lee move. We can both tell he’s seen Enter the Dragon too much.

I start to follow him instead of the couple, more interested in this man’s story.  He runs into the hills, though. So both of us follow him up there.

“Ah,” expressed Jesse, a sigh of relief from the core of his soul. “I can finally smoke a cigarette.”

            “I wonder where he went,” I said.

Soon enough, the man comes down the hill like an anchorite. He has no shoes, a ratty beard, and is encrusted with dirt. He pulls out a pipe and takes a hit. He holds it out to us as if it’s an ancient Native American peace pipe offering.  We shake our heads, not knowing if it’s marijuana, PCP, or melted plastic. Although the scent was very much that of marijuana.

“Shoot,” he says. “Man I’m from Cali, we ain’t gotta do no hidin’ ‘bout dis right here.”

“How’s it going man,” I ask. “My name is Derek and I’m doing a story on FNB. Are you waiting to go to that?”

He hits the pipe again.

“What,” he says, holding in a hit. “I don’t know what you just said. Naw, I’m here just livin’. The cops took away my shoes. I’m just trying to get to the Rainbow Gathering, but when I got up here they said they moved that [stuff] to Vancouver! THEN the police roughed me up and took my shoes! So now I’m stuck until I can get some money to get on outta here.”

We make small talk with the man with no shoes. He tells us his name is Max, but that his last name is magical. He can’t tell us what it is. His only concern was getting out of Spokane. He had family here, and he’d been visiting them, but seemed more interested in the Rainbow Gathering and politics.

             He told us about his friends he’d lost on the road. Most from drug abuse and alcohol addiction. His only interest: marijuana.

“It’s sad,” Max said, shaking his head. “Because they all let [life] get to them. They got the ‘itch,’ and now they’re [screwed]. I know how that goes; been there. But I also know that I wanna live. I wanna do something. And I’m not gonna let that [stuff] take control of me. But I’ll smoke me some green any day!”

At one point he tells us that he’s starving. Jesse tells him about FNB, and instructs him to find as many of his friends as he can so they can all get fed. He walks over to the building immediately, taking huge steps. This was the image of a man on a mission. He walks in one door with the big lead pipe, half an afro bushy and disheveled, and walks out the other door with a huge stack of FNB fliers.

I laugh at the site and tell Jesse, “I don’t know if that’s even journalism. But, hey, whatever. [Max and his friends] needed to eat, and [FNB] wanted to feed. It’s serendipity.”

Soon hobos and homebums of every race, age, creed and color come walking out of the urban forest. They march through the park and infiltrate the food. The members of FNB dish them all up a great deal of food, and they all sit at benches and eat.

We eat the food they serve us; it’s delicious. I talk to Natalya and the others before Jesse and I retreat downtown.

“Thanks for coming,” Natalya said. Everyone else says ‘bye’ and ‘thanks,” and soon we’re off. I tell Jesse, “I think I’m getting better at this,” not realizing that I didn’t even have a story. We get downtown and find our separate buses.

“So what are you going to do,” Jesse asked.

“Figure out how to write this as a blog. I’m sure it won’t be read, so I might experiment with it, because, hey, we’re in college. If I have to one day get a job, I sure won’t be able to do what I want for long.”

“Hit me up sometime if you want to commiserate,” he says, getting onto the bus.

“Alright man, peace!”

The buses begin to leave. I let mine pass me by, opting instead to walk home: all three or four miles.

What next?