Outdoors.
September 3, 2007
I don’t know why this bit of neighborhood drama interests me so much or why it would interest you at all but here it goes.
In our neighborhood there is a paved trail that cuts through some woods and follows along the Monocacy River. I have taken many pictures of this area during bike rides and walks.
For a couple of weeks this area was home to a young man that was outdoors. He had moved here from out west to be with a girl. Things didn’t work out and she kicked him out. I suppose he liked the neighborhood because he set-up camp in the woods off the trail. He had a large tent and was even building a fence around his property (pictured above) before the cops came and rousted him out.
Why do I know so much about this guy? He spent a lot of time walking around the hood talking to the neighbors. My wife even got him to sign a traffic petition that she was walking around the neighborhood one night. Through his interactions with all of the people in the our neighborhood we were able to piece together his story.
Many of the neighborhood walkers/joggers/bikers often saw him chopping wood and singing along with his iPod at his encampment along the trail. Others would see him walking along the road to his place of employment in Old Town Frederick.
I even saw him once as I was coming home from work. He was waiting to cross the street and I waived him across. He nodded a thanks as he sipped from a fountain soda cup. As he crossed I noticed a large knife strapped to his back. I didn’t think too much of it until I started to hear stories of the woodsman living in our midst.
Anyway, this was this was the hot story in our otherwise quite suburban lives. I don’t think anyone has seen him since the cops rousted him out of his camp. I hope he saved enough money up to get a bus ticket back home. The only trace of him now is his partially built fence and some other equipment at his encampment.
Tags: local
September 3, 2007 at 12:00 pm
When I was living in Montana (1999-2006), I befriended a young guy (23?) who had moved to Bozeman to attend MSU, where I was teaching English Comp. He was working the grounds crew doing odd lanscaping jobs for the university.
Bozeman is an expensive place to live, with rent for a loft apartment far beyond the reach of your typical college student (much like in MD). And since the dorms closed in the summer, he was without a place to live. And, I discovered, that’s why he was living in the Gallatin National Forest.
The odd part was that, even knowing this, a mutual female friend of ours began dating him. Why is that odd, because she nonchalantly told me of nights she spent over at “his place,” which, mind you, was the back of his Toyota Tundra parked riverside deep in the forest. She, on the other hand, had quite a nice place in town. Anyway, come the beginning of the Fall Semester he moved into the dorms.
An interesting side note: during that summer, two guys approached him and asked for food, water and a place to spend the night. He happily obliged and the next morning they thanked him and moved on. He told me this story and it piqued my interest.
When he came around later that day I showed him the local paper and asked if he recognized the two men in the article, to which he emphatically answered “Yes.” The two men were escaped convicts who hadn’t been seen since escaping into the forest several weeks earlier.
When I asked him if he’d reconsider his current living arrangement and move into a spare bedroom I offered he declined saying, “No way, it just got really interesting.”
Oi.
September 3, 2007 at 12:54 pm
@ Corey - Great story!
September 4, 2007 at 7:09 am
[...] found an account of a homeless person who was apparently well-liked in his neighborhood and employed, but he [...]
September 5, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Did this make the paper? This is the first I’ve heard of this. I hope he made it back home OK too. It’s nice to put a story to people who have no other choice but to set up camp where they can.
September 6, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I don’t think it made the papers, just a hyper-local neighborhood thing.