tramping

I'm reading another library-sale find, "Refuge" by Terry Tempest Williams. It's a simultaneous natural and personal history of her life, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. She reaches a bit into the Mormon history of the state and her own family, and at one intriguing point describes an almost-utopian experiment, in the 1850s, called Brigham City. (She calls it a socialistic endeavor begun by conservatives.) The city's founder settled a few hundred families, with the goal of a self-sufficient, interdependent community whose every practical need was represented in the skill set of its population. Of course it was all a "company store" type of central administration, and Williams writes that the lack of acceptance of diversity (economic and interpersonal) was the town's eventual undoing. But in addition to establishing workers in textiles, metals, carpentry, livestock and agriculture, she records, "The community even made provisions for transients, declaring a 'tramp department' which enlisted their labor for chopping wood in exchange for a good meal."

What a great idea! What a natural aspect for a community of actual human beings to include! Why can't we try this? Other than the fact that we can't collectively admit that transients are among the citizens of all our cities... Of course, I can right away imagine the naysayers (those who suppose that cities only consist of people who've got it all together - and who are happy and fulfilled that way). To them I'd suggest that our visions of city/community already incorporate many other acceptances of less-than-utopian currents (not to mention, less-than-capitalist). Project housing. Shelters. 12-step groups. Walk-in clinics with 3-hour waits, for all those of us without health insurance. Payday loan shops? And all of those have room for creative, life-affirming human faces - well, maybe not the last one - when organized with compassion and imagination...and I've seen it done...

But I'd really like to see a Tramp Department established in a modest corner of any city that calls itself progressive. Not charity but cooperation. The meeting of mutual needs (including dignity). Maybe someplace has tried this, since 1854, and I just haven't heard about it. The closest thing I know of to this idea, in my experience (besides of course all the under-the-radar catholicworker communities, who help many in transition locate work), is craigslist. The "general labor" category there has provided my own transient self with multiple opportunities. I think that was where I found the phonebook delivery that kept me solvent two winters in a row. Almost got a job picking blueberries, from that site. And when I first got to Portland, it connected me with a 3-week gig cleaning out invasive water plants at a marina on the Columbia Slough: one of the physically toughest, but visually most beautiful jobs I've ever had. And that could've led to yet more of the tramping life - that job was where I got the invitation to live on a sailboat in Hawaii for the winter. But that's another story....the vegan Vedic ex-biker who had the boat was a fascinating guy, but with no further context, that opportunity seemed like more senses of "tramp" than I wanted to take on...