2017-10-07; THE TOUR

2017-10-07; THE TOUR
Touring the property of Opportunity Village is actually a common occurrence, mostly to raise funds for other endeavors that Square One is more invested in; this wasn’t that type of tour. This was the tour you are given by a random and reluctant villager when they know you’ve dropped an application and might end up being their neighbor. They immediately start to assess what they’ll be able to get out of you. During my time with the carnival I saw much the same glint in the eyes of shills looking for marks.
As I walk into the Village, there is a gatehouse on my right, it’s painted a hideous lime green color. In it there is a cot, a desk, a couple of chairs and a couple of filing cabinets to give the illusion that things are being filed. The gate is manned 24/7 by villagers, it is mandatory that each villager puts in a certain amount of gate duty every week, the amount can vary if you have a real job or are otherwise impaired. Of course that also means that at one point or another, every villager and perhaps their unkempt dogs or partners are sleeping and/or copulating on that same cot. Having read my literature I knew that open flames weren’t allowed in huts but there was a censor there to burn incense and it was clear how heavily used it was by those who hadn’t lost their sense of smell. Note: some rules are a little bendy.
The entrance is a short driveway up to a rolling metal gate that a car can drive through when rolled open. The path is concrete but it isn’t in very good shape. It runs the length of the village, straight through the middle, to another gate, one that doesn’t open, at the back of the property. This stretch of concrete is called the thoroughfare. As we walk along, the villager giving me the tour says “Let me know if you have any questions.” Then, as we strolled along, he pointed at things and told me what he knew. “That’s the tool shed, there’s some cleaning supplies in there and trash bags. Sometimes we store stuff in there. Council of the day has the key, it stays locked. You’ll figure it out.”
There was one little hut that was nicer than the others, it was just past the gatehouse, nearer to the tool shed. It served as an office for staff that frequented the place. The tour guide told me that they would show that one, with its fitted windows and wood floors and insulation, and tell people on fund raising tours that it was the model for how all the tiny houses on site were constructed. It was clear to anyone with sight, however, that was simply not the case.
The office contained two desks, a few chairs and file cabinets where things actually were filed. It also had the nicer, more functioning office equipment the yurt needed but would never get, as equipment like that wouldn’t last a week in that yurt. I would come to find out that this was also where villagers with complaints, so, ALL of them, would corner staff members to fill their ears with garbage about the goings on at the village. The herbalist in me also noticed a giant Elderberry tree between the gatehouse and the office, it was epic and I wondered how far down the toxicity went into the ground and whether it affected the fruit of this tree.
The office and the shed weren’t nearly as interesting as the yurt. The yurt was set up to be a community area. There were tables along the back walls with computers, some for public use, some clearly personal computers that people just left set up all the time, sharing of limited space be damned. There were a few big chairs and couches most of which were filthy and stained, the most urine soaked near a door due to the smell. There was a sort of functioning and a semi functioning coffee pot and as long as there was coffee, there was coffee brewed; the village went through a lot of coffee.
There was also a microwave that had a very interesting smell and would shoot sparks from time to time. The best part was the pellet stove since only a few of the huts had electricity and it gets cold in un-insulated, poorly constructed huts. The yurt itself wasn’t very old and it was well built. It would have been in much better shape had people had any interest in taking better care of it. Outside and adjacent to the yurt there was a smoking area, a couch that must have been too stinky to keep inside was out there, it was all under an awning in case of rain. There were also some chairs also strewn about.
People were lounging there but paid me little mind. The overall vibe was just lazy. Everywhere I looked I saw things that needed to be done. In the past I have lived in many villages, there were always people busily working alone or helping one another to improve things, there was none of that here. People seemed defeated and whenever brief conversations took place they were mostly contests about who had the hardest life, coolest diagnosis and most valuable medications to trade or sell.
Just past the yurt was a pantry, a tiny hut with an old refrigerator and a chest freezer in it. On the floor were plastic bins and along two of the walls, shelves. This is where food obtained once a week from an organization called Food for Lane County was stored. The “FFLC” food was for all of the villagers, if you wanted food from the pantry you were supposed to sign it out on the clipboard provided, some people did. The FFLC didn’t provide food for the entire village, nowhere near it in fact. What they did do was supplement whatever groceries villagers were already buying for themselves.
Under a series of tarps all strung together and lashed to a frame, there were two folding tables running long between one tiny hut, the pantry and another, the “kitchen.” The outdoor area had another chest freezer and a standing freezer right outside the pantry on the right, and on the kitchen side there were two more refrigerators. Bear in mind, this is food storage for upwards of 40 people. In between the two huts, pantry and kitchen, was a somewhat useless stove on a palette that worked as well as you would expect a stove exposed to the elements to work, so, not great. There were also a couple of gas grills to cook on in the outside area, but only one of them worked and it was hard to light.
The next hut was the kitchen, tiny in size but with room for two more, somewhat smaller, refrigerators. There was another greasy, smelly microwave and some donated things like broken crock pots, pots and pans and utensils, apparently, the ones no one wanted to steal. There were a few hotplates and a toaster oven as well. Everything was in various stages of filthy. The smells of mold, wet dog, garbage, rot and dead rodent lingered in the air.
Once past the mess they called a kitchen and food storage area, there’s a bathhouse. There are two toilets and a shower. On the backside, a laundry room with a barely functioning washer and dryer. “You sign up for laundry and showers, the sheet is up there.” He absentmindedly gestures in the general direction of the bathhouse and I do see a clipboard hanging on the wall. We look from a distance at the brightly painted bathhouse, later, when I see the inside, when I smell the inside, I understand why he didn’t want to go up there unless absolutely necessary.
Past the bathhouse and still on the right side are Conestoga’s. I had never seen one until then, they looked like wagons circling. There were about seven of them and a hut or two to our right as we followed the thoroughfare to the end and turned around. Now on our right were the tiny houses. Some are brightly painted, others aren’t. Some are all tarps and trash and some don’t even look occupied.
The first row is what’s called the Medical Circle, a semi-circle of six or so huts with electricity for people with disabilities that require electricity for health monitoring devices or sleeping machines and things of that nature. Beyond the first row is another semi-circle with more huts, single and double units, a couple of even smaller ones referred to as “bungalows.” I can see a few dogs and decide that if we’re walking through there I should mind my step.
The kid keeps walking on though and we don’t go looking in on folks as they are just trying to go about their day to day. My tour was as a potential villager, after moving to the village, I would be required to give these tours as well as endure the tours that Square One representatives gave, which were awful and totally dehumanizing. Villagers treated like a spectacle, like animals in a zoo to be gawked at. That would all come later though. In the meantime, I could tell this tour was over.
At this point, the kid giving me the tour just sort of wandered off and absentmindedly lit a cigarette in the designated smoking area next to the yurt on the other side of the thoroughfare from where we’d been standing. A couple of curious folks came over to say hello and size me up as I walked back to the gatehouse. I willed my daughter to call, she texted, it was still a nice distraction from the absolutely unwelcoming feeling I was getting. It was either I was totally ignored or people were a little too friendly and a bit awkward.
Still to my right there were a few more Conestoga’s and a little patch of grass for a tent or two if necessary and agreed upon by the village. Right at the end, at this point on my left I’m between the office and the gatehouse, so I am approaching the gate. Right before the gate and on the right, opposite the office, I see a shed. A woman pops her head out and introduces herself as Brenda. She is rifling through boxes and bags strewn about, I can smell mold and things that never dry, even in summer. She is sweating with her efforts to not miss a thing and her very thick glasses keep sliding down her nose.
Brenda tells me this is the donations shed. People donate and after the gatehouse inventories it, it is put into the donation shed for the whole community, she explains. Each villager gets two items a week, they sign in and out at the gatehouse on the appropriate form. As she tells me this she is gathering up not two items but two generous armloads of items. She winks and takes off not toward the gatehouse to sign it all out, but straight to her tiny house. I wonder where she’ll put that extra booty.
As I get closer to the gate house, the guy comes out with a little badge that says, “Visitor” on it and tells me I need it if I’m going to go walking around the village. Apparently he hadn’t seen the kid who gave me the tour quietly bail on me. I told him I just got done with a tour and he shoots me a look like it’s somehow my fault that he had been too drunk to give me the visitors pass. I came to find out later, the man on gate was appropriately named, Dick, he was southern but was not a gentleman and was bad for all the really nice men named Dick.
At this point I sort of lingered at the gate for a bit wondering if they had any further information or instruction but everyone seemed otherwise occupied. The kid who had given me the tour was long gone having smoked a few cigarettes and bailed. I wasn’t about to ask Dick who was glaring at me the whole time, he had a weird vibe. It was like he could just snap at any moment and either come straight at me and slit my throat, or go and yell at the nearest tree, so I just left. I had questions but there weren’t any people helpful enough to answer them. Fortunately, experience has shown me that the best way to learn about how a community functions is to live in it. All that was left was to wait my turn.
When I could, I called the one person with whom I had been in contact more than once, a voice through the phone called Raymond, I figured maybe he could fill me in. He was the one person who sort of kept me up to date about availability and my position on the wait list throughout the time we were in limbo and at the farm. He was aware that my daughter and I would be sheltered throughout the coldest part of the season but also that it was a temporary situation. He assured me that he would keep in contact with me during our stay in Washington.
As I walked out I took one last look over my shoulder to see Brenda returning to the donations shed, ready for another couple of items. And just like that, my daughter and I hopped a train to Tacoma where we were picked up and taken to a goat farm to work for room and board while we awaited our space at Opportunity Village.
Touring the property of Opportunity Village is actually a common occurrence, mostly to raise funds for other endeavors that Square One is more invested in; this wasn’t that type of tour. This was the tour you are given by a random and reluctant villager when they know you’ve dropped an application and might end up being their neighbor. They immediately start to assess what they’ll be able to get out of you. During my time with the carnival I saw much the same glint in the eyes of shills looking for marks.
As I walk into the Village, there is a gatehouse on my right, it’s painted a hideous lime green color. In it there is a cot, a desk, a couple of chairs and a couple of filing cabinets to give the illusion that things are being filed. The gate is manned 24/7 by villagers, it is mandatory that each villager puts in a certain amount of gate duty every week, the amount can vary if you have a real job or are otherwise impaired. Of course that also means that at one point or another, every villager and perhaps their unkempt dogs or partners are sleeping and/or copulating on that same cot. Having read my literature I knew that open flames weren’t allowed in huts but there was a censor there to burn incense and it was clear how heavily used it was by those who hadn’t lost their sense of smell. Note: some rules are a little bendy.
The entrance is a short driveway up to a rolling metal gate that a car can drive through when rolled open. The path is concrete but it isn’t in very good shape. It runs the length of the village, straight through the middle, to another gate, one that doesn’t open, at the back of the property. This stretch of concrete is called the thoroughfare. As we walk along, the villager giving me the tour says “Let me know if you have any questions.” Then, as we strolled along, he pointed at things and told me what he knew. “That’s the tool shed, there’s some cleaning supplies in there and trash bags. Sometimes we store stuff in there. Council of the day has the key, it stays locked. You’ll figure it out.”
There was one little hut that was nicer than the others, it was just past the gatehouse, nearer to the tool shed. It served as an office for staff that frequented the place. The tour guide told me that they would show that one, with its fitted windows and wood floors and insulation, and tell people on fund raising tours that it was the model for how all the tiny houses on site were constructed. It was clear to anyone with sight, however, that was simply not the case.
The office contained two desks, a few chairs and file cabinets where things actually were filed. It also had the nicer, more functioning office equipment the yurt needed but would never get, as equipment like that wouldn’t last a week in that yurt. I would come to find out that this was also where villagers with complaints, so, ALL of them, would corner staff members to fill their ears with garbage about the goings on at the village. The herbalist in me also noticed a giant Elderberry tree between the gatehouse and the office, it was epic and I wondered how far down the toxicity went into the ground and whether it affected the fruit of this tree.
The office and the shed weren’t nearly as interesting as the yurt. The yurt was set up to be a community area. There were tables along the back walls with computers, some for public use, some clearly personal computers that people just left set up all the time, sharing of limited space be damned. There were a few big chairs and couches most of which were filthy and stained, the most urine soaked near a door due to the smell. There was a sort of functioning and a semi functioning coffee pot and as long as there was coffee, there was coffee brewed; the village went through a lot of coffee.
There was also a microwave that had a very interesting smell and would shoot sparks from time to time. The best part was the pellet stove since only a few of the huts had electricity and it gets cold in un-insulated, poorly constructed huts. The yurt itself wasn’t very old and it was well built. It would have been in much better shape had people had any interest in taking better care of it. Outside and adjacent to the yurt there was a smoking area, a couch that must have been too stinky to keep inside was out there, it was all under an awning in case of rain. There were also some chairs also strewn about.
People were lounging there but paid me little mind. The overall vibe was just lazy. Everywhere I looked I saw things that needed to be done. In the past I have lived in many villages, there were always people busily working alone or helping one another to improve things, there was none of that here. People seemed defeated and whenever brief conversations took place they were mostly contests about who had the hardest life, coolest diagnosis and most valuable medications to trade or sell.
Just past the yurt was a pantry, a tiny hut with an old refrigerator and a chest freezer in it. On the floor were plastic bins and along two of the walls, shelves. This is where food obtained once a week from an organization called Food for Lane County was stored. The “FFLC” food was for all of the villagers, if you wanted food from the pantry you were supposed to sign it out on the clipboard provided, some people did. The FFLC didn’t provide food for the entire village, nowhere near it in fact. What they did do was supplement whatever groceries villagers were already buying for themselves.
Under a series of tarps all strung together and lashed to a frame, there were two folding tables running long between one tiny hut, the pantry and another, the “kitchen.” The outdoor area had another chest freezer and a standing freezer right outside the pantry on the right, and on the kitchen side there were two more refrigerators. Bear in mind, this is food storage for upwards of 40 people. In between the two huts, pantry and kitchen, was a somewhat useless stove on a palette that worked as well as you would expect a stove exposed to the elements to work, so, not great. There were also a couple of gas grills to cook on in the outside area, but only one of them worked and it was hard to light.
The next hut was the kitchen, tiny in size but with room for two more, somewhat smaller, refrigerators. There was another greasy, smelly microwave and some donated things like broken crock pots, pots and pans and utensils, apparently, the ones no one wanted to steal. There were a few hotplates and a toaster oven as well. Everything was in various stages of filthy. The smells of mold, wet dog, garbage, rot and dead rodent lingered in the air.
Once past the mess they called a kitchen and food storage area, there’s a bathhouse. There are two toilets and a shower. On the backside, a laundry room with a barely functioning washer and dryer. “You sign up for laundry and showers, the sheet is up there.” He absentmindedly gestures in the general direction of the bathhouse and I do see a clipboard hanging on the wall. We look from a distance at the brightly painted bathhouse, later, when I see the inside, when I smell the inside, I understand why he didn’t want to go up there unless absolutely necessary.
Past the bathhouse and still on the right side are Conestoga’s. I had never seen one until then, they looked like wagons circling. There were about seven of them and a hut or two to our right as we followed the thoroughfare to the end and turned around. Now on our right were the tiny houses. Some are brightly painted, others aren’t. Some are all tarps and trash and some don’t even look occupied.
The first row is what’s called the Medical Circle, a semi-circle of six or so huts with electricity for people with disabilities that require electricity for health monitoring devices or sleeping machines and things of that nature. Beyond the first row is another semi-circle with more huts, single and double units, a couple of even smaller ones referred to as “bungalows.” I can see a few dogs and decide that if we’re walking through there I should mind my step.
The kid keeps walking on though and we don’t go looking in on folks as they are just trying to go about their day to day. My tour was as a potential villager, after moving to the village, I would be required to give these tours as well as endure the tours that Square One representatives gave, which were awful and totally dehumanizing. Villagers treated like a spectacle, like animals in a zoo to be gawked at. That would all come later though. In the meantime, I could tell this tour was over.
At this point, the kid giving me the tour just sort of wandered off and absentmindedly lit a cigarette in the designated smoking area next to the yurt on the other side of the thoroughfare from where we’d been standing. A couple of curious folks came over to say hello and size me up as I walked back to the gatehouse. I willed my daughter to call, she texted, it was still a nice distraction from the absolutely unwelcoming feeling I was getting. It was either I was totally ignored or people were a little too friendly and a bit awkward.
Still to my right there were a few more Conestoga’s and a little patch of grass for a tent or two if necessary and agreed upon by the village. Right at the end, at this point on my left I’m between the office and the gatehouse, so I am approaching the gate. Right before the gate and on the right, opposite the office, I see a shed. A woman pops her head out and introduces herself as Brenda. She is rifling through boxes and bags strewn about, I can smell mold and things that never dry, even in summer. She is sweating with her efforts to not miss a thing and her very thick glasses keep sliding down her nose.
Brenda tells me this is the donations shed. People donate and after the gatehouse inventories it, it is put into the donation shed for the whole community, she explains. Each villager gets two items a week, they sign in and out at the gatehouse on the appropriate form. As she tells me this she is gathering up not two items but two generous armloads of items. She winks and takes off not toward the gatehouse to sign it all out, but straight to her tiny house. I wonder where she’ll put that extra booty.
As I get closer to the gate house, the guy comes out with a little badge that says, “Visitor” on it and tells me I need it if I’m going to go walking around the village. Apparently he hadn’t seen the kid who gave me the tour quietly bail on me. I told him I just got done with a tour and he shoots me a look like it’s somehow my fault that he had been too drunk to give me the visitors pass. I came to find out later, the man on gate was appropriately named, Dick, he was southern but was not a gentleman and was bad for all the really nice men named Dick.
At this point I sort of lingered at the gate for a bit wondering if they had any further information or instruction but everyone seemed otherwise occupied. The kid who had given me the tour was long gone having smoked a few cigarettes and bailed. I wasn’t about to ask Dick who was glaring at me the whole time, he had a weird vibe. It was like he could just snap at any moment and either come straight at me and slit my throat, or go and yell at the nearest tree, so I just left. I had questions but there weren’t any people helpful enough to answer them. Fortunately, experience has shown me that the best way to learn about how a community functions is to live in it. All that was left was to wait my turn.
When I could, I called the one person with whom I had been in contact more than once, a voice through the phone called Raymond, I figured maybe he could fill me in. He was the one person who sort of kept me up to date about availability and my position on the wait list throughout the time we were in limbo and at the farm. He was aware that my daughter and I would be sheltered throughout the coldest part of the season but also that it was a temporary situation. He assured me that he would keep in contact with me during our stay in Washington.
As I walked out I took one last look over my shoulder to see Brenda returning to the donations shed, ready for another couple of items. And just like that, my daughter and I hopped a train to Tacoma where we were picked up and taken to a goat farm to work for room and board while we awaited our space at Opportunity Village.