Quick Silver Fall 2003

Camp Hank has ‘em scratchin’ . . . in the best way

It weren’t only the mosquitoes that had two associates of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness slapping their skin and dodging into the no-see-um netted gazebo. It was George.

Oh, the skeeters do come out something fierce in the August evenings at 3,000 foot elevation in the Sierras when there’s water around. But if a stiff dose of georgist regaling follows languid lounging by a shaded burbling stream while the sun bakes the mountain inclines, and if revival tent adjurations follow utter respite from the craziness and psychological terrorism of the urban setting’s indifference to broken humanity, and if spiritual tumult comes as the concomitant of experiencing the healthy regime of the out-of-doors, bring it on!

Linking the soulful, astringent message of georgist thinking with the powerfully healing medicine of a weekend in the mountains (including a swim in the clear, cold and swift American River) is precisely what Camp Hank aspires to accomplish.

This past August, Ken Noto and Mike Lyle, both of the Coalition on Homelessness, formally inaug-urated Camp Hank as a retreat.
The site is still rustic: no power, water has to be brought in in jugs, and cooking’s accomplished with a small camp stove. Yet these spare terms assist in detoxifying the spirit of the acculturated notion that “the world simply can’t work well.”

Both Ken and Mike were thrilled to briefly leave the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. It’s where they work, committed to offering material and moral help to those abandoned by official social assistance programs. But as I picked them up and dropped them off, their gallows humor commentary on this and that denizen of SF’s most visible slum spoke volumes about their misgivings as to societal betterment.

Up in the Sierras, they put in a half-day’s strong labor clearing brush leading to a future building site, then passed the balance of time plunking rocks in a creek and conferring with the demonstrative geology and flora of Mother Nature. Mother Nature works. The evidence of that is everywhere. She flourishes without any need of human welfare programs. Indeed, all of its own accord, life has filled up space as fully as can be, and with an astonishing variety of forms.

It is the ambition of Camp Hank curriculum to first break down participants’ ideological allegiances to received systems of economic analyses, then to point out that, in fact, Nature does operate according to some specific economic principles, and, lastly, to translate these principles into the human experience so that civilization mirrors nature’s depth and breadth of abundance.

The program, as it organizes itself in my thought, is a six day event. In the two days I had with Ken and Mike, a good deal of the first third of the curriculum was achieved, namely the deconstruction of faith in existing political economic thought. Not by intellectual argument, but by plopping the men in Nature’s living room. We roamed the mountain, entered the mountain via a Gold Rush era slant mine tunnel, sweated (in work) like the manzanita sweats through its stomata, and washed ourselves in the icy snow melt that is the American River. There was no political position to defend, only a stunningly quiet sojourn to accept. Without our intervention the mountain and all of its fauna and flora ran on apace --the mountain through various states of erosion and geologic uplift, the plants and animals by nibbling away at one another in a circle of caloric transfer.

At one point the existential immanence of Nature drew the residing sense of oppression out of one of us and rocks were thrown from one side of a creek to another, shattering on an igneous slab. It seemed to me that this wanton exercise was akin to the child who purposefully tests the patience of its parents. There on the mountain, in an infinite embrace, Nature absorbed all the pent up frustration of a man rendered poor by civilization. In the city, throwing such a fit would win contempt and disdain and also, perhaps, some charity. The mountain, by contrast, offered no judgment nor sentimen-tal pandering, only a profound resilience to a gnat’s worth of pummeling and an unperturbed gurgle of water over a wee cataract.

In short, where it was apparent to a sensate human being that something in the design of society ground him down, no element of malice obtained in their neighbors and loved ones. And it all has to do with moral and economic speculation in home ownership. The Nature. Rather, Nature welcomes the human being to apply might and mind to endeavor and produce a living. There was not time this trip to explore Nature’s own economy and then propose to rehabilitate society along Nature’s lines, but as if to underline the efficacy of a Nature-immersion presentation of political economy, the fellow who had exhibited such a violent interaction with nature has beat it to the country. After two months back in San Francisco he chose to endure the crime of poverty no longer and has left. The systemic pattern of society will follow him,most like, but he will be so much closer to Nature I suppose, that some of the pathological alienation he experienced as a sometimes homeless person in the city will be dissipated.

To draw this initial report on Camp Hank in action to a close, I suggest its provision for reaching the heart and mind of today’s citizen cannot be over-stated. It’s modality potential is enormous --physical exercise, self-paced exploration of a living economy that models elements of a georgist philosophy (no absentee control of habitat), intellectual stimulation, and spiritual refreshment. In an era of virtual existence, of video simulations and attenuated representational governance, of artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation, the feel of mountain underfoot can occasion revolution in thought. Q