Occupy Boise, Part I

18 December 2011

Yesterday Ada and I went to visit the Occupy Boise campsite, located downtown on the grounds of the old state courthouse. As we entered the patchwork of tents and canvas structures, some trimmed out festively for the holidays, others bearing cardboard signs (Pardon our dust – we're building a better world), a small group standing by the mess tent noticed us and waved. I waved back, and Ada, in my arms, felt emboldened to do the same. One of the group approached us. She was a smiling, dolled-up middle-aged woman who might have stepped right out of a PTA meeting. Following behind her were two others: an old thin black man, and a scruffy white guy who looked tired and dowdy as if he'd just finished a long shift in a factory. Through the tent flap I could see a man stooped over a griddle cooking breakfast for others huddled at the tables. The morning was frigid and except for the breakfast being made, the grounds were quiet, the private tents closed protectively against the frozen sky and the thicket of bare trees overhead.

The dolled-up woman reached out her hand and brightly made introductions. I sensed in that moment their ownership of the grounds, as well as their hope that here was someone — a someone who would bring their young daughter here — who had sympathy for their cause. But politics was not the first thing out of their mouths. The woman looked polished for a reason. She had dressed up to come down here and support the Occupiers, and despite the cold, wasn't it a great day to be alive?

“I don't stay here during the week,” she said. “I only come down weekends to help out. Isn't it great? It's important for our country. So I come down and do what I can.” I asked what that was. “Oh, mostly talk to people. Get the message out. There's a big march on Monday, from the Anne Frank Memorial. You should come, bring your girl,” she enthused, glowing like a cheerleader. I asked what she did, and she upended my expectations by telling me she was a real estate agent, living in the small town of Marsing, an hour away by the Snake River. “We've all got to do what we can,” she nodded at Ada, as though acknowledging the child was doing her part just by being here. “All of us, to take back our country from the corporations and the rich who control it. You know, we've all got more in common than you think. The other day a guy came down here, a tea-partyer, and after we talked awhile he realized we were in the same boat. You just gotta focus on the same problems we all have. This one here's a tea-partyer, too.” She motioned to the white guy, who was talking earnestly with the black man. You had the feeling that all about the grounds quiet determined conversations about the betterment of the country were simmering in the tents and over the breakfast tables and among those standing about slapping their sides to keep warm. “Or he was a tea-partyer. He was just looking for something to grab on to, politics-wise. Then he lost his job. And here he is.”

The men joined us and for a while we talked politics while Ada, to my surprise, watched on without boredom, intrigued by these characters. We began to stroll, compelled by the cold to keep moving. There was a big common tent for gathering and socializing, an open tent which held clothes racks full of sweaters and second-hand garments, a row of port a potties, and other tents situated for the common needs of the grounds. A thick-gauge electrical chord ran to the common tent from an outlet at the side of the courthouse, and I remembered something I'd read about the city, to the dismay of many on the right, allowing the Occupiers to use their power. In all, the city had been fairly accommodating to the Occupiers, compassionate, you might say, to their suffering in the cold.

The old man and I fell back and I asked him where he was from. “San Francisco,” he said. When I told him Ada was born in the City, how we'd lived there for many years, he paused, his face lighting up, and smiled grandly into Ada's eyes. “You from San Francisco too!” Ada can be very cautious around strangers, but now she returned the old man's deep smile.

“You know,” he said proudly, “I have a boy, too.”

“Does he live out here?”

“Well, he was in Snake River,” he waited for me to recognize the name.

“The river?”

“The prison. Over by Ontario. He done seven years there.”

“And that's why you came out here, to be near him?”

“Yes.”

“But he's out now? He's doing alright?”

The old man's face lit up again, a radiant sad joy: “My boy is doing good. My boy is doing good.”

We walked about under the leafless oak and silver maple trees. The old man talked dreamily of San Francisco. Boise had been good to him — “the people are very nice here” — but he longed to be back near the water and hills of the bay. He spoke slowly, precisely, and the space between his words was the dream space of the open road, the careful space that one develops around themselves after years of being alone and wandering. I could tell the old man had a great love, or at least a great memory of love, for his boy, and he needed to be near his son in order to give body to that love. His son was living in San Francisco again and soon he meant to move back there. I hoped that he would, but I couldn't help feeling that it was all just more dreaming, the story he told himself and strangers to give some narrative to his life, some texture just out of reach.

As we circled around to the mess tent, Ada began to get cranky. She was cold and restless. The other two had gone inside the mess tent for breakfast, and the old man and I stopped to say our goodbyes.

“So I guess you'll be leaving for SF soon?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said adamantly. “I got work to do still. I'll be here till spring, at least.”