Washington State: It's a different world

It’s only a day’s drive from here, but it’s a world away. At least I fit in.

With longish gray hair and a beard, I looked like a hundred other guys on the street, although they were dressed more like I do at home than on vacation. There was more camo and Carhart khaki in downtown Spokane last week than on the opening day of elk season in the Breaks.

But while one younger fellow there was even packing a hatchet, and most everyone was carrying sleeping bags, there didn’t appear to be any hunters among them.

If Washington doesn’t recruit the homeless, it certainly attracts them, handing out free tents, sleeping bags and backpacks to anyone in need or want. And if you aren’t into camping, new homeless shelters provide a warm place to sleep.

Drug laws are lax, and vagrancy is accepted.

No wonder that the Northwest, despite its wet, cold, inhospitable winter climate remains such a draw.

Certainly not everyone living on the street, however, is there by choice. The incoherent ramblings of the mentally ill are hard to miss.

Also hard to miss are all the folks getting high, all the trash, and the fact that even the most disheveled among them – like everyone everywhere -- are staring at their cell phones.

At a time when McDonald’s offers a starting wage of up to $15 an hour, and help-wanted signs are common, a lot of folks apparently just don’t want to work.

I understand. I don’t want to work either. I’d rather hunt or fish. But given the lack of restraints that homelessness offers, I sure wouldn’t choose a northern clime. There are far warmer places to be unproductive.

No wonder they offer so many incentives to do nothing in Washington.

A valet at the hotel told me that in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, just a few miles east of Spokane, the homeless are rounded up and bussed to Montana.

What a disappointment for them that must be with Spokane and all its homeless swag a hundred miles in the opposite direction.

And what a disappointment for me, too. I prefer to leave the state for my urban fix.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected].