| James Bustamente doesn’t remember where he was the night before he met a police officer on the path to his tent on Queen Anne Hill. He doesn’t remember what day it was; sometime in early October. He doesn’t remember what the police officer looked like. What he remembers is the weather.
“They picked a day to do it when it was raining,” he says. “I think they do that all the time.”
He remembers, too, what the officer held in one hand. A machete.
And the 39-year-old former butcher can recount what the officer said when he asked for time to clear out.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’ll be out in a couple hours,’ you know, because I just had my tent and a few things.
“He said ‘No, if you try and get in the way I’ll arrest you and have your stuff destroyed.’
“He said, you know, ‘Just get out of here.’”
“So I just turned around and left, you know. Didn’t have nothing to do.”
The next day he went back: out Elliott Avenue to the parking lot behind the Super Supplements, where a trail leads up into a forest of ivy and maple. The machete’s slashes had exposed his things to the elements. The rain had done the rest. Everything was ruined.
“All my art” — Bustamente does pen and ink drawings in the fantasy genre, and has made money from the work. “My lantern. Propane tanks, sleeping bags, two duffle bags full of clothes, a couple pillows.
“I mean, my stuff was just thrown all over the place, just all over. They did a hell of a job, I’ll tell you that. Did the same to everyone else.”
Two weeks later, Bustamente says, Parks employees came in and cleared up the mess. At his camp, they were mopping up after the police alone, Bustamente says; during his tenure in Kinnear Park he kept the premises clean, picking up cigarette butts along the trail. He was a regular at the Starbucks at the foot of the hill, which had a bathroom. Trash, too, was taken care of. “I had a trash can with trash bags; the guys at the vitamin shop… would even give me bags when I didn’t have them.
“My place was spic and span; I don’t drink or do drugs, if those guys say they saw beer cans they are absolute liars.”
And that’s why the maintenance lead for Kinnear Park turned a blind eye to his camp.
“The Parks people, they went up there one day” last spring, he recalls. “He wandered around, went up there and there and there, you know, then came back and said ‘You guys are OK, if you ever need bags when you see me, you know, let me know and I’ll give you all the bags you need. This is a very clean, clean camp.’
“He said ‘I’m going to pretend you’re not here.’”
The Parks Department estimates that this year it will spend $175,000 on clearing homeless encampments from its property. That’s about 20 percent more than it spent in 2006. For the Central West district of the city, in which Kinnear Park resides, they’ll spend nearly $25,000 — up 50 percent since 2006. The southwestern portion of the hill, where Bustamente camped, is estimated to need “up to eight cleanup projects with police and DOC assistance,” according to Parks Department documents.
Bustamente left his ruined things where they lay. He stayed with his wife in her subsidized apartment for the eight day maximum allowed by the rules, then found shelter with SHARE. Of shelters generally he has no good opinion. “They’re disgusting. They live like animals,” he says.
He’s afraid to go back to sleeping in the woods. But cops don’t scare him. He saw a couple in a Starbucks recently and asked them what they thought of Mayor Greg Nickels’ stepped-up approach to keeping public property free of blankets, tents, and other survival aids. The mayor’s staff are codifying an encampment clearance procedure that gives the homeless 48 hours to move on [“Trespass procedures get hearing,” Jan. 30].
“The officers said that he’s a very stupid man, a very stupid man. They said, ‘That guy, you know, he’s going to give us a pain in the ass. We hardly have enough people to take care of the city as it is, and now we’re going to have to take care of all these people, thousands of them, their homes destroyed.’”
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