“Excuse me, where’s the tent city?”
The man with matted dreadlocks and a weathered face from the sun squinted at me. He wore a white tee shirt grey with wear and slung a tattered jean jacket over his shoulder, hot from the afternoon sun. “Why would you want to go there?”
Why indeed. Like many, I followed the flood of news coverage of the tent cities supposedly popping up across the country, according to the New York Times, as the recession devastated the hardworking, middle class home owners of this country. Leaving in its wake, jobless professionals evicted or foreclosed on their homes. My curiosity piqued by Oprah and other stories , I headed to Sacramento to see the tent city with my own eyes.
I spent the two-hour drive with my partner discussing our ambivalence about being voyeurs of other peoples’ misery. We strategized about how to approach residents respectfully. Nothing could prepare us for the landscape that greeted us: Miles of wasteland bisected by train tracks, concrete levee walls, and a tangle of electrical power grids alongside the American River. The skyline of downtown Sacramento was barely visible in the distant horizon. The lack of trees magnified the afternoon heat and the sun beat down on the assorted tents and tarps arranged in clusters, some around campfires.
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