Disclaimer: This is not a story about houselessness. I could never write a story about houselessness because I have never been unhoused. This is a story about compassion, community organizing, government, politics, and power. These are all things that I have experienced. Everything in this story is written as closely to the truth as I can remember it. Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the people involved.
Weed, Conspiracy.
October 16th, 2021. 1200 hours.
Standing across from me, over a discarded tire in the Sears Lane houseless encampment, is a 22-year-old college senior whose eyes are much older than she is. She glances around as the young activists in the circle look to her. She speaks a joke into the excited atmosphere:
“Which city councilor do you think gives the toothiest head?”
We all laugh bitterly, commiserating in our disillusionment in our university and the poverty around it that we know doesn’t have to be there. Nearby, a person with short orange hair speaks casually into a UVMTV microphone.
“…Me, personally? Like, I’m gonna keep comin’ out here, as much as I can, smokin’ weed, talkin’ my shit, making sure that no cops come, and protecting the houseless community…”
When the cameras move on, they tell me a story of Burlington slumlords, UVM housing, brief houselessness, couch surfing, and tentative security. It will be a few months before they put out the all-too-familiar Venmo call for rent money to Burlington’s extensive mutual aid network. They are not a resident of Sears Lane, but they are living proof of the blurred line between resident and activist in this city.
A Middlebury College student filmmaker, who we affectionately refer to as Dan the Camera Man, is standing nearby. He records the beauty of the encampment, the garden, the church, the conversation, the live folk music. He is filming a documentary. It will be released right when the city is beginning to forget about these months.
Between me and the woman across the tire from me is a language that not everyone speaks. Hiding between the lines of our dialogue is every food-insecure night she spent making sure others didn’t endure the same, every $90 subscription to a college course’s proprietary homework software that could have bought either of us a week’s worth of groceries, every sheepish plea to my three-job mother and immigrant father for help paying for dinner, trying my very hardest to prove to them that I know how hard they work and that I am sorry and I wish this didn’t have to be so difficult. And the honesty in their eyes when they give me more than I asked for and tell me it’s okay.
People’s Kitchen VT, a statewide mutual aid group, makes lunch for the residents of the encampment and the community members who have come to protect the residents and their belongings from the police. The Burlington wind punches cold through our jackets, and the community and respect and food we share momentarily takes it away. If I had been standing on that ground two months later, the city’s bulldozers would have dropped my body in the city works dumpster next to the destroyed tents. It would have been brought to a landfill, crushed, and then left, the methane melting off of my skin, blanketing the atmosphere and asphyxiating the planet. But for now, I am standing over a discarded tire in the Sears Lane houseless encampment, I am no longer hungry, and I am talking to a 22-year-old college senior whose eyes are much older than she is.
Mark and Matt/Refrigerators and Stars.
October 26th, 2021. 0700 hours.
Our anxiety is a suffocating fog worsened by the rain, as activists and residents alike await the arrival of the blue and white siege machines. The cruisers carrying the city’s troops, directed to complete today’s scheduled eviction. We are secured to our lines by the protest veterans in our ranks. One of them hands out defense assignments to the protesters. Years of direct actions have solidified their assured tone. They have seen the power a human body has to stop a bulldozer in Anishinaabe land when Enbridge construction vehicles cut trenches through wetlands in order to complete the controversial natural gas project, Line 3. They point to me and three other activists and list us by name.
“You guys are going to protect Mark’s stuff.” Their long auburn hair and beard are dripping rainwater as they direct us to a wooded corner of the encampment. We all know the name.
It was introduced to us on a sunnier day in a gruff low voice with a familiar New England accent. It belonged to a stocky, bald man with a firm handshake. A commercial refrigeration repairman, he had undergone shoulder surgery and received a metal disk in his joint.
“I had a good paying job, too!” he insisted, as if I could ever blame him for being thrown on the street by his situation. “But that didn’t matter. The surgery was too expensive. Lost my house. And somehow, I fucked up the metal disk in here so now I’ve gotta go get a new one.”
After charging him enough to become unhoused, the medical industry had told him that staying in the encampment was too dangerous for his recovery. I asked if he’d be present the day of the supposed eviction.
“No, no, absolutely not,” he assured me with a resolute look. “I’m takin’ whatever I can. If Miro wants to give me a month in a motel, I’ll accept. I can’t be in this encampment while I’m recovering. Doctor’s orders.”
Once we have scouted out Mark’s area, we discuss our moves.
“What’s the plan?” a team member asks. Their voice is muted by the nervous hum of the encampment–the endless torrential rain, the hushed anxious discussion, the hurried boots lumbering through the mud.
“Do you see the Jersey barriers near the lane?” I project my voice to make sure everyone on the team can hear.
They all nod.
“Beyond that barrier is a small, muddy ditch,” I continue. “If they bring dozers in, they’ll have to move the barriers with vehicles, and we’ll get to see their equipment. That’ll let us know which direction they’re coming from.”
One of our team points out a pair of yellow lights piercing the treeline. A pickup engine rumbles and the tires crackle across the gravelly, weathered asphalt of the nearby parking lot.
“That’s a city works truck,” they say. “They’re coming to inspect the crowd.”
We all watch the truck stalk across the parking lot West of the encampment, like a crocodile waiting for an injured animal to fall into the river. We all know that if the city decides that the resistance isn’t too heavy, they will bring in dozers and police officers. They respond to the media, and they don’t want to tarnish their image by hurting anyone other than the unhoused.
The eldest member of our team turns to us.
“Our assigned land is a corner,” they say. “There’s a fence blocking visibility between the side facing the entrance and the side facing the lane. We should split up—two of us on one side watching the Jersey barriers, two of us watching towards the main entrance. Both teams will be able to see the parking lot and at least one of the entrances. If something happens, come around the fence and holler.”
We grumble our affirmation and split up, trudging through the mud to our positions. After a few minutes of pacing and talking anxiously with our team members, we watch the city works truck drive away. The scout is leaving to report to the police.
“Hey guys!” a voice from deeper into the wooded area calls to us. “Why are y’all standin’ in the rain like that? I’ve got tarps over here!”
We look at one another, perplexed, and then over to the direction of the voice. There is a man, who we hadn’t noticed before, standing past the treeline underneath a large blue tarp. The man is heating potatoes and a large pot of chili on a grill, watching us prepare. There is another tarp, light green, over the area in front of him. We walk over and huddle underneath it.
“I hope you guys are well-fed,” the man continues, gesturing at the weather. “It’s fuckin’ cold out here, but I’m grillin’ up potatoes and chili if you want any.”
We all look at one another, the exact same thought on our minds.
This man doesn’t have a house and he’s offering us food.
We politely decline; earlier that morning we enjoyed scrambled eggs and sausage from People’s Kitchen. The traditional Latin American low-effort breakfast dish will sustain us until noon. But we are all grateful for the offer, nonetheless.
The man at the grill shrugs. “More for me.”
He introduces himself as Matthew. We recognize this name, too. He is the local legend responsible for the two-story hand-built treehouse in the encampment.
He brightens at our admiration for his architecture. “You guys can come hang out inside if you’d like.”
We oblige and join him around his hand-built furnace. He nonchalantly unsheathes a machete and begins to hack at firewood while he explains to us the comets and asteroids that he has detected with his telescope.
“Once you get North of Burlington, a lot of the light pollution fades out,” he explains. The crack of his machete cutting into the wood punctuates his phrases. “Even out here the pollution isn’t as bad as in the city. I’ve got a pretty good telescope, but even with a shitty one you can spot some stuff.”
We talk about the stars until 1030 hours, when the police are supposed to show up.
They don’t.
Interlude: Midterms.
Several days in late October 2021. 0500 hours.
I snatch my phone and punch the snooze button before my alarm has a chance to wake my roommate. If anyone is going to wake the heaviest sleeper I have ever met, it will be me, bustling around my room, layering nondescript sweaters on top of one another. I grab a thermos and make some tea in the common room, feeling the unique morning silence that blankets the halls, full of my fatigued freshman floormates. The stillness is the same outside the dorm building, whether there is rain, a clear sunrise, or deafening wind. The stillness follows me up Main Street to the Waterman building, where I arranged to be picked up by a senior in an endearingly worn Subaru. The stillness gets in the car with me and four other activists. The stillness has eye bags from the early mornings and midterms, just like we do. The 40-minute walk is cut down three quarters by our conversational chauffeur. I hide my distinctive long hair in a bun underneath an unmarked green hood. WCAX was caught flying a drone above the encampment and none of us want to be the targets of the Burlington police department’s next online harassment campaign.
The sun rises over the encampment again.
Child of the System.
October 28th, 2021. 1445 hours.
Treppenwitz is a German word for the point you realize you should have made as you’re walking away from an argument. Its literal translation is “staircase joke.” I think about that factoid while I’m walking up the Chittenden County Probate Courthouse staircase. It distracts me momentarily from the tension of the coming moment.
Me and the other UVM student walking with me reach the imposing door of the courtroom we were directed to by security. This student drove me and Dan the Camera Man from the encampment to witness the Sears Lane proceedings.
“Should we just go in?”
“I don’t know, man. I feel like it would be disrespectful to just barge in like that.”
“Disrespectful?”
“I don’t know! I’m not a lawyer. What if th–”
“Oh, for Chrissakes.”
A Sears Lane resident passes us, pushes the doors open, and walks inside. After everything that’s happened, she has a right to be there.
As I take my seat in the ornately-designed but small courtroom, I feel bad about leaving Dan and his camera at the front door.
“Just go in without me,” he had said. “I’ll find a news report and edit that in.”
The security guard at the metal detector had looked at us with sympathy in his eyes while he watched our hesitation unfold.
But now I am sitting in the gallery with the few friends I recognized. I look around the gallery. It is disappointingly empty–mostly residents and a few of the older activists scattered around the room. The ones who didn’t have rides to the courthouse are supporting us from the encampment via text. Messages of support and condolence are lighting up our phones. The encampment’s legal representatives are standing at the bar, looking at a livestream camera. There is a screen covered in old white men in suits. I do not know any of them, or their relevance to the case. To be honest, I don’t really care. My gaze falls on the media cameras and their operators, hungrily watching one of the representatives stutter out an answer to Judge Samuel Hoar Jr.’s most recent question. The reporters, unlike Dan, had gotten clearance to be in the room for this decision. They will be posting photos on their websites with attention-grabbing headlines.
Hoar watches it all play out with a judge’s impartial captivation.
This is nothing like those Aaron Sorkin courtroom dramas. I think to myself. Why isn’t anyone slamming books on the table or yelling yet? Did I miss that part?
The room is suffocatingly quiet, given the gravity of what is being discussed. One of the representatives is caught on a phrase and can’t quite put what they are thinking into the proper jargon. Neither of the representatives is a legal expert. The buzzing of a fluorescent light, or a heater, or a wire, or a pipe is catching our attention, one by one. It does not read the discomfort in the room as it sings into the abyss. The judge will not be making a ruling today. He will deliberate and then release his decision a few days later.
“The court has not heard enough yet to be persuaded that it can legally prevent the city from taking or continuing in those efforts.”
I recognize the sinking feeling in my gut as those words leave Judge Hoar’s mouth. I have heard backwards, callous clauses in velvet chambers and marble hallways. I have read and reread PDF file legislative jargon. I have replayed statements in my mind, scanning for the cowardice in my senator’s eyes as he says something that he knows doesn’t really make any sense. The flaunty language of the law lets you down slowly, as you play back the tape in your head. Despite everything you’ve been through, you catch yourself believing them momentarily–believing that somehow, you’ve missed something. Somehow, you don’t understand your own experience and somehow, this loss is your fault.
It is debilitating. You feel the ruling itself sucking out your motivation, melting away your resolve. There is no contempt in a decision like this. It’s a brick in a wall in a maze leading you to a decision a much more hateful person made for you many years ago. Yelling and slamming books on the table would give us something to think about. But the law wants to act like the breeze in the trees in the forest–powerful, invisible, disinterested, and above all, a natural fact of life.
The law wants to pretend that it is not made by people.
“The court has not heard enough yet to be persuaded that it can legally prevent the city from taking or continuing in those efforts.”
Judge Hoar interjects those words into a paralyzing silence. It’s almost as though he, too, wants this torturous proceeding to end. He is almost aware of his place as a representative of a callously indifferent legal system. He does not want to believe that there is anything he can do about it.
The proceeding ends and we clutter the doorway and the hall outside. Samantha, one of the legal representatives, is completely displeased with the drama of the day. Her eyes light up as a reporter dares to question her about her legal background.
“I’m a child of the system,” she asserts in response. “I have been in and out of courtrooms all my life. I know how these places work.”
It’s another painfully representative moment in this saga, someone whose upbringing has existed in and around courtrooms being interrogated about finding herself there once more. Of course, now that she is there by choice, she is unqualified. When you type “judge hoar vermont” into Google’s search box, you might find headlines about his “aggressive, sexist behavior” on the first result page.
Treppenwitz is a German word for the point you realize you should have made as you’re walking away from an argument. Its literal translation is “staircase joke.” I remember that little factoid as I lean against an intricately-decorated courthouse railing, listening to residents joke and argue with reporters about what they could have, should have, said. I am standing to the side with a friend. We laugh when they do. It echoes down the stairs.
Siege Over The Railroad Tracks.
November 2nd, 2021. 1400 hours.
1 MESSAGE FROM “Sears Lane Rapid Response Line”
“cops at sears rn.”
15 MESSAGES FROM “Sears Lane Rapid Response Line”
We agree to meet at the Catamount statue outside Howe Library.
“Look! Somebody sprayed yellow paint over the cat’s asshole!”
We try really hard not to think about how each minute that we wait there for our friend is another minute the city has on us. Our friend shows up and all of us begin the nearly hour-long walk to the encampment in the bitter cold.
“Do either of you have a pen? We should write the jail support number on our wrists in case the cops get too excited.”
“Let’s ask this guy.”
The second university student we ask lets us borrow a pen. We take turns frantically texting the group chat, hoping someone can meet us in the maze of ticky tacky houses that we walk on. It is as if someone unfurled a roll of suburbia down the hill from South Prospect Street. Finally, someone gives us a corner to wait on and we have a moment to sit and think.
“The city is definitely bluffing.”
They’re testing our response time, they’re seeing if we still care, they’re doing any number of things. But we know that “destroying the encampment” could be added to that list if we aren’t there to stop them. That is why we are not calling their bluff. That is why we are playing along with their games, not because we want to, not because we are fooled to. But because the residents—the people who this is really all about—can’t afford for us not to.
A black pickup truck with a socialist in the back arrives.
“Jump in, push some stuff around, make yourselves comfortable,” the protester in the driver’s seat yells over his shoulder.
Then we’re off. The truck kicks up pebbles and the wind blows in our eyes and howls over our heads, and we try to talk to each other to keep our minds off of things. We arrive to see three police cruisers peeling away from the parking lot. We jolt in our makeshift seats as the truck jumps the curb and drives towards the encampment. There’s a small crowd there, people who had readier access to rides than we did. They’re laughing bitterly and saying very mean things about the mayor. We walk past a black undercover cop car.
“Anybody smell bacon?” blurts an anarchist walking next to me. I snort farm animal noises at the cruiser. We laugh. The officer sitting in the cruiser does not laugh.
People are talking at the front gate of the encampment. It takes a moment to readjust—the city works had set up fencing around the encampment, funneling the entrances to the parking lot and the lane.
Watching the coils of fencing unroll from the city works pickup trucks, we knew that they had cruel motives. Dan the Camera Man and I trudged through the mud, across the ditch, out onto the lane, and around into a nearby warehouse parking lot to record the men in neon yellow and orange unloading the cheap temporary fencing. Some protesters had initially made plans to slow their work down, but the residents asked us not to.
“People have been throwing rocks and bottles and stuff at us,” a woman explained to me in a shaky voice.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!”
I probably looked and sounded naïve—the residents of the suburban neighborhood across the train tracks from the encampment had repeatedly shown up to city council meetings to disparage the residents during public comment. One of them had called the unhoused people terrorists and said that they all deserved to be imprisoned for their own safety. Everyone on our side of the tracks knew that if the city plowed the encampment, they would buy out all the properties around it and build a strip mall or a hotel or an airport or a highway. But the suburbanites couldn’t see beyond the train tracks separating them from the people slightly more poor than they were.
Now, one of the suburbanites glares at me through his kitchen window, his hands on his hips defiantly. I recognize him from city council meetings. I glare back. He closes his curtains.
We are standing at the front gate because the residents are trying to go about their days. After all, you don’t enter somebody’s backyard without permission. The talking dies down until we’re standing solemnly. A man starts yelling about how dirty and disgusting the encampment is, about how if the residents would only clean up after themselves and stop abusing drugs, they’d be fine. We all know that no matter what we do, someone will say those things. It doesn’t stop us from trying to tell him why he is wrong. He only needs to say a few words to reinforce the dominant narrative. We could explain the housing crisis to him for hours and he would never budge. All it takes is a look at his defensive posture to understand why he is talking. He is arguing out of his own insecurity. The only thing we can do then is make sure he doesn’t become violent towards the residents. After his tantrum has calmed down, I climb into an environmental science major’s car and go to class. I forgot to do my homework.
The police are fighting a war of attrition against the citizens of Burlington.
Interlude: Humanize.
There is something gross about people, on the whole. We’re molded by our histories and we can learn beliefs and behaviors so deeply that they almost become innate. We are all deeply flawed because we are all living in a deeply flawed world. There is no social ladder. No one is sterile of their shortcomings.
When a transgender activist got into a disagreement with a Sears Lane resident, it didn’t take very long before the resident started hurling transphobic and racist slurs. It took several people to physically de-escalate the ensuing fight.
I remember the moment a protester told me about a resident with a history of sexual assault allegations. I remember this protester telling me, “don’t leave girls alone near that guy. Or femmes. Or anyone, really.” I remember the frustrated hand-wringing on another resident while we discussed how we could hold the abuser accountable for that. We were both men. How could we possibly have a good conversation about it?
Part of our work in the encampment involved donning rubber gloves and picking up used needles. We needed the rubber gloves because the needles had traces of blood and heroin on them.
When the news tells these stories, they do not tell them with impartiality. When the police tell these stories, they do not tell them with sympathy. Unlike them, we have nothing to lose from trusting in people. There is nothing clean about people, but there’s nothing clean about us, either. Our love for humanity is unconditional.
In a news article, a resident is quoted as saying, “When we bring in scrap metal, the protesters start cheering. What are they cheering about? Why don’t you come help us break this stuff down? The protesters aren’t here serving our interests, they’re serving their own.” So you see, we are people too. We can't always do the right thing. Our love for humanity must be unconditional, or we will never forgive ourselves.
Our society is not set up for forgiveness. Our culture doesn’t allow for humanity’s constant endless shortcoming. We call it “failure.” We call it “personal irresponsibility.” We call it “inherent evil.” We do not wonder what kind of society considers these traits bad, because we were taught not to. We are told that these are flaws, and something to be solved. The more capital resources people have, we are instructed, the more they may sterilize themselves of their original, human sin. That’s not a message that coexists with selflessness, or anarchy, or mutual aid, or trust. That’s not a message that is silently kind to people who don’t have the resources to thank you. Can you see how anti-human it is? Can you see how unnatural, how disconnected, how unloving, how dishonest it is?
The liberal deifies the poor. The liberal likes to place an immense amount of pressure on the poor to be “good at it.” To them, “helping” the poor is an exchange from which they will receive something. And if that day comes when they receive nothing—when the poor act “ungrateful,” when they’re no longer “good at it”—the contract is over and they revoke their assistance.
The conservative demonizes the poor. The conservative likes to surgically remove all agency from a poor person, to consider their situation an inherent aspect of their (sub)human condition. To them, criminalizing the poor is an exchange from which they will receive something. And if that day comes when they receive nothing—when they join the ranks of the poor, when they can’t climb any higher on the backs of others—then they blame themselves or the people less fortunate than themselves for breaking the contract and losing the assistance.
To both, our flaws are our fault. Most Americans operate politically between those two belief systems. They’re not all that different, and they were both invented to serve the same goal.
Neither wants to really look at the evil baked into the system, or the intricacy and intent with which it was built, or the centuries that the ruling class has spent refining it, protecting it, making it stronger. Neither wants to really face the fragility of their place in the world. Neither wants to really mourn what they didn’t get to be because the world didn’t let them. And they have contingencies, in case the day ever comes when someone, something, forces them to.
Fuck that. There is an inherent, irrevocable beauty in all people. For that, we have a right to our flaws.
Grilled Cheese, Language, Ruth.
December 10th, 2021. 1100 hours.
1 DIRECT MESSAGE FROM @avaswrites:
> r u back on campus? r u alright?
> Yeah. I mean shit sucks but I’m not in jail or anything.
> yeah feel that. man ://
3 Hours Earlier
Whether the urgent notifications or the alarm wake me up first doesn’t really matter. I can’t get up or dressed or outside or into the car or down the road or through the parking lot or out of the car or up to the gate of the hastily-constructed and dismayingly effective city works fence fast enough to stop the cops from doing what they did half an hour ago.
“Did people get their stuff out of the way?”
“We need jail support.”
“Where did my cat go? Can someone please help me find my cat?”
“FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIGS. PEOPLE LIVED HERE.”
“Isn’t this great?! Those crackheads deserved it!”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Did they already take down Matthew’s treehouse?”
“YOU GUYS DESTROYED A FUCKING CHURCH.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The cops had gotten a head start by arresting and threatening the most outspoken residents with contacts to activists. So, with one of our most diligent contacts in chains in the back of a cruiser, another frantically trying to text distant activists through her half-asleep state, and a fourth of the usual residents present, it’s simply a matter of moving in dozers, telling people to get out or else, and finally destroying the Sears Lane encampment.
My friend and I are back on UVM’s campus. We are in the windowed back room of Central Dining. I am poking a half-eaten muffin. They are chewing a grilled cheese sandwich. We feel like characters in a movie and it’s really exhausting. I raise my eyes to my elder sheepishly.
“Is every semester like that?”
They laugh bitterly.
“Yeah, pretty much. Shit sucks.” Their voice is weighed down by memories of other causes, old, new, and ongoing–lunch and stories with anarchists at Food Not Cops; the knifelike voices of sexual assault survivors delivering charged speeches to the university Board of Trustees; the smell of summer mornings across from Battery Park, waiting to see familiar faces leave jail; sitting in a room heated by fossil fuels and listening to school administrators lie about trying their hardest to divest–in no particular order.
“I think I want to transfer,” I blurt.
We laugh again. We look down at their grilled cheese. It is shaped like Palestine. We start cackling. Then we start crying. The horror and the stress and the pain and the despondency are rolling off of us. The conversation continues. We speak the same language. There’s no way to put this kind of conversation into words unless you have lived it. There are people anywhere in America who could speak like this with us. We find each other everywhere we go, without fail. We all wish we had the time to be friends instead of coworkers or comrades. We all wish we had the energy to show how much we love each other. Community is not an American concept. We are fighting uphill, no matter where we are. That is why we understand each other. “Activist” is a stupid word and it doesn’t quite cover it.
“Go to Spanish class, Miguel. It’s the last class of your first semester. You shouldn’t skip it.” Their voice hovers gently but presently over the hum of the dining hall.
I hesitate in response.
“I’ll be okay,” they assure me. “And you will, too.”
For the next week before I go home, I go hard for Food Not Cops. I’m there every day, scooping pasta and vegan stew into cardboard cups held by cold hands, doing my part to clean up the mess the city made. And besides, I get a free meal out of it. Before I leave for Rhode Island, Ruth, an unhoused woman who is always diligently cooking and volunteering for Food Not Cops, exchanges contact information with me. Her kind eyes smile at me as she says goodbye and suggests that we meet one day in Providence. She loves that city.
“It didn’t work.”
December 17th, 2021. 1200 hours.
My mother is driving me through Providence. I see a man standing on the side of the road. He is holding a cardboard sign. I start weeping.
“My chest is aching, burns like a furnace,
The burning keeps me alive.”
–Talking Heads - Life During Wartime
Epilogue
I didn’t think I was going to add to this story again. But I suppose this is a living history.
I don’t know how I am going to write this part. There is too much to think about and I don’t think my words can make sense of it the way they need to. But like always, I am going to try.
I never left the Sears Lane Rapid Response Line group chat. As a result, I was peripherally aware of a fundraising effort involving a former resident of the camp. The fundraiser was organized by an unhoused woman known as Janet and the money was being raised for her fiancé. He was the man known around town for his handmade one-story shelter built from a shipping container sitting on the outskirts of the encampment. He was also the man who had been arrested early in the morning the day of the eviction as the police swept the camp. And one day in early November, he was the man whose name was written on a digital flyer underneath a cartoon megaphone on the BTV Copwatch Instagram page.
The flyer read, “All out for Jon, who was arrested during the raid on Sears Lane. Pack the court with support!”
The day I saw that flyer was the day I learned that Jon had been held in pretrial detention in the Burlington Corrections Department for the long year since the encampment eviction. I don’t know how you spent your 2022, whether you spent it on your second semester of university, celebrating the end of the year with your friends at sunset on a waveless lake beach, getting your first job as an intern in a local government office, visiting your friends in the city, returning to college, starting up your sophomore year, looking for apartments, passing classes and exams.
That’s how I spent my 2022.
Jon spent his in a cage.
On November 4th, 2022, at 10AM, me and three other college students walk into the Federal Building on Elmwood Avenue. The hearing, initially set to begin at 9AM, has been pushed back for no apparent reason. As I empty my pockets into a plastic bin, I think of my classmates chattering excitedly before the beginning of their history lecture. I feel a familiar indignation rise in my chest and I walk through the metal detectors with my back straight. I am missing class, but I’m doing it for a just reason!
My indignation deflates. I know I am going into a courtroom to watch a man get convicted. My presence feels like an empty gesture at this point. This isn’t a movie. We are not saving lives. We are mustering harm reduction.
The last student in our group of four hurries through the metal detectors, under the pitying look of the security staff. I glare back at them and they look away. We all turn towards the elevators.
The gallery is supposed to be split down the middle–in this case, the defense is seated on the right. We shuffle into our seats and look around the imposing room.
I think back to the Chittenden County Probate Courthouse, where the first Sears Lane proceeding was held. The bland walls, the drab color scheme, the faded brown of the wood finish. This courtroom is nothing like that. It is overwhelmingly ornate, with dark wooden bleachers and Vermont green dyeing the entire room. A big clock on the wall tells us the precise time. Its second hand glides over bold Roman numerals as we wait for the trial to begin.
An old man in a plaid suit hunched over a thick messy binder strides briskly into the room. He sits down at the defense table, and then immediately stands back up when the prosecution walks in. He charismatically shakes their hands and introduces himself. I can’t hear what the prosecutors mutter in response.
There are two prosecutors, a man and a woman. They both have tightly-held back hair and similar modern gray suits. They look young, almost millennials. They glance back at us. We glare back at them. They look away.
At this point the defense attorney surveys the courtroom. He sees us sitting in the gallery on the defense side and his eyes light up.
“Are you here for Jon?” he asks. He knows he can use our presence, as well as the letters of solidarity other anarchists sent in, as proof of Jon’s good character, that he doesn’t deserve to spend the 2020s in a federal facility.
“Yeah,” the four of us respond in unison. I think about how official this all is. The defense shook the prosecutors’ hands like a businessman. We responded as curtly and politely as a waitress.
We are about to watch a man lose years of his life in a cage.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I haven’t even gotten to the part where Jon walks in. This is impossible to write. I am too distracted. I don’t know how to say this.
The judge asks him questions like “What were you thinking?” and “Why would you have those guns on you?” and “Why didn’t you stop doing meth, when meth was worsening everyone’s homelessness?”
I will always be too tired to explain those things away.
“Why don’t you do this?”
Why don’t you help him? Because he doesn’t deserve it? Everyone does.
What do you think meth addiction does, Your Honor?
The mandatory minimum sentence for Jon’s several federal offenses is four years. The prosecution seems satisfied by putting another threat to the community in a cage. This time it is an old man, and they do it in front of his sobbing fiancé.
On the ride back to campus, my friend and I discuss what has happened to us in the past four years of our lives.