Thursday. 8:30 PM. Rain is coming down again. At a bus stop at the train station, I watch as a guy with some grey in his beard comes shuffling along the platform. What he does not have is an umbrella, nor a coat, nor a shirt, nor socks. What he does have are untied shoes, shorts, a black leather vest, and a baseball cap. A previously unmatched level of odd. I am unconvinced that he is necessarily a street person until we are on the bus and he begins speaking with an all too familiar tired and gruff voice. He begins telling someone how he got "pulled over and they took everything." Was he on a chopper? That would explain the outfit, not so odd on a motorcycle. He says that the authorities wanted to take him to detox. So he was riding drunk? The usual story; hopelessly incomplete as to ever make any sense. They took his back pack and his phone, he says, but I hear him mention nothing about a motorcycle. Perhaps he means the police "pulled over" to him as he was on foot. If you are homeless, the police may take your possessions, and even throw them away. The guy listening to him is quizzing him about details. He claims that the police opened the doors to a van and offered to take him to detox. He asked if he was being charged with anything. When he was told no, he replied, "Fuck that, I'm outta here." He advises, "If they ever put you in detox, don't let them lock the door on you." And, he adds, "I've been fightin' so much, I'm already sliced up."
...from wild-eyed developers scraping and building as fast as they can, to artists loosing their studios to the marijuana grow houses...to new residents...starry-eyed about Colorado's legendary sunshine and blissfully unaware of the lack of affordable housing... "...there is no Section 8 anymore...where I go to school. You can't find a house, you can't really be with your community. I had to create another life, basically. I just remember everyone not [being] on the same page as me. I don't even remember growing up on that block because they changed it so much. ...you're forcing kids who have lived their whole life in one world to go to an opposite world that is considered an enemy world. It's incredible to me how a lot of people are completely just leaving out the fact of gentrification as a connection to the rise in homicides that we have. ...between the ages of fifteen and seventeen...everybody asks, 'Where you from, when did you move in here?' ...you've got everybody knowing...who's supposed to be your enemy." Fuller Park has turned from a...hang out into a dog park primarily used by new white residents... "When they shut down open gym...almost every one of my friends started gang-banging. We would go in and ask the lady, 'Is there a chance we can get open gym?' And she would say, 'No...have your parents come up here,...then you can pay for an activity.'" "And she wanted everybody to do karate!" "And I'd...tell her, 'Well, my mama can't afford this $450 summer camp. We've gotta pay rent!'" ...instead of settlers worried about Indians...now it's frightened white residents posting reports of gunshots on Facebook pages. ...most students...like seeing...new cafes and restaurants appearing - even if some of those places don't seem meant for them. "It's actually far less of a community," he says. "It's far less tight knit. It's far more separated and split and tense; it's not better. It looks beautiful, and the lawns are amazing, and the home prices are excellent for the homeowners, and the organic coffee is fantastic - but it's not better. And I think we want to say it's community, and it's diversity, and it's city pride, but really, the driver is home value." .- Westword, 7/2-8/2015
Friday. At the deathburger up the street from where I live, and at my usual bus stop, is a homeless guy I haven't seen before. I first saw him at Mr. Anybody's Dad's bus stop, just across the street. He appears to be in his twenties, with shoulder length hair which is beginning to mat. It looks like a black mop head. His skin isn't dirty. Perhaps he's an undercover cop. He's in a buttoned down shirt and slacks, both with dirt all over them. He looks like an accountant, or a school teacher, months after a nuclear war. The following Tuesday, it's 10:30 PM. I am on my way to drop off a document at my doctor's office. On the bus, I'm sitting behind a trio of ladies speaking of someone they knew. "He died sitting in church. He was 72 years old." I get it. We pull into a lightrail station. Past our bus comes another. Then, something which I have never seen before. I guy comes hobbling along and yells, "Hey, somebody stop that bus!" I've been at this station in the early evening, listening to a couple arguing, listening to people talking to no one. I've never heard this line out of some movie. From here, to my doctor's office, to a quick lunch, and back to the bus stop. I watch an ambulance come from all the way down the street, thinking that it will head straight to the hospital I just came from. Instead, it makes a right, and accelerates past me, leaving me in a cloud of exhaust. The bus stop is in front of something called the "New City Church." The sign has an outline of downtown, but we are nowhere near downtown. This is an old suburban neighborhood. An odd character moseys up. Surely she is a woman, but looks so much like a 12-year-old that its confusing. She;s in clunky black untied shoes and striped socks, and a summer dress with a wide skirt bottom. Her hair is shaved into a bob but much longer on the sides. There is a trash can next to me with a lid. It appears to be brand new. I lift the lid to toss a piece of refuse, assuming that the lid is on hinges. When I lift it, it's completely loose, and I have to grab it to keep it from falling. This is obviously a neighborhood where everything not attached will be stolen. I get home around 10:30 PM. In the parking lot of a restaurant is something which makes me do a doubletake. It's a pair of young professional Caucasian couples. I don't recall ever seeing anyone in my neighborhood wearing a turtleneck. On Wednesday, I'm at the shopping center where I work. It's just about 1:30 PM. Up at the corner, I hear what sound like an ambulance siren. I watch as three grey SUVs, all with lights, block off the intersection. A police officer in a white vest comes out and blows a whistle, holding his hand up to stop traffic. I assume that someone important, out here in suburban nowhere, needs to make a left. I wonder who's in town.
...your vision...images jumping and falling as though they were being received by a dropped camera, hearing a hundred horrible voices at once - screams, sobs, hysterical shouting...a tiny, clouded voice coming over the radio, "Uh, that's a Rog, we mark your position, over." And out. Far out. ...we had to pass...a house that had been collapsed by the bombing, bringing with it a young girl who lay stretched out dead on top of some broken wood. The whole thing was burning, and the flames were moving closer and closer to her bare feet. There was no...hometown paper so humble that it didn't get its man in for a quick feel at least once. ...tended to be the sort of old reporter that most young reporters I knew were afraid of becoming someday. You'd run into the once in a while at the bar of the...press center, men in their late forties...exhausted and bewildered after...briefings and lightning visits...their tape recorders broken, their pens stolen by street kids, their time almost up. ...too shy to make friends... During my first month back I woke up one night and knew that my living room was full of dead Marines. ...I lay there for a moment thinking that I'd have to go out soon and cover them. - Herr
The CPA existed...in Saddam's old palace... ...in...the rest of Iraq...conditions generally were deteriorating. It was isolated from the city's giant traffic jams and shaded by many more trees than grew elsewhere in Baghdad. Inside the zone, the telephones had a 914 area code from New York's Weschester County... "It was almost like being at Walt Disney's version of Arabian Nights. I lived in a villa..." It featured...three Iraqi maids. ...inside CPA headquarters the food resembled that of an American high school. Oddly, for being a Muslim country, "it seemed like seventy-five percent of the entrees were pork or pork based... I think Haliburton must have gotten a great deal on pork somewhere." ...some of the zone's inhabitants... "...very few spoke Arabic or ever got out." The result was that all some CPA officials knew of Iraq was what they saw on TV. "...the journalist knew more about the situation than the briefers did, because the journalists moved around..." - Fiasco, by T. E. Ricks, 2006
Thursday. 11:30 AM. I head a couple blocks up the street to a bus stop. I pass a defunct medical marijuana place, now up for lease. On the corner in front of it, on the ground, is an empty cat-carrying case which has been there for at least a couple of days. At the bus stop is a guy who is asleep. He has a hard hat with him, and he's awfully bundled up for a day which is supposed to get up to 85. When the bus comes, he wakes up but he never gets on. There isn't a bus on another route which comes through here. Down the street, a middle-aged woman gets on with a roll-away suitcase with a duffel bag on top. The duffel bag is covered with purple sequins. I pull out my camera to take a shot of her when she turns to me to ask me how I am. When I tell her that I'm fine, she replies, "Not me," and she begins sobbing. She tells me that her boyfriend left her, that he's an idiot. I watch a guy help her on the bus with her luggage. Was that him? She tells me that she's trying to get home. I wonder where she lives. She has a strange accent. I wonder where she's from.
Tuesday. I am having some kind of suburban dynamic experience today. I noticed on my way to work that the entire sole was coming off of one of my shoes. When I get to the shopping center where I work, I head over to a clothing store. It appears to have only women's shoes, but I think that I had better ask, to make sure. There is never a clerk to be found in here, so I ask the woman at the change rooms. Nope, no men's shoes, and no place in this shopping center to purchase men's shoes. As soon as I get outside, I spot another clothing place. It turns out to have both men's and women's shoes. I tell the cashier about the lady in the other store, thinking that she will laugh. She makes a face as if something isn't right. I have no way of knowing this, but I am about to enter a comedy sketch. She calls over her manager and asks me to repeat the story. Well, perhaps he will see the humor. He immediately apologizes, and wants to make sure that I found some shoes. he tells me that his store and the other store share a parent company. This is repeated to me by the cashier. Unbeknownst to myself, he contacts the other store. As I am leaving with shoes, the woman from the other store chases me down to apologize herself.
Wednesday. I'm on a bus with a drunk I've seen here once before. Today he is comparatively detoxed. He is talking to the guy sitting next to him. He says that, yesterday, he was on his "way to Dennys to get the Grand Slam" breakfast. "Yesterday was my work day," he explains. He says that he had a hard time getting to Dennys, because the bus was detoured. Someone, he says, threw themselves off the bridge. But, if I interpret his almost parable-like narration, he himself could never commit suicide. He declares, "I love myself too much. I love myself too much. Dennys..." He trails off. The bridge or the bottle. Or, indeed, the Grand Slam. He has a tennis ball with him, which he gives to a young boy sitting next to him. He tells the boy that, it isn't the greatest tennis ball. It's almost as if he's acting out a scene from some old Disney movie. Perhaps he remembers his own days as a youth, long before he began drinking beer and whisky like it was Gatorade. He tells the boy to "Go throw it at the chickens. I don't know. Promise me you'll learn to throw a fast ball." I spend the time it takes for him to espouse this equivalent of his Facebook status by wondering what he spends his days doing and thinking about. Chickens. I would never have guessed that in a lifetime with multiple reincarnations. Chickens. I suppose chickens are where the Grand Slam breakfast comes from. We pull onto the street headed to the lightrail station. Last time I saw him here, earlier this summer or spring, he asked the driver to stop here at the corner, where the bus gates used to be before the condo construction was completed. This morning, he gets up, stands at the back door, and says, "Driver will you stop here?" The driver doesn't answer him. I wonder if the driver hears him ask this question every day. Watch out for the chickens.
Thursday. I'm off work. At a quarter to eight pm I walk through the parking lot of this modern residential shopping center. It has a style which pulls me back to the days of my youth. With reminders of the current decade. There's a flyer announcing a memorial for a fallen local veteran of the war in Iraq. A white Porsche convertible is revving its engine, as its white-haired driver parallel parks next to a shop. Middle-aged guys conduct business by bluetooth. Young guys shepherd their families. A cool breeze wafts past my shoulders. The temperature drops as the sun sets. I am stepping along here in some kind of Caucasian dream world. It's a fiscal lifetime beyond my own neighborhood of broken people on the broken concrete of those testosterone-soaked streets. As far as I can see here is all directions are trees highlighted by the setting sun, just like in a Renaissance painting. It's a scene out of some children's bedtime story. Friday. I am called in early to work. After five hours at one store, I get a ride to another by a relatively new hire, who tells me that she is on a chamber of commerce with a couple of my customers, who tell her that they both know me. 'Oh yeah, we know him.' She mentions that one is the former mayor of the neighborhood in which I work. Him I remember mentioning to me who he was in the store. I don't know how my name came up. I know that she is in a jazz band. I don't know why someone in a jazz band is also a member of the chamber of commerce. But I am going to be fifty years old in a couple of short weeks. I can't remember how many customer have asked me if I am the owner, one of them telling me, "You carry yourself like the owner." It suddenly appears to be not any stretch at all to imagine that these people relate to me completely on their own level, on the level of this neighborhood. These are the kind of people that my dad would have been impressed with. Suddenly, my bomb-throwing days are but a distant memory. These are the two worlds that I step between. By afternoon and evening, I do commerce with local entrepreneurs and former local television anchors. Then I return to my own neighborhood and its dens of thieves. If there is a chamber for the black market, I wonder if its offices are the bus benches up and down my boulevard.
Sunday. In the late morning, I'm on a bus to the supermarket. The new, young homeless guy with dreadlocks is on here. He's in the same wrinkled buttoned down shirt and slacks. I swear he looks like he has been held captive, taken from some insurance office. This morning, he's with a young woman who does not strike me as anywhere near homeless. Also along for the ride is a middle-aged guy with a bicycle. He's in an orange vest and he has a whistle. I notice that he can't speak, and when he's on his bike he blows his whistle to let everyone know he's coming. I don't know why he has to do this, but it explains the random whistle-blowing which I've heard in the neighborhood. Between 5:30 and 6 pm I head to a new Vietnamese restaurant behind where I live. It's great place, and it's always busy. There are Vietnamese, Hispanic families, and groovy young Caucasian couples. And this place is jumping. Monday. I'm on a train station on my boulevard. Down the steps to the platform walks a guy with an angry expression on his face. He's talking to himself. Another guy, down on the platform, appears to be posturing like he's a gang member. As he paces back and forth, a third guy has his eye on him. The train whisks all of us to one end of down town, and I disembark along with a homeless guy in a camouflaged coat and his sleeping bag on his back. I watch him pull an unlit cigarette out of his mouth. I head into the terminal to get next month's bus pass. I listen to a young woman behind me ask the clerk what the fastest way to the airport is, the bus or Uber. Her flight leaves in less than an hour and a half. Not including the two hour security line, she will be lucky to even make it to the airport by the time her flight leaves. With bus pass in hand I hop on to a shuttle bus with a young guy in a tie-dyed shirt and afro. After work, around 9 pm, I am sitting across from a drug store. A woman appears to be helping her significant other make his way inside. He looks as if he is so drunk that he can hardly walk. She may be carrying a cardboard sign.
The following day, I am at my new regular bus stop, a short walk from home. The first guy to stop by offers me his bus transfer. I've seen several passengers around here doing so this summer. The next couple of guys I hear laughing before I see them come along. They sit on a low concrete wall at the bus stop. One is slurring his speech. The other does most of the talking. He tells the other that he went to Sonic to get a strawberry milk shake, because he saw a picture of it with pieces of strawberry. When he got it, there were no pieces in his. "That's the whole reason I went there, dude." He mentions that, when he quit drinking, he went to Dairy Queen. He began walking there, but it started to rain. The other one says that, yeah, he goes there when he doesn't drink. I feel like I'm in some kind of weird fast food commercial. The sober one says that his wife used to make the best ice cream sandwiches. She made him an ice cream cake for his birthday. But, he says, "I got tired of her bitching." A couple of hours later, I am at the shopping center where I work. I was skeptical about the forecast for rain when thunder begins crackling across the sky, followed by sheets of rain. The thunder gets so loud, is sounds like artillery bursts directly overhead. One sounds like an atomic blast, setting off a car alarm. At 9 PM, I am back in my own neighborhood. I usually sit under a tree near the stop for the bus home, away from the bench where the drunks usually gather. This evening, the drunks are under a tree, and I sit on the bench. A guy in a wheelchair is handing a 40 oz bottle of beer to a couple of other guys. One of them comes shuffling up to me. I saw him last week, I think it was, at this same time and place. He asked me if I was enjoying the evening before he asked me for a cigarette. They way he speaks is barely intelligible. Though he appears to have no trouble making drunk friends. Upon this illustrious evening, on top of being at the very edge of being comprehended, he speaks is a whisper of a voice. It's barely audible over a boulevard full of street racers. "Can you help me out?" With money. I can just make him out. I truly wonder what he does if anyone doesn't hear him and, as a result, doesn't notice him. So I say nothing. His response is, "All you have to do is say no." He shuffles back to the beer tree.
The following day, I decide to try a closer bus stop after work. I walk away from the shopping center, and with a few steps I am immediately submerged in a suburb as the sun is going down. As if I have taken some kind of drug, I am suddenly taken back to my early school years. A parade of children come up the opposite sidewalk on razor scooters, surely on a last days adventure before bedtime. Trees, everywhere are tall trees. From this boulevard branches out residential streets. Homes with green lawns and lampposts. Lights will be coming on in the windows as the scooters come in at last. The bus comes and whisks me off to the train station. I hop on a train, where I am looking at seven young coeds spread across four seats. All chatting away and wearing sun dresses. Six are blonde. All have straight hair. The train drops me off at a bus, which gets be back n my street around 9 PM. Before I disembark, it pulls through an intersection. At one bus stop on the opposite corner, I watch one of three guys digging in his pockets, as if he is looking for change. As I cross the intersection, I hear one of them say, "Runner!" I watch as one guy comes running diagonally across the busy intersection. He passes me and says, "Runner!" before he runs into the liquor store which used to be a fish restaurant. I look in the drive-thru window as a young clerk with g lasses looks out at me. I hear cars honk at the same guy as he runs back to his pals.
When the insurgency launched its offensive in April... "The April attacks just changed everything. It was a full-out war. Everything was allowed. I remember a company commander saying on the net that he didn't have room to maneuver an Abrams tank. The batallion commander said, 'Park it in the house, just park it in the house.' It was like World War II." - Ricks
Man I've seen the swat team so many times in this neighborhood. SOMEONE please tell me why swat with big guns and dogs just came and searched my entire property?
Guy just ran down my driveway and hid in our bushes. - Westwood Residents Association FB page, 7/26/15
Saturday. I'm off work and at the bus stop. Parked nearby is a shiny new jeep, or Hummer, or something. It's called a "Rubicon," and I watch as another with a small open bed is pulling out. I wonder if there is a new dealership around somewhere. The one parked has shiny, new "mud-grade" tires. I doubt if they will ever see any mud. The following morning is quite a time at the supermarket. A couple of homeless guys are strolling past, not actually having gone inside. One asks me, "Hey buddy, got a quarter left?" At the bus stop, a trio of young adults are smoking a joint. Another guy, slowly, slowly coming across the street, is both young and homeless. he has dreadlocks and his clothes are hanging off of his body.
Monday. Shortly after 9 AM. I'm at a bus stop across the street from where I live. There's a girl at one end of the bench, and a middle-aged guy at the other. As soon as I get there, the middle-aged guy says what I think is, "Petrified Bigfoot for bus change." I get it. I'm supposed to be a secret agent, he's my undercover contact, and this is the agreed upon phrase by which I will know who he is. I believe that he was actually saying petrified "wood." He has a backpack, from which he is removing, one at a time, individual pieces of what appear to in fact be pieces of petrified wood. He is placing them on the ground in a line. Before I can get a shot of him, the bus shows up. He does not get on board. He does not attempt to barter with his wood. Up the street, I head over to my usual deathburger, where I see a local drunk. I saw him last week, admonishing me for not answering him. I saw him last month, with his shirt off at my previous usual bus stop.This morning, he has breakfast in hand. He's wearing a Tommy Bahama buttoned down shirt, completely open as he moseys away. At 9:30, I'm at my previous old bus stop. In the shelter is a woman yelling into her phone. In the shade, on the grass, is a couple who appear to be street folk. They are laughing at the woman in the shelter. "It's not that I'm not talking to my best friend, it's that my boyfriend is an asshole! That;s my fucking house, and if that twat doesn't like it, I'll show you!" Apparently, there are both an asshole boyfriend and a twat involved. This can't be good. 12 PM. I had a dentist appointment in a neighborhood I lived in for sixteen years. Opulence, health food, and bike paths. At a stop for my bus to work, a hefty guy comes along with a bike and sits on the bench. On one handlebar appears to hang a cap for the U.S.S. Kennedy. He wears a jersey for the U.S. Navy football team. On his head is a bike helmet, with a big red light on the back, and an even larger headlamp on the front. With a Texas accent, he mentions the discourtesies of the neighborhood's drivers. "And if I end up in the hospital, you know who's payin' for it? They are." I wonder how a Navy man would fare on my side of town. He wants to know what time the bus comes. I tell him that the #24 will be here at 12:34 PM. He thinks that I said 12:24. "It's a minute late," he decides. "That's why I think that (the transit system) doesn't need a fare increase. Their service has gotten pretty bad." Beginning the first of next year, a monthly bus pass will be over $100.
Tuesday. I get on a bus with a young woman. She sees another young woman she recognizes. They are both strikingly similar in appearance. Both are overweight, wearing halter tops, and have long, straight, dyed hair. Both of them have sketchbooks. One is gossiping about some kind of math class she is taking. They both seem out of place here somehow. She then excitedly mentions finding an ad for employment at a nursing home. The other one responds with excitement also. At the train station, a train whisks me to my bus stop at a private university where I find a spot in the shade. The rains of the past three months are long gone, and this week is seeing temps in the high 90s. A cool breeze blows. What a beautiful day to go swimming. Instead, I sit next to a college-type in a T-shirt which reads "believe in heroes." Around 1:30 PM, I'm at the shopping center where I work. At my usual hang out, today must be mother/daughter. One pair has exactly the same hair. And the pattern on the daughter's dress is almost exactly like the one on the mom's blouse. On the bus, two woman who appear to be seeking independence. Here, two women defining each other. On a bus home after work, I sit behind a guy on his phone. He is seeking clarification for the Holy Day of Atonement. 9 PM. I'm at a bus stop back in my own neighborhood. Along comes a guy in what looks like a pith helmet. He has a couple of tall beers in a plastic bag. He stops on the opposite side of the tree I'm under to look for something. He pulls something in another plastic bag out from under his shirt, and ends up unbuckling his pants. He reaches down one pant leg, presumably to see if there is anything else in his clothes. He asks me if I am waiting for the bus. On the bench are Mr. and Mrs. Anybody's Dad. The Mr. does a brief panhandle out on the median of the boulevard before coming back. Mr. Pith Helmet spots a car with its lights off, accelerating down the street. He yells at it, dramatically extending his neck forward, for the driver to turn his lights on. The couple come up to where he is, and the three of them attempt to make out a vehicle which is long gone. The drunken woman looses her balance before recovering. The couple has with them a small black and white dog without a leash. The dog appears to be the only one who is not drunk as they go on their merry way.
Wednesday. 10:30 AM I get across the street from where I live. In the shelter are four people, spread out across two benches. At either end is a guy asleep with his cap over his face. In the middle is a young couple. The guy looks like a character out of Easy Rider. The girl, with her long straight hair and sandals, could have walked out of any 1970s TV police drama. They both are staring into space through half open lids, and appear as if they are stoned on heroin. None of the four get on the bus when it comes. Ten hours later, I am watching a beautiful sunset behind the Rockies from the train station. Laying on the cement, against a chain link construction fence, is a guy who at first glance appears to have nothing wrong with him. He isn't thin, or dirty, or wearing tattered clothes. He is, however, in handcuffs. And three transit system officers stand next to him. I hear him say, "This is it. I got no place else to go. This is it." A police car shows up, followed by an ambulance. He appears to be put into the ambulance. My bus comes and a guy gets on with a two-day old transfer. He asks the driver where a particular train station is. It's the station where we are parked. He asks the driver a second time, and again he tells him, we're here. I sit behind a couple of guys who appear to not necessarily be all there. One has phone numbers in black marker on his forearm and hand. The three of us arrive at my last bus stop a half hour later, along with a collection of others. One guy I don't recognize. He has no shirt. Firecrackers go off across the street and someone from the bench whistles approval. Suddenly the shirtless guy jumps up in apparent anger, looking at the ground. When the bus comes, both he and the guy sitting next to him begin half speaking/half growling. I get on the bus with the pair from the other bus. I sit across from a guy on his phone, talking to someone about having sex with his girlfriend. The guy with the numbers thanks him, either for a lighter or a cigarette.
Thursday. A quarter to noon. From my new usual bus stop, I watch as a sheriff department van pulls a flatbed into my alley. I wonder if inmates are going to clean up my neighborhood. The following day is the last day of the month. I find myself across the street at the bus stop at 7:15 AM. Sitting on the bench is a little woman who appears old enough to be a grandma. She's in a white undershirt which reveals an assortment of gang tattoos. Below her grey buzz cut is a black eye. She offers me a small bag of marijuana, about an inch square, in exchange for bus fare. I decline. She asks me what time it is because her "phone's all broke." I direct her attention to a time and temperature sign across the street. In a couple of days, I will turn fifty years old. I own a home which I've refinanced, and I've survived an ownership transition of the company which I've worked for over a decade. I look at this woman and wonder how she got to this spot. Does she have grandchildren which she takes to the zoo? I head up the street to my old deathburger. Parked outside is a shopping cart. In the cart is an enormous olive duffel bag with an open cloth briefcase on top of it. Inside the case is an English language textbook. I watch the owner come outside and head over to his cart. I head up to my old bus stop. Yesterday, I was on a train home with some guys arguing the height of American fighter pilots. This morning, I walk past a young guy with sleeve tattoos and a Raiders cap. Thirteen hours later, I am back at the train station, to get on a bus back to my neighborhood. A couple of ladies and a guy are standing together before one of the women asks me if I " would like a flyer about Jesus returning, sir?" I didn't think that anyone else standing here appeared to want it, so I accepted it. Sitting on the curb with her legs in the street is a young woman who looks like a runaway. As our bus approaches, the driver has to honk at her before she gets up to move. She sits back down before getting up again to get on the bus.
Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman... Only four years earlier his sanity had been widely questioned. Now, at forty-six, he was the hero of Atlanta and already..surpassed in popular esteem only by Ulysses S. Grant, and the ruler of a military domain sweeping west from the Mississippi River to the crest of the Rocky Mountains... ...his conviction that Americans must meet the West's challenge...and make it a viable part of the Republic. The surge of migration would add a million citizens to the census rolls of the western states and territories between 1860 and 1870 and another two and one-half million by 1880. In 1866 only a handful of tribes retained the power and will to contest the westward movement. In the Rocky Mountains they were the Nez Perce', Ute, and Bannock. Totalling less than one hundred thousand people, these "hostile" Indians engaged the Whites in the final struggle for the American West. Whites offered opportunities for plunder and honor... ...after 1866... At stake were no less homeland, subsistence, and way of life. Yet only dimly, if at all, did...perceive their final wars with the whites in these apocalyptic terms... ...the U.S. Army. ...had followed the Indian frontier over the Appalachian Mountains, across the praries and woodlands of the continent's heartland, finally to the plains, mountains, and deserts... - Frontier Regulars, 1866 - 1890, by R. M. Utley, 1973
