A Disgusting Scene

Today I arrived under the bridge early. It was a gorgeous fall day. So gorgeous that I abandoned all plans after work and headed straight to the Gorge to hike one of my favorite trails… Wahkeena Falls to Angel’s Rest. The leaves were in full color, bright yellow, and the wind roared through the trees as though it hoped to pluck them forcefully from the ground and snap them in half mid-air. They held their ground.

An ambulance was parked next to the Honey Buckets when I arrived, lights flashing. A handful of homeless people were gathered around. I parked and walked over to see what was going on just in time to see several men wrestling to lift a stretcher. On the stretcher lay a gigantically fat man, shirtless, with an oxygen mask.  A paramedic was pumping his heart as the men struggled to carry him to the ambulance. His arms dangled limply off the stretcher. He was dead.

I’ve only seen a dead man once before in my life. It was in Guatemala. I was sitting on a chicken bus traveling from Xela to Antigua when the bus slowed and followed a traffic jam around something blocking the road. As I looked out the bus window I briefly saw a small man. He was wearing a hat. His body was crumpled in the middle of the road face down and splattered in blood.

This time a gigantic man was carried past me like a beached whale on a stretcher. He was blue-faced and looked incapable of moving out of water. He O.D.’d on heroin, so it was told. I don’t know much about heroin or meth other than what Sarge told me. Heroin gives you a sort of euphoric relaxation, while meth gives you an adrenaline rush. Both drugs are disgusting and highly addictive. I read recently that Portland has had a record amount of deaths to meth O.D.’s over the past year.

I looked at the people standing around. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. No one at the scene was crying or looking even slightly more than remotely concerned. No one I talked to knew who he was. They didn’t know anything about him other than he’d come in with a new group of people who were now staying under the bridge.

The new group under the bridge was comprised of probably 100% druggies. This was an educated guess based on the state of the women of the group who boasted these characteristics: up to 100% toothless, giant open sores on face, jerky bodily movements. One woman had short hair died red. Her face was puckered as she was missing 100% of her teeth and obviously void of dentures. She smacked her mouth together and wandered aimlessly like a hen pecking at grass. I watched a man approach her. He was rubbing up against her and whispering in her ear in a deal-making sort of way.  She put her ham sandwich down, made her way to the porta-potty, gathering long streams of toilet paper, wandered back to her sandwich and ate a few bites, and followed the man away. I watched her walk with him through the parking lot and disappear. I knew she was on her way to sell sexual favors for drug money.

It was a disgusting scene.

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