Tolerance Gets Put to a Test

Boo!, as he calls himself, doesn’t have shoes. “You get used to it,” says the 27-year-old veteran traveler as he stands on the edge of the central plaza of Arcata.

He also has no job. “I don’t answer to a clock. I go where I want to go.”

He does, however, have a filthy, graffiti-stained station wagon--which at the moment is filled with fellow travelers and a steaming vat of oatmeal that Boo! commandeered from sympathetic donors. His hungry friends eat from tin bowls. Others sing softly in perfect unison with singer Jewel as she croons from a portable radio, “Who will save your soul. . . . “

As lost souls go, these are neither the deinstitutionalized nor the downsized seen on most urban streets. “They are not homeless,” says Arcata Police Sgt. Richard Zanotti, whose task this day is to cope with the crowd in the square. “They choose their lifestyle.”

Indeed, Arcata is an irresistible haven for self-styled wanderers--a college town with a politically progressive pedigree, a grassy square and a redwood forest within walking distance for overnight sleeping.

But this small city’s tolerance has been tested by the visitors’ panhandling, littering, loitering and loud, repetitive drumming. These days, there is a tense dynamic between Arcata’s transients and its more grounded residents, who struggle to do the right thing while disdaining the visitors’ public slothfulness.

In a town where protection of the surrounding redwoods is a civic passion, the wanderers’ disrespect of the forests (leaving trash, burning fires) is as unforgivable as panhandling in the plaza.

And it doesn’t help that they are seen as self-indulgent children who probably could be working or at least going to school.

“If someone is hanging outside your store panhandling, you’re going to get irritated,” says Chris Smith, co-owner of two restaurants on the plaza, Abruzzi and Plaza Grill. “But there’s been no town meeting about throwing them out of town.”

Some townspeople might not mind that.

“I just recently moved out of Arcata and I’m glad,” says Sandy Wieckowski, the bookkeeper for Smith’s company. “I was tired of seeing the people every day.” When she worked at a bar on the plaza, “every day I had to say to people, ‘Get away from my sidewalk. . . .’ Every day they would try to use my bathroom.”

Arcata, the home of traditionally liberal Humboldt State University, has struggled to deal with them. A local ordinance was passed that says noise and loud music in the plaza are banned when someone complains.

The nomads even became an issue in the recent City Council election--which saw the Green Party gain a majority on the five-member council, apparently the Green’s strongest local foothold in the nation. According to outgoing Mayor Carl Pellatz, the city has struggled for a couple of years to get a local group called Food Not Bombs, which feeds people in the plaza, to comply with county health regulations.

When Food Not Bombs failed to do so, the city sued several people involved with the group. But different politicians had different views of that lawsuit.

“Humboldt County Jail is not a pleasant experience,” says newly elected Councilman Bob Ornelas, noting that he wants to drop the lawsuit. “Murderers and rapists in the same jail will ask, ‘What are you in for?. . .’ ‘Not having a food permit.’ ”

Pellatz, who sat on the City Council and served as an appointed mayor, says the council has no choice but to enforce county health regulations.

“I would like to see everyone grow up and respect the rights of everybody else,” says Pellatz, who lost his reelection bid. “They’ve taken that piece of ground as theirs. It belongs to all 18,000 of us, and we would like to be able to use it without being accosted by people under the influence of something.”

Ornelas worries about their influence on his teenage daughter but sighs, “What choice do we have? We don’t believe in police brutality. We believe in folks’ freedom to say and do what they want. . . . No one will be run out of town. There will just be some low-level persecution.”

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As modern-day vagabonds, they stay a matter of days only to be replaced by others. They are mostly white, young--Boo! is an oldster; many of his compatriots are 18 and 19--and, by their own admissions, escaping deadly middle-class existences.

A few stumble around, ill from too much exposure to the weather (or drugs, some fear). Others are smart and bubbly and talk like they might be sending postcards home if this were a more traditional vacation.

Amy Olson, 18, says she calls her parents in Chico every week. “They’re kind of stoked for me,” she says, sitting on the curb. “I was a secretary at a foster placement agency. It was a nice job, but I was in an office all day. Now, I call [my parents] and say, ‘Wow, we were just in the most beautiful forest.’ ”

They wear a mishmash of dirty tie-dyed shirts and baggy pants, their faces a road map of piercings, their hair a palette for colorful dyes. Some coax along puppies and kittens on strings that pass for leashes.

At least one trade-off is dirt. Some haven’t showered since Oregon.

“Those are our wannabe hippies,” says one waitress with a smirk as she eyes them through the glass window of the cafe where she works.

But unlike vintage hippies, these wanderers are short on politics. Though some are en route to environmental rallies, many simply wander along the coast with only the fuzziest of aims and the goofiest of notions about survival.

“I personally don’t believe in money. People give us stuff, and we turn it around and spread love. We’re right now on our way to the California fires to help set up kitchens,” says one traveler, who seemed to believe that the then-raging wildfires had made shelterless poor out of Malibu homeowners.

Town suspicion has it that they are all well-off, and a few do claim to have rich, rotten families they left behind. The other theory is that they’re all displaced followers of the Grateful Dead, because Arcata and other points on this northwest coast have periodically played host to droves of Deadheads when Jerry Garcia was alive and touring.

“They really do look like they’re from the parking lot of a Dead concert,” muses Ornelas, who is also part owner of the Mad River Brewing Co. “We have people who apply for jobs here at the brewery and when they write descriptions of what they’ve been doing for the last few years, they say, ‘Doing the Dead.’ ”

Most seem relatively middle class and some actually seek work. “I’ve always gone to restaurants and asked for work--’Can I take out your trash?’ ” says Nathan Grassmeyer, 19, who travels with tarpaulins for sleeping on wet forest ground and a backpack full of dog food for his German shepherd-Airedale.

Some feel that their souls have been saved by traveling. “I’d be another body on the street” had she remained in Phoenix, Tina DeWeese insists. Instead, she left her mother three years ago and found the community she craves on the road.

“Absolutely everything I own belongs to all the people in this family,” says DeWeese, 18, about the wanderers around her. “Last night someone gave me the socks right off their feet. Someone else gave me shoes.”

Some things she keeps for herself. From her sleeve she produces a tiny white rat. “My pet rat had babies,” she says.

A late afternoon downpour sends the wanderers scurrying for cover. Within minutes they have vanished. Winter rains wash away Arcata’s visitors for the most part. Then, like tulips, they return in the spring, singing along to the latest tunes on the radio.