collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative
I work at “Fork and Spoon,” a pay-what-you-can restaurant, two nights a week. It is, as far as I know, the only place in Bozeman besides the food bank where people can get emergency food services, or food that is affordable or at no cost in town. My job is to coordinate the volunteers, who serve all the food and clean the kitchen and dining area at the end of the night, and to watch the dining area to make sure everything is safe. The restaurant is a few blocks from the downtown area where there are ever-increasing numbers of chic restaurants and boutiques. I feel a strong desire every night to protect the restaurant from the militancy of an increasingly poverty-phobic (or poverty-ignorant) downtown. Perhaps I kid myself into thinking I’m protecting something; I’m not sure if the people regularly who use the services of our restaurant even regard Fork & Spoon as a safe place to hang out. I see many of the same faces, week after week, many I know by name. This intimacy always feels strange and uncomfortable in a way that gets my mind churning. They are customers, and I am paid to offer them a service, yes, but I have chosen to be there each night and their access to choice is ambiguous and strained.
With many of the regulars --the people who return every day for a meal at Fork & Spoon-- there are sometimes complaints: they tell me the potatoes are bland, the silverware smudged, the salad greens limp. I experience these complaints as a kind of choice in themselves. I do not know the reasons why people come. Perhaps they are hungry and there is nowhere else to find food. But if they cannot choose to eat there, then they can choose to complain.
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When I walk home from work I feel a release of pressure, a shift done. I pass lighted windows in houses, the “open” signs of restaurants, the stark beams of car lights cutting through the air. The snow absorbs and only gently reflects the light, as though all the light were really seeping out from under some widely spread cloth. I walk quickly --I usually haven’t eaten dinner, and don’t drink enough water while working, so I walk toward the relief of food heated in the microwave, my filled water bottle, my coat cast aside, and the warmth of my family’s kitchen with the brown linoleum. I am always aware that I am walking toward something, that I am moving between places and have no intention of lingering outside. If I am walking in the cold and dark I carry the imminent warmth and light of my house inside me. What I am walking towards is the abundance in my life, the certainty of having everything I need available in one place.
The certainty of warmth, which is of course accessible only with wealth, is partly what drives the insanely expensive outdoor recreation industry here. Ice climbing, back-country skiing, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, and winter camping are all hugely popular. It is fashionable to spend time in the cold if it means you’re doing some impressive snowy sport. But to be cold unwillingly is unsavory and even repellent. The “MT” on the new “Bozeman, MT” signs made by the Bozeman City Government look like “™” signs, marking the territory of the parks and government buildings, subtly signalling that Bozeman belongs to the people who pay. Bozeman’s unhoused and housing insecure population is increasingly unwelcome and policed in the downtown area (although this was pretty much always the case), and the few facilities that offer overnight emergency housing or emergency food access--the “warming center” and the food bank-- exist at the geographic margins of town, meaning people have to walk, or wait for the bus with infrequent route rotations.
The story of displacement of housing-insecure folks from gentrifying communities is a story we have all heard many times before, in many places across the country. But there is something horrible about the proximity of the growing winter sports industry and the people who experience the everyday burden of winter on their bodies. It takes ingenuity to navigate the town when it is too cold to linger outside. Without a home or safe place to return to, there are considerations: there now for food, there later for sleep, here now for heat. Talking about the weather is not frivolous small talk at Fork & Spoon; when there is no choice but to face the wind and snow, it is life-shaping.
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There was one night a few weeks ago when I drove to an expensive Italian restaurant called Blackbird in the downtown area rather than walk home after my shift at Fork and Spoon:
They are serving a special pasta with celery root, which I am proud of because I helped package and prepare it at my other job on an organic farm. That night at Fork & Spoon I had to ask a man to leave because he tried to initiate a physical fight with another man. It was uncomfortable for me to say the words; I did not feel I earned my disciplinary authority in the restaurant insofar as I don’t believe anyone earns their authority over anyone anywhere. As I walk into Blackbird, I feel briefly breath-taken by the huge atmospheric difference between here and there. Blackbird is bounded by its own seamless authority; the easy authority of money. No one person needs to exercise authority over another here, because everyone has already entered with an agreement that they will participate in the languid ease of the atmosphere. Everyone is swaddled in candlelight, there is a dark glimmer around each table, a soursweet smell of wine, of bread and herbs, and an intimacy in the room that could make a life --if you have the right kind-- seem to fall into order for a moment. It’s a warm cocoon filled with the laughter of the ease-of-the-everyday, of isn’t-life-splendid, we-have-bread-and-oil-and-vinegar, our-server-is-quietly-charismatic, we-are-humbly-delighting-in-our-lives, we-are-warm-and-yes-troubled-by-the-state-of-the-world-but-let’s-focus-on-the-little-things-like-our-pancetta.
Here everything is ringed with loving light and chatter, opinions on serious worldly matters, and bustling success. There, it is full of jumbled, lurching urgency, fluorescent lights and security cameras, zero-tolerance-policies and curfews and no-seconds-on-any-items and I’m-gonna-have-to-ask-you-to-leaves. Blackbird is a place where, if you are a paying customer, you hear people say yes when you ask for anything. Fork & Spoon is so many nos all stacked up on each other, there is so much that can’t be done in the two hours we are open for evening service. It is possibly a reprieve but hardly a dark and glimmering cocoon.
I can’t help but feel that the warmth and soft candlelight of the restaurant has already done itself in, is imploding at the center. The two places --Blackbird and Fork & Spoon-- are in each other already, the nice restaurant needs the need of others in order to understand itself, the generosity and charisma of its waiters and service is bounded by its walls. Not only does the accumulation of wealth in the restaurant necessitate the poverty of others, but from my experience, the customers at Blackbird need the hardship and suffering of others in order to have something to talk about over their baskets of fresh bread. People discuss how awful political leaders are and give their critiques of Amazon labor practices, and by talking about the need of other people they begin to believe they are doing something about it.
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The notion that we earn our own abundance is what I think drives our scarcity economy. What I have --this front door to unlock with my key, this towel to set my snow-sodden boots on, this microwave where I heat my leftovers, this warm shower that I linger in for too long until I become drowsy with heat, this bed with sheets I fold myself into-- all of this is a given, was granted to me before I was born. And beyond the warmth of my body, beyond the food I have always had, I have the constant presence of my parents. And beyond that, I have the protective buffer and affirmation of the Bozeman PD and Bozeman at large. In my town, which is over 95% white, people seem to believe there is something viscerally wrong about a white woman like me sleeping in the street, or going hungry. This is an abundance I never earned.
A passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed comes to mind: “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while another ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think” (358). Just as the abundance in my life was not earned, neither is the scarcity and violence earned by the people who experience it everyday, many of whom come in to Fork & Spoon. For me, Le Guin’s passage compels me to focus on my responsibility for the present moment; I did not “earn,” nor “deserve,” the life I am grateful for, but it is within my capacity to disperse its abundance. In writing that “No man earns punishment, no man earns reward,” Le Guin is not saying moral relativism is the answer or claiming that one’s experience of existence is determined by dumb luck. Her words remind me to let go of my personal attachment to what I have, and to identify the ways I am a part of --the ways I readily admit, and the ways that are difficult to admit to myself.
It is so easy for me to fall into critique of Bozeman as a consummate example of modern settler colonialism in the U.S. West. And Bozeman is, irrevocably and rampantly, a bastion of white escapism and domination. In the downtown area the signs that say “We accept all races, identities, etc.” are omnipresent; there is literally a stamp of white liberal anxiety on every storefront. Blackbird is an exemplary place for Bozeman’s outdoorsy cosmopolitanism; the good wine and bread and subtle elegance of the waitstaff is so convincingly natural. The proximity of punishment and permissiveness is certainly jarring, but this is happening everywhere, not just in Bozeman. And any time I start critiquing something I find I am really just distancing myself from it, from how my own body --its warmth, its well-fedness, its low-blood pressure-- are all wrapped up in precisely what I am critiquing. I have in so many ways already opted in to the life of Blackbird, whether I admit it to myself now or not. I have a taste for artisan pizza every now and then, I like flirting with the attractive and edgy-looking servers. Am I willing to give that up? Is anyone asking me to?
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I find myself distracted by “shoulds” -- people should not be sleeping in the streets -- a town this resourced should have a better warming center than this -- we should all be honoring these people rather than pushing them subtly to the margins where we don’t see them. The shoulds cloud my vision and don’t allow me to see things as they are. Everyone has choices, some more readily available than others -- I cannot deny those who use emergency food services the dignity of their choices to be where they are. If I deny people their choices, then I assume the necessity of me, a “service;” I admit that in order to understand myself, I need them to be there in need of me.
I dream of a world where food and warmth are irrefutable and unassailable, rather than something accessible only “if you behave yourself;” where nobody is put in a position to pass judgement about whether someone has the right to live, and to live well. I have more specific and immediately practical dreams about Fork & Spoon, too. For now, I am trying to be accountable to my values, and to have the courage to try to make the changes I believe need to happen at Fork & Spoon, to honor people’s responsibility and expertise over themselves, and to honor my own responsibility to my own abundances. For now, during my walks home from Fork & Spoon in the dark, I leave the option open for myself to stop by Blackbird if they are serving the special pasta I like. I walk in a body and mind that is suspended between the places I have inhabited, and now inhabit, in my life; I feel like a spider walking the strings of a web, balancing between two points as she moves from one to another, home in the tension between both.
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