Street People

On Sunday night, I flew to San Francisco to attend a technical conference.  I arrived rather late and rode BART into the downtown area.  From there, I had a 10-ish minute walk to my hotel.

Maybe I just haven't been in the right (or wrong?) parts of Salt Lake late at night, but it's pretty clear that Salt Lake City and San Francisco are not even in the same league when it comes to being a big city.  Utah doesn't really have a big city.  Salt Lake is large-ish, but it's nothing like San Francisco.

As I walked to the hotel (first walking a block in the wrong direction), I noticed that pretty much every business that was closed for the night had someone (or two or three someones) sleeping in the doorway.  Most of them had a few belongings--a sleeping bag and a small bag of stuff--with them.  I've never even been close to living on the street.  I can't imagine what that would be like.  Now, as the weather gets warmer, it would be more bearable.  How do they survive during the winter?

There are a lot of panhandlers around too.  I saw a couple of veterans with missing limbs, sitting in wheelchairs or on standing with crutches.  At the BART station, when the AirBART bus pulled in, there were several people either asking for money or offering to help people purchase tickets for BART, afterwards asking for a buck or two for their trouble.

One of the guys traveling with us said he got in about the same time that the prostitutes were out in significant numbers.  After checking into the hotel, he heard a couple of them arguing at the top of their lungs. (Downtown isn't always the best place to stay.)

Some of these street people we're quite a bit more humorous than others.  For example, on the way back to our hotel from Pier 39, we walked by a park where a man was adamantly (and loudly) proclaiming "This is MY bench!!  I live here!!!" to someone who stopped to sit and watch his dog in the park.  He then proceeded to meow loudly at the dog, just to annoy the owner who tried to sit in his "home." A block or two later, a panhandler was holding a sign that said "Why lie?  I want beer."

The thing that haunts me, though, is the lady that I passed on the way back to the convention after lunch.  She was sitting on a street corner with the familiar cardboard sign, asking for any help of any kind.  She looked completely defeated as she sat there on the street corner by an orange construction barrier, sobbing.

What haunts me is that I really have no way of knowing the "why" behind her tears.  Is she really destitute and devastated?  Probably.  I doubt that sitting on a street corner begging is someone's first choice of making a living.  But were those tears real or were they manufactured by someone that knows that she "earns" more money if she looks more forlorn?  I'll never know.

But whether the tears were real or not, that face and the anguish I saw, real or not, will probably stick in my mind for some time.