It’s quiet. Despite its reputation as a chaotic place, the PalCo Marsh, also known as the Devil’s Playground, often is. A few dogs, tied in front of tents, bark. The motor of a fishing boat on the bay can be heard just out of sight behind the trees. Eureka City Councilmember Kim Bergel walks with a member of the Mobile Intervention and Services Team, going tent to tent to check in and see if people are willing to talk about services. She is wearing a pair of tall rubber boots. It is Friday, the day several service providers set up tents and tables in the north parking lot of the Bayshore Mall. Some people visit the fair, taking advantage of the free food and water and talking to providers. But many others still stay in their camps or leave the area entirely, wary of the increased presence of interlopers. Their time of refuge may be coming to an end. This is the last Friday before the city of Eureka plans to clear out the homeless camp – and its estimated more than 100 residents – for good.
“Things seem to be going pretty well,” says Bergel. “We’ll at least get as many people out peacefully as we can.”
Bergel visits the area often, checking in with residents, petting pitbulls and spreading the word about the upcoming eviction date. People have been increasingly responsive to the idea of the shipping container village, she says, and are signing up with Betty Chinn.
She is doubling back to the parking lot when she decides to check in on Manny, an older man with diabetes and mobility problems. He was sick the day before. Although Manny can walk, he must use his wheelchair to get far, and relies on his friends and neighbors in the marsh to help him with some tasks like getting dressed and finding food. He is waiting on the Veteran’s Administration to help him get an apartment, but this solution is at least a week away. In the meantime, he and a friend might stay in a motel, or in the shipping container set up.
In this place, etiquette demands a shout to announce your arrival, and just outside the entrance to the camp, Bergel does so. Receiving no response, she moves closer.
“Manny, are you in there?”
From within the tent, there’s the sound of a muffled whimper.
“Manny? Are you sick? Do you need help?”
His voice is muffled, unintelligible, pained. Bergel unzips the flap and goes inside.
“Manny? Manny? Wake up. Wake up Manny!” There is the sound of rustling as Bergel shakes him, then the sound of a slap.
She reappears outside the tent.
“I need some help,” Bergel says.
Inside, Manny has gone unconscious, his eyes twisted back in his head. His thin legs are covered only with a blanket. A bowl with macaroni and cheese and hotdogs, cooked on a nearby hotplate, sits on the floor.
Fresh vomit has spilled over his lap. Bergel kneels next to him on the dirty mattress, holding his chin and asking him to wake up.
“We need an ambulance,” she says as she dials 911. Soon the tent is full of people from the camp next door.
“He’s hypoglycemic,” says one person. A woman who kneels on his other side, slaps him and tells him to open his eyes. “Manny, the ambulance is coming, the cops are coming, so you have to wake up, do you understand?”
Manny whimpers again.
Another man, skinny, with a neck tattoo and a large hunting knife on the back of his belt, yells at Bergel for calling the police. He tells Bergel that Manny has taken heroin to help with his diabetes, and he’s just nodding, and that he doesn’t need the ambulance, and that the treatment will waste the $20 high Manny paid for.
Bergel tells the man that Manny has given his permission and needs to go to the hospital. In the distance, the whine of a fire engine’s siren can be heard.
“Well we’re going to have to take him out there then, because they don’t come back here,” says the man.
“They’ll come back,” Bergel replies through gritted teeth.
When the paramedics and police arrive, the neighbors disperse. The responders say Manny’s name and thump his chest. He is more responsive now, reaching urgently for Bergel’s hand and whimpering, “No heroin, no heroin.”
“No heroin,” she says. “But your friends say you did take some.”
“No heroin, sick,” he says, a note of panic in his voice.
The EMTs put him on a stretcher and carry him out of the tent, over the puddles and garbage, 10 to 15 yards to the parking lot. Bergel and the MIST worker follow and, once the police have gone, the man with the knife follows her.
“You’d better fucking make sure he has a ride back,” he says.
“He does, I gave them my card,” she tells him.
“They can send the bill to the fucking city councilor’s office,” he says, and continues to shout at her back as she walks away. “This happens all the time, every day. Nobody calls the ambulance. We don’t need an ambulance. You people are here for five minutes and you think you know everything. Fuck you.”
Bergel turns around.
“You know what?” she says. “You can back off.”
The two exchange remarks for a few tense seconds, then finally they turn and go their respective ways, him back to his tent and her back to the parking lot. The fire truck has pulled away. Manny is in the ambulance, which drives away.
“What happened?” asks a woman with a plate full of food, and someone tells her.
“Oh no,” she says, hurrying back to her camp.
Back out behind the trees, the swears and shouts of Manny’s neighbor can be heard.
Bergel walks over to a cluster of people in the parking lot, and they lean in and listen. One puts her arm around her. After a few minutes, Bergel gets in her car and drives to the hospital.
As of 5 p.m. on Friday, Manny had left the hospital and returned to his tent in the marsh.
This article appears in Crackpot.
What happened to Manny ?
It’s too bad some people who could really benefit from the help might get lumped in with the jerks.
Most people that are housed are totally ignorant of what is going on in the minds of the people living on the streets. No one really cares about them and that is why they are not housed. People fall through the cracks of society every day without a safety net in place to catch them all. There is little responsibility taken for this sick condition and so people like Kim Bergel do not know how to interact because her authority won’t allow her to respect personal choices that she assumes she would never make. After all no one would ever want to live in a tent and be left alone and shoot heroin that is put on the streets by people she looks up to to make a profit off of human misery. She criminalizes people, as do the rest of city government, instead of allowing them opportunities for self improvement. They build upon the penal system of prisons where prison guards are locking up their neighbors and destroying families. What is being done is nightmarish. There is a better way.
Thank you Kim Bergel for helping Manny get to the hospital by calling the ambulance – And picking him up from the hospital and giving him a ride back! ALSO – thank you for helping transport a dog to the vet for a rabies vaccine so their owner who is experiencing homelessness could get their dog licensed in between!! I wish you could share some of your compassion with a few of your council members. Thank you so much!
Please stop parroting the bigoted, degrading, prejudicial and hateful epithet “Devil’s Playground”. All those using it merely perpetuate Eureka’s enduring dark legacy of punishing and evicting entire classes of their weakest, most vulnerable residents who also suffered similar epithets.
An unbelievable and inexcusable disgrace.
The bankers, brokers, speculators, developers and realtors that are still benefiting by making sure affordable housing shortages continue throughout the 1980’s and 2008 housing bubbles, share much responsibility for homelessness.
Why not call them “Predatory crony-capitalists”? It’s a far more accurate description than the one used to describe an involuntary homeless camp.
thank you Kim Bergel for going above and beyond to help these people!
Wat kind of low mantality peice of shit would not call an ambulance for somebody that was having a medical emergency Manny is a personal Freind of mine and a good person who’s back there because of medical circumstances and has been given an alotted time to live and this brainsurgen skinney whos obviously worried his heroin party will have to slo down if the cops show up more then human life needs to OD on heroin and die .if you do you I hope they leave you’re dead ass carccus in the middle of the trail for more then a week before the cops stumble across you and shovel you’re remains peice VB y peice and that is more then you deserve .you’re a heroin theiven criminal and a peice of shit .thank you Mrs bergel for calling the paramedics and getting Manny to the hospital it’s a relif to KNO he’s back.at his camp and OK thank you again for helping Manny and skinney do society a favor and die very soon so my kids won’t have to look at a peice of shit like you ever
Several times a week a fire truck, ambulance and police will arrive at a Eureka residence for an array of health issues, addiction, violence, illness, suicide, but this is the first time I can recall one making the news with photos and descriptions of a personality behind the incident.
Curious.
It appears that the homeless are like everyone else after all.
Get it right Devil’s Playground is behind the mall the marsh is known as the North 40
If someone refers to, “the homeless camp on PALCO Marsh”, or “near COSTCO” or even on “Humboldt Bay”….everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about.
“Devil’s Playground” is pure bigotry and no different than “Satan’s Cesspool”, referring to that truly evil cabal of Bigs that make sure there’s little affordable housing in Eureka and Humboldt County for the past 40 years, rigging shortages that push folks into bigger houses and a “Housing Bubble” every 15 years.
If every media source accurately reported on “Satan’s Cesspool” these repeat offenders might have a little trouble attaining their next “Bubble”.