You Can Be Here
On Expeditions and Evictions and Libraries
The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
My bladder’s so full it’s flooding my brain. So, I attribute to it the sighting of the small brick building that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Brilliant, I think. My bladder recognizes welcome—walls that hold space for entire worlds, that stretch like an accordion, that form the Mary Poppins bag of buildings.
I rush through glass doors, veer toward “restrooms,” and throw myself into a stall.
It has one of those saloon-style doors, so, standing, your chin’s above it. I’m just pulling up my pants when a man walks in—making for the urinal right in front of my exposed face.
Oh!
I make like a meerkat and sink.
Squatting, I think of telling you this story—how I’m trying not to laugh so I won’t embarrass the poor man and hoping he’ll leave before my legs start shaking. I think of the times I’ve parked Ruby the van in a library lot, needing a place to pass a hot day. I think of this encampment I drive past these days (or now I have to say used to), how the city named it Marvin’s Garden on opening it a few years back to meet a need it claims no longer exists. You know the place—rows of tents, plastic chairs on “stoops,” a line of portajohns, Russian doll neighborhoods tucked inside areas the wealthy don’t frequent, tiny ghost towns on days when temperatures press triple digits.
Later, the chairs welcome hunched bodies. Bits of conversation and puffs of cigarette smoke rise to meet the sun halfway as it dips toward the horizon. Dogs puddle at feet, hands playing their velvet ears like prayer beads. Sometimes, a woman with long, ash blond hair washes clothes in a bucket.
I think of how, in a single day, the garden became a square of dirt inside a metal fence.
I think of the night when, public restrooms closed for Covid, I padded the streets of another city, wild with need—a city whose council meetings I’d once spoken at—barely holding my animal need at bay. A portajohn would have felt like a throne.
The man finishes. I wait for the door to swing closed, pop up and then back down when the door opens again. This time, I sit on the toilet. When I realize I should have just walked out, I have to double my efforts not to crack up.
Another library comes to mind. Have I ever told you that, back before smartphones, I wended my way along the US East Coast, no Ruby the van, just me and my rucksack and maps you can make notes on and fold and stuff in your pocket? OK, I had my laptop and, more often than not, an internet connection. But doesn’t using only paper maps sound romantic?
Anyway, it was in this library in a small town near the sea where I learned how to stuff quahogs. A woman in a lemon-colored apron leaned over a pot, face wet and pink from steam, and pulled out a fat, yawning clam. “Got these beauties this mornin’.”
I pictured Narragansett Bay at dawn. Pink clouds. Silver water. Her soft curls piled atop her head. Felt the press of ocean against waders as she pushed in deeper, the sense of discovery as she worked her long rake over the sea floor.
She showed us how to scoop the meat from the shells, how to mix it with spicy linguiça sausage and clumps of torn baguette and chopped peppers and garlic, how to cut the shells’ fringes with poultry shears and lay them out like bowls.
All the while, striped sea bass simmered in an electric skillet at the other end of her demo table. I felt wise—she who makes a library’s readerboard her first stop in a new town, who discovers the most interesting ways to get dinner.
In 1524, an Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, arrived on these shores and, having encountered either the Narragansett to the west or the Wampanoag to the east, sent word of open forests suitable for travel “even by a large army.” Who decided to assign the term explorer to men whose impulse was a braid that splits—find new lands / summon legions?
The day of the Marvin’s Garden eviction, the road was blocked on either side. I drove by the next day, though. I want to give you this image: A bulldozer fishing bits from the dirt was all that remained. The hope of the evictors. The message, Split. You can’t be here.
But really, in the dirt berm just up the road, the sun high like a dictator, sat heaps of canvas rendered useless, amid a couple dozen men and women looking on through tired eyes, the need that no longer exists.
I think of the morning I was stretched out in the back of Ruby the van, legs up, soaking in buttercream streams through curtain cracks, hands wrapped around a steaming mug, notebook on my lap—she who avoided morning rush hour and made time to write by arriving at yoga an hour early—when three angry raps hit the door precisely where my head rested. Hot liquid sloshed onto my lap. Tears pressed at the corner of my eyes.
This wasn’t my first, “You-can’t-be-here” rap. So, I knew not to open the barn doors as I would to welcome a friend. Still, it takes coaching to remain calm, to put on shoes, to grab keys, to climb to the driver seat.
The security guard, thin with a low paunch and eyes that wouldn’t meet mine, had no ears for my words. “Time for you to roll on,” he said, like I was a puppy he’d swat if he wasn’t so bored.
An anger brewed, bigger than this moment. I only realized I’d taken a step toward him when he stepped back, mumbling something about how I should “take it up with the lady.”
Even after the studio owner had apologized, “it’s just that there’ve been thefts, ya know”—and yeah I get it, but still—even after an hour breathing deeply and stretching my body into shapes that remind me who I am and pouring sweat like an offering, I felt unsettled.
When the bathroom door shuts once more, I jump. My mirth returning, I swoop my bag and spill into the foyer, giggling, and wink at the security guard as I cross to the other bathroom to wash my hands. Inside, a line of offerings hangs on the wall—tampons and pads, condoms, a sharps bucket, pamphlets on how to access various forms of aid.
These days, my favorite library is the one near my sister’s house, where I stay when I see my docs. I walk in the gulch behind it, along paths lined with trailing blackberry, vines languid; Pacific bleeding heart, their upside down bells like sleeping fairies; and fringe cup with its tiny white flowers. Sunlight spools through white pine and hemlock into pools of golden thread.
Sometimes, I sit in a lounger, perhaps next to a man nodding off, a jacket and a couple of well-stuffed bags not yet coming apart at the seams draped at his feet. Often, I see two women, one in a wheelchair with partial aphasia. Both lean into the brook of their conversation, regularly swirled up in eddies of laughter. When the volume picks up, I look up to see a stream of kids shedding backpacks and forming groups at desks. The librarian walks through and quiets them but gently, giving the same message she gives to all: You can be here.
Books Not to Miss (Cuz Libraries) and a Sneak Preview
Fallout by
because the political is personal. A currently serializing, timely novel on protest and self-discovery with writing that will knock your socks off. And stay tuned for Eleanor—here on the Rolling Desk soon!!—to talk about another of her fantastic novels, In Judgement of Others, which will soon be available in print.- , both a thriller and a philosophical allegory. Beautiful writing that explores where human consciousness and technology might intersect, the roots and enduring pain of violence, and the coding of love deep within us. Now available in print! Awaiting my signed copy with great anticipation.
Liberation of Being by Dr. Dylan Shanahan—who will be gone by the time his book reaches most readers. “A passionate case for the meaning of life apart from what we can produce or provide,” ushered to print by
. More here.
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Your article weaves together seemingly disparate threads – needing a restroom, seeking refuge in a library, witnessing an eviction – to highlight the interconnectedness of human needs. Whether it's a safe place to sleep, a public restroom, or a sense of community, these needs are universal. Your writing prompts us to consider how our own comfort and security are often built upon the exclusion of others. It's a call to empathy and a reminder that we all deserve a place to belong.
I really loved listening to you read your post. It gave me the chance to close my eyes and really feel the picture you were painting. Such a beautiful, rich story that left me with an inner calm and a desire for more.
And I loved the mention of meerkats. I forgot about those little savage cuties.