On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the local media—not just in this city, but in any town—often show up at places where the homeless assemble. Usually, the angles all but write themselves: a school group is working at a soup kitchen; an ex-member of the homeless community is “giving back”; or a tragedy has occurred, such as someone freezing or starving to death. And then December 26 rolls around and the stories slow.
Just a couple nights back, on December 26, I visited the northern end of the St. Louis riverfront. The homeless encampment known as Hopeville, USA was blanketed in a combination of ice and snow. With the Mississippi River just on the other side of the flood wall, the area had that extra cold that you get near a waterfront during the winter. It was windy, and bone-chilling, with temps dropping to the mid-teens over the next few hours.
By 9 p.m., Hopeville was already in an overnight mode. Everyone and everything was under cover. Only a few sounds were heard as we marched through at a crisp pace. Some folks could be heard murmuring in tents. A few called out, to see if a friend or neighbor were responsible for the crunching-through-snow coming from outside their flaps.
In the dead of winter, the structures there seemed more dramatic somehow. In some cases, the tents had been added onto sheets of metal or scrap wood, with some actual, makeshift buildings cropping up on the perimeters. From those tiny houses, wisps of smoke were sneaking out, compliments of the small fires inside, sometimes visible through the cracks in the walls or from the strange, orange glows.
Our time there was relatively short, with only a rabbit passing through for company, until the last minute, when a white van pulled into a single parking space in the northern quadrant of Hopeville. The driver popped out and began unloading things. A nearby storehouse glowed yellow, tucked up on the higher ridge of housing. Fires burned within each of the tent circles, one actually roaring, the others flickering down to embers. From just beyond the tents and shacks, the glow of the Lumiere Casino could be seen.
There are many reasons why people wind up Hopeville. I know from having talked to some of them back in the summer that there’s a real contingent that wants to opt out of workaday society. But to walk through Hopeville on a bitterly cold night and feel, really feel, the vibe there, is to experience the essence of the phrase “eerie calm.” It’s not a mood you’d want hanging over you your whole life.
