Of hubris, horror, and homelessness

As I lay on my cheap foam bunk in the hostel the night after I returned my rental car, I found myself thinking about money – or more specifically my general lack thereof. The bed in the hostel cost me $30 for the night which I didn’t overly mind paying as I somewhat desperately needed a shower (along with a night not spent in the foetal position in the back of a Toyota), but it wouldn’t be a great economic solution going forwards; that is to say I could afford going the hostel route for the foreseeable future, but I would have to become gainfully employed in my chosen field within a very small window or face the reality of running out of funds entirely. The final nail in the hostel coffin came the next morning when I was hastened out of my bunk earlier than memory dictated this place did its evictions, summer policies of course being different than the mid-winter in which I had previously stayed. Clearly this more expensive and less friendly service wasn’t for me.

By this time I had secured a storage space for the vast majority of my belongings, to which I hastened in order to drop off all items non-essential for my day’s activity: scouting a suitably surreptitious spot where I might while away a night in a tent without attracting any undue scrutiny. After a bit of map study I decided to look within the bounds of the Auckland Domain – the oldest, biggest, and most naturally forested park in the city – as it was suitably far away from the downtown core, and big enough to make a nightly patrol of any kind unfeasible. Indeed, I was not the only one to reach this conclusion, as I actually came across a series of other people who were – in all likelihood – going to do the same thing as I: they were universally young, somewhere on the scruffiness continuum, and carrying large filled hiking backpacks around the more back-woods tracks in the park. At one point I took a somewhat worn looking departure from a trail and stumbled almost on top of a Scottish guy who was just then unpacking his gear for the evening; after a hushed yet humorous conversation I set out again to find my refuge, more heartened with this elusive kind of company than I had been previous to its confirmation in my mind.

In the end I found a visually secluded flat space near where the park is bordered by the train tracks, and somewhat tentatively set about my first urban camping experience. To my mild surprise absolutely nothing bad happened, other than the occasional diesel train’s remarkable operating volume and a series of nighttime animals (likely either nocturnal birds, hedgehogs, or both) that made alternating spitting-cat and electric kettle coming-to-boil noises from time to time. When I woke up the next morning all continued to be well, and I packed up my tent with a certain bravado and the knowledge that the $30 it would have cost me to stay in a hostel was still mine: I had my temporary solution for waiting until the school season started.

I kept on coming back to my spot for a few nights, and indeed came to quite enjoy living craftily in a well-manicured park on the verge of the downtown area. Around five or six I would retire to the park from my daily perambulation around Auckland (doing errands and scouting where to eventually look for a real place to live) with some combination of groceries prepared for my dinner. By this point there would invariably be some variety of local sports going on worth watching on the park’s main playing fields – which in the New Zealand summer means cricket with a light dusting of soccer – so I could sit down, make myself some tea using my handy stove, and enjoy an eminently civilized evening decoding semi-obscure English sports. It was an interesting window into what old age is probably going to be like for me, without any kind of physical complaints slowing me down; it was, in a word, relaxing.

It was not to last, however. Some few nights later while inside my tent preparing to sleep I was rather surprised to hear a violent crashing coming through the vegetative screen surrounding my grotto campsite, complete with swearing and metal clanking sounds reminiscent of ski poles or microphone stands being carried inexpertly. As I was very much alone and solely clad in my underwear I chose to remain silent, rather than hailing my night-time visitor, and simply crouched motionless, waiting for them to leave. The person didn’t throw any words in the direction of the tent but I did hear the telltale electronic ‘beepbeep’ of a camera of some kind being used. The person then retreated in equally noisy fashion through the woods leaving me in a sudden night-sweat, considering my options. After a moment of indecision I immediately began packing up my bag, getting dressed, and breaking down my tent (all, counter-productively enough, at the same time), and a few hurried/sweaty moments later I was rather actively fleeing the scene of my singular ‘occupy the park’-style campout towards the more communal one in one of the main downtown parks.

View of the new inadvertent basecamp. Pretty in tents.

A view out the window

I arrived sometime after 10pm to a largely asleep camp of ‘occupy Aucklanders’, which was just as well as I had zero intention of starting a book club, and re-organised myself a sleeping solution on the verge of their small tent city. I remained there for a few days, or at least long enough to discover the real reason why the people who were there were camped out: they didn’t want to pay for, or couldn’t afford, hostel fees. It’s entirely possible that a handful of the occupiers were interested in global economic equality or somesuch…but not a certainty. Laying down to sleep one night I heard another tent arriving to be ‘occupied’ by a young guy who was apparently borrowing it from his female friend; the conversation around this was essentially the following:

“all right, thanks for letting me borrow it!”
“whatever you bum, haha…..don’t go bringing any trashy chicks into it, haha”
“oh, I won’t….pause….haha!”

There were no speeches given, no rallies held that were actually attended by the campers, and no proselytizing of passers-by. I found the experience immensely gratifying from an ironic perspective: in the name of defeating ‘evil’ capitalism, the people at this occupy site were saving boatloads of money – presumably to be used on buying sweet, sweet material goods. For my part, I at least kept the listening-to of my evil corporate ipod to within the tent…but that is about as far as anyone went.

After I got up on my third morning, earlier than my surrounding party-campers as a rule, I walked to the park bathrooms with a certain bemusement in my mind and my bag on my back (as yet another rule I would completely pack up before I left the tent at all in the morning). This turned out to be a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself, and a flotilla of security staff was descending on the camp as I made my way back in the direction of town; before you get too imaginative, however, remember that this is New Zealand. A ‘vacate in half an hour’ notice was given, and like the corporate lackeys we were, we all dispersed. I left alongside another Canadian that had joined the impromptu campout, in the direction of downtown and, no doubt, more questionable CBD adventures.