Blackberry Hell

There are people sleeping in the greenbelt behind my house. About 20 feet beyond the fence, under the blackberry brambles.  They try to hide that they've been there and try even harder to hide that they'll be back, but this afternoon as I was cutting the brambles away from the cedarwood privacy fence, I saw the crushed undergrowth and moss where they'd bedded down, the flattened cardboard beer cases pulled from neighborhood recycling bins, used as ground cover to sleep on and sometimes as blankets, the plastic grocery bags of food bank bread and Spam, clothing and soap partially hidden in the Scot's broom.

I've seen this coming for a while, actually. Each morning, my dog and I walk up the street, turn down a narrow, overgrown track and hike up a short, steep rise to come out on the Interurban Trail, an asphalt path that runs along the old railroad right of way.  It's designated as “public multiple use” land, but I think the city planners had mostly bicyclists and dog walkers in mind when they okayed the trail, because there aren't any structures like three-sided sheep sheds where people can bed down and wait out a rainy night relatively dry and safe.  But people are sleeping under the Douglas firs and hemlocks,  in the rhododendron hells and blackberry thickets up there, too. There are more permanent dwelling sites along the trail. I've seen sleeping bags and food weighted down with rocks, clothes left drying on low branches.  There are T-shirts and blue jeans too small to be adult clothing. There are used and unused diapers.  I've also seen people whiz by on $2000 bicycles, wearing another $2000 worth of fancy gear, carried away in their Tour de France fantasies,  never noticing the battered old pup tent partially hidden under fallen alder branches.

I'm not talking about little green elven people. No, they're mostly a brownish color, weather-beaten, haggard and the color of the forest floor they've been sleeping on. The color we would all be if we'd been sleeping outside and hadn't bathed in reliable memory.

One morning, my dog and I happened upon two happy families harvesting blackberries on a slope that rises from a section of the trail.  The clean, well-fed, well-clothed children ate berries as fast as they could, their hands and mouths stained a deep, blackish red. Their parents chatted and swapped pictures on cell phones as the children gorged themselves. Their REI strollers were full of buckets and bags of sweet, ripe berries.  This was a social gathering of my suburban neighbors.  One little boy offered to share his harvest with me, but I said no, thanks, they were all for him.  The thing is, I don't know what pesticides and herbicides the city sprays along this public use land to keep the weeds back.  Besides, the prior afternoon in the very same spot at the top of the hill, between the brambles and more privacy fence separating the adjacent homeowners from those making the most of public multiple use, I saw a girl—I'm doing my best not to speculate about her age—tricking with first one guy as my dog and I walked down the trail, and a different guy as we came back.  Her knees below her miniskirt were stained a deep, blackish red.

Early in the morning, I've seen the earth-colored people rise from the brambles like cautious deer, keeping low and still, wary, watching carefully until they know whether or not you mean them harm.  Not all of them traffic, but there are too many vacant stares, too many needle tracks on arms, too many syringes, broken glass vials, used condoms and spent amyl nitrate cartridges scattered amongst the piles of moldy dog poop at the edges of the trail for it to be strictly innocent public multiple use.  There's a ring of downed logs in a space under the trees by the power station where teenagers like to sit and smoke. I passed by once, and there were three bodies lying face up on the grass just outside the ring, two of them with arms and legs splayed onto the trail.  They were breathing and their eyes moved, but they didn't flinch as my dog sniffed and nuzzled at them. As I checked for pulses and breathing, their arms floated up from the ground trying to brush me away, but without minds conscious and coordinated enough to direct purposeful motion.  This went beyond a simple marijuana high.  Not one of them was over 14 years of age.  An adult voice spoke from just beyond the circle of log seats under the trees.  “They're all right,” he said. “I'm watching them.” 

I'm ashamed to say, I was so angry and frightened that I just grabbed them by their skinny little floating arms, hauled them clear of the trail onto the grass and left them there at the mercy of their pusher. I walked away and did nothing.

In the book Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, co-author Edwin Marty likens Himalayan blackberries in the Seattle area to kudzu in the south. Both introduced, invasive, aggressive species, they are resistant to most forms of herbicides and thrive in the poorest of soil and climate conditions.  They spread fast, resist disease and, therefore, harbor diseases that decimate the native species.  They grow in the tiniest crack in the pavement and can engulf a house in less than a year if equally aggressive measures aren't taken to combat them.  You have to poison the plant, then chop away the dead foliage, then poison the stump, then poison the ground so it won't come back. That's what it takes to kill these plants  Both have carved out a niche for themselves by dominating the native species. Poverty's like that too, taking root in distressed areas, vanquishing one household at a time, bringing disease with it, easily resisting known methods of defense, aided and abetted by public multiple use.

There are other species living in the brambles.  Coyotes live in the greenbelt that runs behind my house and adjoins the trail.  Raccoons, possum, squirrels, innumerable Norwegian rats and mice. And, of course, the birds.  There are lots of tiny, colorful migrating birds, a few hummingbirds, but mostly we have Stellar jays, starlings, crows, pigeons, gulls—the usual scavengers. We had a family of California quail before somebody bought the lot at the top of the hill, spent a raucous summer building a house on it and the quail moved away. We've had the occasional bear coming looking for grubs and berries, though they're usually destroyed by 18-wheelers as they try to cross Interstate 5 in the dim predawn light.  

It's been a particularly dry summer, and the fire department has come three times to put out fires gobbling up dry weeds in the greenbelt.  Each time, it was blamed on kids and firecrackers, but while that's possible, I don't believe it. The coyotes didn't set the fires either.

As I worked chopping brambles, I realized our privacy fence badly needs to be replaced.  The posts are rotten and wobbly, the rails are soft and won't hold a nail, and the slats have decayed to pointlessness.  We're making ends meet, but the economy is tough, and we don't have money to spend rebuilding the fence.  As I cut back the brambles, I realized the only thing holding the fence up was the blackberries and that there were dead leaves and cobwebs in my hair. Flies swarmed around my legs where bramble thorns had torn my skin and made it bleed. And my arms were brown from fighting the brambles in the dirt.