This morning Victor saw something he'd never seen before.  There is a
large flock, at least a hundred maybe two hundred, of sparrows that can be
seen in different places around his home camp.  Sometimes they surround the
camp while they forage.  Today he saw them when hiking in the hills behind the
windmill.  He was half a mile from camp, descending a cactus strewn hillside
into some mixed plants and scrub mesquite just above the wash and riparian
area, on his way back home.  The sparrows were fltting in and out of the bushes
and grass on th elower part of the hillside.  They allowed Victor to walk into
the center of the group which was spread out over a couple of acres.  The flock
was spread over a couple of acres and as Victor slowly ambled on his way they
were traversing the ground at the same rate and in the same direction so that
he remained in their center.  Suddenly, in front of him, fifty or sixty of them
lifted fifteen feet out of the shrubage and, forming a dense sphere about ten
feet in diameter they flew directly towards him and at a shallow downward
angle.  Victor felt thrilled, amused and a little bemused by this unusual
behavior.  Understanding came when he noticed the Perigrine falcon following the
flight.  The sparrows flew beyond Victor and he turned to see them dive into
some thicker trees and bushes.  As they settled the falcon swoooped into them
and then flew off in a long low arc across the wash and into the mesquite
forest.  The preditor stayed under the line of the treetops but Victor glimpsed
a feathery ball clutched in his talons.  He couldn't help thinking the sparrows
had flown towards him seeking protection.  Was it like an appeal to authority?
He hopes they will still visit his camp.  He likes them but there was nothing he
could do.



   Victor wants to survive but he has little security anymore.  At any time
he can be forced to abandon any property he is unable to carry on his back
and bicycle.  Any law enforcement officer from any agency needs only tell
him to move on.  If the bicycle is in need of repair that day, as is often
the case, he must lose that too.  The alternative is jail and having the
property carried to and impound yard where he'll never be able to retrieve
it.  His life isn't comfortable by normal standards but he's adjusted to it.
He has decent cooking gear, a collection of herbs and spices and a pantry
(milk crates) well stocked with the little things that make cooking and
eating fun.  He has established a routine of wood gathering, fire building
and cooking that is almost reassuring.  He goes fifty miles to Tucson when
he needs to access the net and half that distance if he just needs food and
supplies.  He flies a sign when he needs money.
   His day to day struggle to survive is not that interesting and wouldn't
even be unusual if he'd had the freedom of choice we take for granted.  He
didn't choose to live alone in the desert.  He established a retreat where
he could have some peace and quite.  When his Chinook broke down in Tucson
he was lucky to get his PV array, batteries and inverter, along with his
computer, down to the camp before the police towed the camper.  That day
they bulldozed the "hooches" and ran off or arrested all the tramps living
near the  Santa Cruz River and Ajo Way.  All had been give warning but
thought they could reason with the city and save their homes.  Most lost
everything to the unnatural calamity.  Victor didn't trust the "homeless
advocates to protect his "rights" or property.  He lost less than most that
day.
    Most of the homeless stay in cities where there is no hospitality.  The
general population find them contemptable or pitiable.  The Police are sent
to harass them intermittantly; usually at the insistance of some politician
trying to create publicity for himself by first introducing fear and
insecurity then offering his protection by attacking those with no means to
defend themselves.  That's what happened to the people along the Santa Cruz.
Food and shelter are more readily available than in the wilderness but
Victor doesn't care to tolerate all the hassle.  He's not afraid of it and he
deals with it when he must.  It just seems futile to him.  The programs
offered to the homeless don't seem likely to increase his chances of
successfully completing his life or extending it to a normal duration.
   The System we have contrived to meet our basic and extended needs is no
longer reliable for those like Victor:  the unpeople.  Once they achieve
that status they usually only live three to five years.  Starvation and
nutrition related diseases, exposure, lack of medical attention and street
violence claim many.  Peers and the expectations of society encourage
alcohol and substance abuse.  The dormitories provided  by rescue services
allow contact with body and head lice, atheletes foot, aids and drug
resistent TB.  These characteristics of the available help annoy Vic and so,
obviously, he doesn't consider the resouces for the homeless to be very
useful.  He knows most of the people involved in trying to help are sincere
and caring.  At least at the lower levels there are none deliberately
cynical enough to wage biological warfare against the poor.  Not yet anyway
thinks Victor.  That is, they haven't thought about what they are doing yet.
What's being done and what's just being allowed to happen through
[cultivated] ignorance is irrelevant to Victor.  The delusion that society
is not responsible for what's happening is a major issue for him.  With no
power Victor has no influence.  People will continue to be deluded and
society is unlikely to change.
   But Victor likes his lonely desert camp.  And the more he thinks
about the overall situation in society the happier he is about being able to
get away from it.  If only it could last.  But as I said the game warden told
him for the third time that permanent camping is not allowed on state land.
In fact, he's not even allowed to be there without a permit of some sort.
If he's not leasing the land for grazing or mining and is not there for
hunting, with the appropriate documentation, he's trespassing.  Trespassing
on public property.  Well he can't get a ticket on the space shuttle and he
has no money to buy land.  Where can he go?  Apparently no where on Planet
Earth!  The Tucson city council has made their feelings known.  He assumes
it's no better in other cities and small towns don't warm up to newcomers
very fast or to homeless, broke ones at all.  Jail is beginning to look like
the most likely and dependable source of food, shelter and a bonus: a medical
and dental plan.  Vic hasn't seen a doctor or dentist for four years.
   He wants his physical freedom too.  The problem is where?  He's willing
to try to provide his own food, shelter and clothing.  At least to depend on
society less and less as he learns how to hunt, gather and make his own.
However, if human societies monopolize all the land and resources on the
planet, and we do.  Where can he go and relieve us of our responsibility to
care for him?
   Are we responsible?  Without the lock hold on human survival we might be
able to wiggle out of it.  But humanity is in denial.  We want to claim the
right to control and administer the entire planet and all the life on it but
refuse to recognize that we are then accountable for all that life.
Including superfluous human life.  A few are making more money by displacing
employees (lean and mean).  Does that excuse them and the rest of us who are
complicit by our silence from dealing with the chaos we have created? Created
for shortsighted greed, in the lives of so many, while the rest of us strut
arround pretentiously presuming to dominate the life of the entire planet?
Will the majority remain myopic even when it happens to them?
   With those thoughts still in his mind, Victor, with painfull consciousness
of irony and unhappy synchronicity, watched the Game Warden pull up in a four
wheel drive Fish and Game pickup followed by a Blazer with light bar and
Sheriff's insignia and two deputies inside.  The Warden walked back to the
deputies, who were just emerging from their vehicle, and spoke to them.  They
remained by the doors while the familiar peace officer walked over to Victor.
   "Victor, you know I didn't want to bother you out here but the State Land
Department sent these deputies to evict you and my boss told me to help them
find you.  I didn't have any choice."
   "Nobody ever wants to do dirty jobs, Joe, but you got to cover your butt.
Everything I have in the world is here.  It's not much I know, but it's
everything."
   "If you leave voluntarily, you can take it with you.  They'll give you
time to pack."
   "It's ten miles to the pavement, Joe, I couldn't pack a tenth of it and
have no place to put it if I could."
   "I'm sorry,  There's nothing I can do."  Then he motioned to the deputies
and they walked over...

...The officers perform the ritual cleansing of the land according to the
rights prescribed with respect to the sacred dogma of free enterprose
capitalism.  (Most fiction is prose and free enterprize is fiction: free
enterprose makes sense to me.)  They inform Victor that whatever he leaves
behind will be taken to the impound yard, "inventoried" and held for him a
few months should he wish to claim it.  If he refuses to leave voluntarily
he will be arrested for trespassing and taken to jail.
   Victor opts for jail.
   The judge, of course, denies he has a right to live there, or anywhere
apparently, in spite of Victors elloquent plea, which cites the right of
native born earthlife to a place on the planet which human law denies in
support of monopoly of land and resourcess of survival.  The citing of
prehistoric conditions is not accepted as a precident of law.  The judge was,
of course, sympathetic.  He only did his job.
   But Victor managed to get some press coverage.  The new connections which
result from media attention are seen by Vic as an opportunity...


...His decision to act was both well thought out and precipitate.  How is
that not an oxymoran?  He has always spent a lot of time thinking about the
world of humanity and how it relates to life in general.  At first, thoughts
occured to him disjunctly and at random times but after the trial they just
seemed to jump into a pattern that fit with many others to allow a frightening
extropolation. He decided to look for more evidence to support the hypothesis
that had just congealed.  No, hypothesis isn't right word for this concept
and evidence is implicit in all human interactions.  It's more like a
revelation by life itself which shows him what he must do.  Even if he can
barely make it appear to be probable, he can justify extreme, radical action.
It might influence his new friends to give him the support he needs to make
it work.  Can he sell it?