My wife works in home healthcare. In its most basic sense, this profession is exactly what it sounds like: a nurse or a therapist does home visits for patients who have recently been discharged from the hospital. Pretty simple. Things have the potential to get complicated when the whole “walking blindly into a stranger’s home” part gets introduced. You might end up in a standard, single family home. You also might end up in dusty casita that doubles as an opium den. It’s a roulette wheel of social situations, one that requires an acute awareness to one’s surroundings at any first visit, specifically in evolving, urban environments.
Last week, one of the clerks called and gave her an evaluation, which basically means she gets a name, phone number, address, and a brief medical history; everything else is up to her to figure out. This particular address was in West Oakland – not exactly the nicest neighborhood ever, to put it nicely – and instead of having an apartment number, it ended with “Bay 5”. Our first theory was that this person lived on a boat, but a quick consultation with Google Maps revealed that the destination was very much terrestrial. The more we learned, the creepier things became; the Street View of the address was a run-down, spray-painted warehouse. This couldn’t possibly be the correct place, could it? A phone call to the person in question revealed that yes, in fact, it was. The verbal directions she received included pulling up to the address, driving through the opening of a chain link fence with a “Do Not Enter” sign on it, and – once already inside the warehouse – continuing to drive for the equivalent of a full city block until reaching bay 5, the shipping container in which the patient allegedly lived. Since my wife has neither a death wish nor a desire to be kidnapped and sold overseas into the sex trade, she did a quick drive-by the next day and decided the situation felt a little too rape-y for comfort. While I don’t think that’s the exact phrase she used when explaining her need to cancel the appointment, she did get a brief explanation of why this person lived inside a container: “I’m an urban camper”.
Oh, right. An urban camper.
Wait. What?
…To the internet!
From what I can tell, urban camping as a long-term means of shelter is what happens when someone becomes too hipster to function. It also may simply be a different way of saying “purposefully homeless”. While urban camping as a traveling or vacationing option seems relatively innocuous and is apparently a somewhat – taken with a grain of salt – viable housing option when one is on the go, it is also in no way a permanent or semi-permanent lifestyle choice. I’ve pitched a tent on a collegiate soccer field for a night or two in conjunction with some weekend road trip shenanigans while I was younger, and apparently this mildly qualifies as participating in the art of urban camping. However – and I cannot stress this enough – it was always my intention to leave and return to the actual place where I lived. The same goes for those sleeping on sidewalks in attempts to score playoff tickets or some other prize at the end of a long, overnight line. There is an endgame involved, even if they initially fit the profile.
Urban camping as a sustained lifestyle choice, on the other hand…I mean, I don’t know what else to call it other than a conscious decision to not have a home. It’s a paradoxical phrase in the first place (are you really camping if you haven’t moved beyond the city limits?), further complicated by the legal definition of ‘squatting’ (which is what is actually happening). I realize it is so very artsy to live in a spacious community-shared warehouse, but I’m also pretty sure there are plenty of pizza collectives or grocery co-ops or actually-rented-out-converted-
There aren’t an immense amount of sources on the subject for the aspiring urban camper to use for research, but I did find a helpful FAQ section in one of the main sites promoting the endeavor that helped to break things down a bit for me (but not really). Perhaps the most important question – “Is Urban Camping Legal?” – was found halfway down the page, likely due to its response: “The short answer to this is, probably not.” Other useful tips include what to do if one is attacked while urban camping – “This comes back to the classic question of fight or flight” – and whether or not this method of living is actually safe – “Urban camping requires a paradigm shift from perceived safety”. Super! But then again, your place can’t get robbed if you don’t have one!
Ah, the great outdoors.
About Andrew Rose
Andrew Rose is a writer and editor for Rookerville. He also manages a travel blog for his friends and family. His book, “Seizure Salad”, is a work of fiction - not in that it is a tale of fantasy, but in that it does not actually exist.