Back by popular request.
I don't remember the winter too well. Or, rather, I don't remember the sequence of events. I don't remember a timeline, just disconnected flashes. Honestly my memory is spotty in general and it doesn't usually matter too much, but it does seem to matter that this feels less like routine "not routing information into long-term storage" and more like a thing I am ineffectively trying not to hold onto. All of my memories of winter have been distorted beyond use by me trying to pry them out of my own grasp almost as soon as they were formed.
What do you do when you can't remember? You build a narrative with what you can piece together, I guess, or wait until you forget that you ought to be remembering something. Usually I opt for the latter because I'm wary of my own tendency to self-mythologize, but so many other people went through the same shit I did that there's a handy counterbalance to aggrandizement. Also somehow just knowing that parallel experiences are being held by other people makes the unwholeness of my own recollections feel disloyal, like I'm failing to uphold an obligation to a collective memory.
I remember kneeling in the snow trying over and over again to light the propane heater. Always the moment where I have to purposely slow myself down to deliberate motions even though my hands are freezing. It's a trick I cribbed from some Jack London story or other that always works, I've become an expert at this stupid heater because everyone else is nervous of it. To be honest I am too, it seems too good to be true that a 35 pound tank of gas with an open flame on top is safe, but we don't really have another option and in addition to keeping folks warm it's also very handy to light cigarettes on. It's never too cold for a smoker being released from the jail to refuse a Newport.
I remember a feeling of bracing to catch people. This is a composite or fabrication but a group of young men coming through the gate across the street, We're scanning them, trying to anticipate. One is in a t-shirt, the rest in long sleeves but no coats, all have their arms wrapped around their bodies, the tongues of their shoes are flapping because their shoelaces are in the plastic pouches the jail uses to consolidate peoples' property. Two or three other volunteers are grabbing hoodies from the clothing bin and they hold them out to the young men who take them like runners take cups of water, because they almost always were running the last ten or twenty feet, or slipping rather on the sidewalk in front of the tent we never quite managed to clear of ice. Hats and gloves are snatched from the table where we laid them out. The first few seconds are chaos, always, and we hustle people toward the glow of the heaters and then it's tight and anxious minutes of sorting out who needs to go where, who has a ride coming, phone calls, maybe a couple people suck down a smoke.
Then in about 15 minutes it's quiet again, just volunteers re-stocking, trudging in circles around the tent to stay warm. I shake a couple water bottles to see if they're frozen through yet, and set the hardest ones on a chair in front of the heaters in the vain hope that they'll thaw. I light a cigarette and bum one to another volunteer and we chitchat, stamping our feet in the small area we dug out of the knee-high snow. We talk about the eco-friendly chemical hand warmers someone donated don't work, astrology, just dumb shit to make a friendly noise. It helps.
Then the feeling of bracing to catch people, the scene of clamor and desperation, grace notes where a released guy makes jokes, and then we do that maybe one or on a bad day two more times before our shift ends and second shift comes to relieve us. It has only been three hours and despite the layers and layers of socks and wool long johns and sweaters I can't feel my toes, I can't feel my legs. It's dark and it feels like it has always been dark, the days are so short. The sodium glare of the streetlights throws overlapping shadows that are exhausting to decrypt.
It seems like nothing, right, or melodramatic. It's almost better when all I could say is "It was bad. It was so fucking bad." It's so bad that you forget why it's happening, it's so bad that you forget that it doesn't have to happen. There is no larger narrative you can hold onto in the moment, which didn't even occur to me then but now is really frightening.
It took me a long time to realize that there it's not stealing valor or whatever for me to admit that I have experienced harm, however voluntary (in the sense that responding to a hostage situation is voluntary) at the hands of the jail. There is no meaning to be derived from attempting to parse the degrees of suffering that separate me from someone who was incarcerated, because there are only different types of damage. And there is no meaning to be derived from suffering anyway, I suspect, at least not the type inflicted by a county jail.
It's much more pleasant now. It's positively balmy, the trees have new leaves and the geese stroll along the median where we post up, though we do chase them away when they get too close because if we give them an inch they'll overrun the snack table for sure. As a group we're starting to be able to look forward again which brings its own worries, because I can't imagine I'm the only one who wonders if we can keep this up. Maybe the day will come when I personally can't, maybe someone else will take my place, maybe this turns into a million-dollar-a-year nonprofit that ends up subsumed in city politics. Maybe in fifty years the jail comes down and it won't actually have mattered too too much in the grand scheme of things if I was there in the winter or not. If I could truly understand all the myriad branching ramifications of my actions I likely would be to scared to actually do anything, so probably best to just keep plugging along just in case. This did help.
What do you do when you can't remember? You build a narrative with what you can piece together, I guess, or wait until you forget that you ought to be remembering something. Usually I opt for the latter because I'm wary of my own tendency to self-mythologize, but so many other people went through the same shit I did that there's a handy counterbalance to aggrandizement. Also somehow just knowing that parallel experiences are being held by other people makes the unwholeness of my own recollections feel disloyal, like I'm failing to uphold an obligation to a collective memory.
I remember kneeling in the snow trying over and over again to light the propane heater. Always the moment where I have to purposely slow myself down to deliberate motions even though my hands are freezing. It's a trick I cribbed from some Jack London story or other that always works, I've become an expert at this stupid heater because everyone else is nervous of it. To be honest I am too, it seems too good to be true that a 35 pound tank of gas with an open flame on top is safe, but we don't really have another option and in addition to keeping folks warm it's also very handy to light cigarettes on. It's never too cold for a smoker being released from the jail to refuse a Newport.
I remember a feeling of bracing to catch people. This is a composite or fabrication but a group of young men coming through the gate across the street, We're scanning them, trying to anticipate. One is in a t-shirt, the rest in long sleeves but no coats, all have their arms wrapped around their bodies, the tongues of their shoes are flapping because their shoelaces are in the plastic pouches the jail uses to consolidate peoples' property. Two or three other volunteers are grabbing hoodies from the clothing bin and they hold them out to the young men who take them like runners take cups of water, because they almost always were running the last ten or twenty feet, or slipping rather on the sidewalk in front of the tent we never quite managed to clear of ice. Hats and gloves are snatched from the table where we laid them out. The first few seconds are chaos, always, and we hustle people toward the glow of the heaters and then it's tight and anxious minutes of sorting out who needs to go where, who has a ride coming, phone calls, maybe a couple people suck down a smoke.
Then in about 15 minutes it's quiet again, just volunteers re-stocking, trudging in circles around the tent to stay warm. I shake a couple water bottles to see if they're frozen through yet, and set the hardest ones on a chair in front of the heaters in the vain hope that they'll thaw. I light a cigarette and bum one to another volunteer and we chitchat, stamping our feet in the small area we dug out of the knee-high snow. We talk about the eco-friendly chemical hand warmers someone donated don't work, astrology, just dumb shit to make a friendly noise. It helps.
Then the feeling of bracing to catch people, the scene of clamor and desperation, grace notes where a released guy makes jokes, and then we do that maybe one or on a bad day two more times before our shift ends and second shift comes to relieve us. It has only been three hours and despite the layers and layers of socks and wool long johns and sweaters I can't feel my toes, I can't feel my legs. It's dark and it feels like it has always been dark, the days are so short. The sodium glare of the streetlights throws overlapping shadows that are exhausting to decrypt.
It seems like nothing, right, or melodramatic. It's almost better when all I could say is "It was bad. It was so fucking bad." It's so bad that you forget why it's happening, it's so bad that you forget that it doesn't have to happen. There is no larger narrative you can hold onto in the moment, which didn't even occur to me then but now is really frightening.
It took me a long time to realize that there it's not stealing valor or whatever for me to admit that I have experienced harm, however voluntary (in the sense that responding to a hostage situation is voluntary) at the hands of the jail. There is no meaning to be derived from attempting to parse the degrees of suffering that separate me from someone who was incarcerated, because there are only different types of damage. And there is no meaning to be derived from suffering anyway, I suspect, at least not the type inflicted by a county jail.
It's much more pleasant now. It's positively balmy, the trees have new leaves and the geese stroll along the median where we post up, though we do chase them away when they get too close because if we give them an inch they'll overrun the snack table for sure. As a group we're starting to be able to look forward again which brings its own worries, because I can't imagine I'm the only one who wonders if we can keep this up. Maybe the day will come when I personally can't, maybe someone else will take my place, maybe this turns into a million-dollar-a-year nonprofit that ends up subsumed in city politics. Maybe in fifty years the jail comes down and it won't actually have mattered too too much in the grand scheme of things if I was there in the winter or not. If I could truly understand all the myriad branching ramifications of my actions I likely would be to scared to actually do anything, so probably best to just keep plugging along just in case. This did help.