Do Trees Like Me?
Inventory from April 3, 2025. Returning to reality (ish).
It was cold and I didn’t want to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag.
I thought about this passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations,
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work - as a human being.
What do I have to complain of if I am going to do what I was born for? The things I was brought into the world to do?
Or is this what I was created for?
To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
I closed my eyes. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wrestle with the question too long before my bladder started moo-ing. I crawled out of my sleeping bag onto the damp ground and began a duck walk towards a spot under the bridge tall enough for me to stand upright.
I peed onto some bushes. I wondered if plants can determine a person’s character by their pee. Maybe they were partial towards some of us and impartial towards others. I wondered about all the times in my life I had peed on plants and how different of a person I might have been each time. There must have been times when the trees laughed at me, or maybe other times, they felt there was a lesson I needed to learn, or maybe they got annoyed with me because of how stubborn I could be. I wondered if they guided humans. Was I a better man now than I was before? Would the trees and plants be willing to help me now?
I wondered how these plants might communicate with each other. If this bush under this bridge in Redwood City could communicate to the olive tree I climbed in the hospice in Vegas. I wondered if they were all connected. I remembered sitting under a tree in Grass Valley, jumping off a tree into the ocean at a place called the End of the World, trees that saw me lay next to a lover and trees that saw me cry… or the tree I fell out of when I was pretending to be Tarzan at 8 years old, falling 15 feet, the first time in my life where the wind was knocked out of me, and I was left gasping for breath.
I stood thinking about these ideas for a while when the sun peeked out over the glass buildings and it’s rays slid under the bridge and landed on my skin like honey. Oftentimes, when I feel the sun, I visualize chemicals flooding underneath the surface of my skin. I don’t know if it’s just blood moving, but in my head, I imagined these chemicals finding their way to some of the missing gaps inside of my body.
Warmer and freer than I had been moments before, I made the duck walk 30 or so feet back to my spot under the bridge. I was in awe. It was the first time in months that I looked at inanimate objects with any form of joy, let alone trust. I hadn’t fully gotten rid of the idea that material objects might still be controlled by unknown forces in a blockchain governing the laws of our universe. But whereas my belief in these forces had manifested itself over and over again in paranoid ways for months - the inverted belief was actually nice. These items might be working with me and for me. Not against me. I think it’s even better than no belief at all.
The morning of April 3, 2025, this was the inventory of my life:
A blue REI mummy sleeping bag (taken from Savers)
A silver Thermos (taken from Savers)
A sleeping bag case to keep my sleeping bag compact (taken from Sports Basement)
Portable Jetpower fuel (taken from Sports Basement)
Jet Oil portable backpacking stove (taken from Sports Basement)
Some matches (taken from Sports Basement)
A small silver pot (taken from Goodwill)
Some tortillas (taken from Safeway)
Taro Root (taken from Safeway)
One and half liter, half drank Crystal Geyser water bottle (taken from Safeway)
A pair of socks (taken from Macys)
Black Nike Cortez shoes (I don’t remember I got them or how long ago)
Grey Marine Layer hoodie (purchased at the Good Wolf)
Green Lulu Lemon pants (purchase at Lulu Lemon)
25 liter backpack (purchased on Amazon)
Toothbrush (from St. Anthony’s)
Medical tape, wrap, and bandaids (from some homeless shelter)
Copy of Don Quixote (stolen from the main SF Library)
A couple of yellow #2 pencils (selectively chosen from the 5th floor of the SF Library)
A California ID
Some trash to throw away
Most of this I had acquired over the last week. Some of the clothes were the only remnants from my life before.
I began packing my bag. After one night, I was flush with the confidence of a seasoned off-grid survivalist. How quickly confidence emerges in man. I felt I only needed a couple more items and I could survive anywhere, survive any condition, survive anything at all. I packed my bag and felt I was heavier now than before. A compromise to the lightness of nothing. You need some things to live.
Another feeling knocked, and one that I knew all too well from before.
Shame.
Shame said, “Hey, you got this bag. This might be your survival kit. But you are now announcing to the world that you are, in fact, homeless. You are a billboard for the vagabond. Tsssk. Tsssk.”
I had seen myself as a traveler, abducted into this hellscape. This was my contrition, my retribution, and I was finally just beginning to feel like the hero of my own journey. I was beginning to feel like maybe there was some way out of this. And as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, I was suddenly confronted with this other thought. I cared what other people might think of me again, in a reality where we weren’t all dead, but in fact, living.
Will they frown at me or pity me? They might not even look at me. But the thought of what someone else might think - it made itself known.
But it was just a knock, a friendly hello. A shadow to acknowledge. You don’t have to invite everyone into your home, but it’s nice to be kind to your neighbors.
I climbed out from under the bridge, onto the road, and headed the mile or so back to the center of Redwood City. It was still too early for the library. Beginning to trust the world a little more, I figured the Human Services Agency might be worth learning more about. I needed to figure out the food problem.
I walked the mile from the main library, past the Costco, to the San Mateo Human Service Agency in Redwood City. I was still early. If you go to places like the library or government service buildings before they open, you might find a flock of homeless people. You see more freedom of spirit among the homeless than the general population. But there is also more despair. And tiredness. Many are not completely strung out or crazy like you are often led to believe. Sure, some are. But many just don’t fit into the capitalistic system. They get stuck in concrete cities and bureaucracy and the heaviness of the systems and the limiting nature of the human mind.
When the office opened, I was given a number like the DMV. The Mexicans were called first. The Spanish speaking agents looked nice and helpful. I have come to believe that the Spanish speakers get better services than the English speakers at the Human Service Agency in Redwood City. I don’t think there’s any grand conspiratorial reason. I believe it’s because Spanish speakers are generally nicer people than English speakers. There is an inherent desire to want to help your neighbor whereas many English speakers in bureaucratic systems are not always so welcoming. But that’s my bias. It’s not tested. It’s a generalization. It’s my jump to an explanation based on an observation and some context that will be given, eventually, in a future story.
Finally my number was called.
A nice woman. She might have been Polish or maybe she was from Pennsylvania. She asked a couple of questions about my income, assets, and residency. Zero, zero, none. She told me that I could qualify for some emergency food stamps usually within 24 or 48 hours, but they could be taken back if I don’t submit the documents to prove my homeless status in San Mateo County within 10 days.
“How does one prove they are homeless?”
She said, “You can grab a letter from a case worker or a social worker from the homeless shelter. Have them sign it and then bring it back to us.”
Easy enough. I figured I could ask the woman who had let me stay at the Navigation Center in Redwood City a few nights back.
I asked how much money I would get in food stamps?
“$292”
“Wow,” I was genuinely surprised. What had been one of my biggest challenges was seemingly so quickly resolved with a couple of questions and answers.
I went to the library next door to check my email, research some defense strategies for my upcoming case, and plan my next movement.
My calendar for the next while unfolded itself. I had to be in San Francisco on April 8 for my court case where I was defending myself. On April 12, my mom had emailed me to say, there was a celebration of life happening for my grandma in Vegas. And then on April 16, I was due in a Vegas courtroom for the tree incident at the hospice.
Now that food stamps were coming my way, the concept of money crept back into my mind. In death, money didn’t mean anything. If I was living, money was beginning to take shape as resource.
I remembered some conversations with my grandma. She had told me that each of the grandkids was to get $10,000. I figured that might be coming within a couple of months. All that my journey necessitated right now was to learn how to survive the present and reach closure on the legal messes of my past.
I looked at Google Maps on the library computer and found what I believed to be a good destination. North of the Golden Gate Bridge, into the Marin Headlands and maybe as far as Mt. Tam or Point Reyes. I figured I could set up a proper camp somewhere in the woods.
I walked back to the central station in Redwood City and hopped on the Cal Train back to downtown SF. Before heading north, I stopped at the main branch of the SF Library. I reached into my bag and pulled out the stolen copy of Don Quixote. I hadn’t read too much of it. I had primarily kept it with me as an energetic companion. I didn’t need this book anymore though. I was going on my journey, not someone else’s. I dropped the book off.
I caught a bus heading towards the Presidio. One of the great things about the public buses in San Francisco is that you are rarely penalized for not paying the fare; it feels like an unspoken public subsidy for the vagabonds. I figured I’d catch the sunset over the Golden Gate before making the trek over. As the sun rays disappeared, the air turned brisk and cold, the people disappeared, the morning chemicals disappeared, my legs became heavy, the confidence wavered, I realized I may have overestimated my abilities.
I ended up on a long linear path called Lover’s Lane heading down towards the water. I didn’t want to make my presence known to the houses on the side of the trail, so I moved fast. At the end of Lover’s Lane, I found a bridge to a dirt trail that was darker and more concealed. I could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a coyote up ahead crossing the path.
Survival is a lot trickier in the dark than in the morning sun. But I was surprised about my eyes. They felt like they could see in the dark better than they ever had. My eyes were getting better without a phone straining them every minute of every day.
As I moved on, the house lights and street lights disappeared in distance, and the only light which remained was the faint glow of the sliver of the moon falling beneath the crevices of the trees. I trusted the intuitive pull of the woods. I took a few blind turns, off the trail, guided, until I literally stumbled onto a massive, collapsed tree. It was far enough away from the trail that morning joggers wouldn’t stumble on me. It was surreally perfect. It was actually 3 large trunks that had collapsed creating what seemed like walls and a roof to a shelter. Or a sanctuary.
I dropped my bag, unrolled my sleeping bag. I took off my shoes. I wandered a little ways into the brush and took a pee in the dark. I thought back to the morning in Redwood City and wondered if the root networks had communicated with each other. I believe they did.
This tree would become my home for the next week, and the anchor for the journey ahead. I had found shelter.
(photo taken May 2025, Presidio, California. The bag depicted is an evolution from the bag described in this article)