We looked more like second-graders with our faces plastered to a classroom window than futures analysts at a Fortune 500 company. But as much as we craned our necks, and fogged up the glass, the action remained conveniently hidden behind the new Duke Energy Building. Even from 38 floors up, all we could see were speeding toy police cars and little plastic fire trucks racing behind a gleaming, perfect shield of steel and glass. The thick column of smoke continued to rise from behind the building and drift into the sky over the stadium.

“Man, I really hope no one got hurt down there,” Steven said from behind his wire-rimmed glasses, nervously biting his lip. Steven was a nice guy, and an eternal optimist. He wore bad ties and a constant expression of sympathy and understanding. He was chubby, instantly likable, and had the kind of optimism that could be contagious – like when Dr. Phil gets involved with some seriously dysfunctional family and you think for a second that everything just might work out. A year ago, when six people in our team were cut in one day, he tried to reassure everyone carrying a brown box to their car that it would all be OK. As if his optimism alone would be enough to help them make their $4,500/month mortgage payments.
It wasn’t going to be OK this time, though. At least not for someone down on Stonewall Street where all the smoke was coming from. To me, the five circling helicopters and almost a dozen emergency response vehicles were proof of that.

Nick turned toward Steven with an incredulous smirk. “Dude, Steve, are you serious?! Someone down there is burnt toast, man. Fried. Well done.

“One less car on the road for the commute home, right Gus?” Nick smiled toward me, hoping for a laugh.

I shrugged. Steven looked over at me and pushed up his glasses.

Nick was one of those guys who only needed five minutes to rub you the wrong way, and he had been transferred all over the country because he was so good at pissing off the wrong people. He’d come to Charlotte this spring from somewhere in Ohio. Cincinnati or Dayton, maybe.  He was a math genius, though, and as long as he could help banks lose less money, he’d have a job somewhere. Nick could have been Eminem’s twin brother, and he was known around the office as Slim Shady. He hated rap music, and he hated his nickname even more. Karma can be a bitch, I guess.

I saw he had the new ID badge that the company had just switched to. Damn if he really didn’t look just like Eminem, too. Just like him.
I glanced down at my own badge, and a faded, young Gus Kaminski smiled up at me.

Nick was also that guy who didn’t get the memo that you stop wearing Old Spice after high school, and my office smelled like cheap aftershave.

“Guys, I need to get going on a couple of things this morning,” I explained. “I hate to stop the show, but I have a really big fire to put out, and a meeting with Brent at 10, and I’d like my office back now, please.”

I wasn’t trying to make a joke, and only realized what I’d said when all three of them turned away from the glass and stared at me. Slim Shady smiled and laughed one of his Ohio dickhead laughs.

“Nice, Gus.”

I had moved into my very first window office just eight months earlier, and Nick had taken my old cubicle between Lori and Steven. The window office wasn’t really much of a step up. The space was comically cramped and just big enough for a desk and filing cabinet. It had less actual space than my old cube, but it did have a view of the street and apparently enough room for four people to squeeze shoulder to shoulder in front of the single window.

The water stain in one of the ceiling tiles and my bonsai tree silently looked on with us as the churning smoke began to subside. Glare from the mid-morning sun now reflected brilliantly off of the Duke Energy building and lighted up my tiny office like a movie set. This was my favorite part of the day actually – the 38 minutes every morning when sunlight overpowered the white glow of fluorescents.

“Wait Gus, hang on a sec,” Lori breathed, stepping up on her tiptoes, eyes again glued to the street below. She instantly became the tallest member of the group, and I could see Nick fighting hard to keep his eyes pointed downward.

“There’s a tow truck.”

Lori was the prettiest girl in our department. Excluding admin, she was really the only girl in our department. Gifted with legs like a Russian ballerina, and a unique ability to find discrepancies in reams of mind-numbing statistical data, she had the guarded persona that attractive women embrace when working surrounded by guys. Chestnut hair cut to a razor’s edge scraped her collar when she glided through the office, and annoyed brown eyes discouraged the bravest of suitors. Nick openly proclaimed he had “hit the jackpot” when he was placed next to Lori, and waited until precisely 10:15 a.m. on his first day to begin hitting on her.  She ignored Nick’s weekly invitations to “grab a roll down at Enso” with such zest that even Steve finally suggested that he give up and “find someone who’s more receptive, because you’re a good guy, and the right woman for you is out there somewhere.”

The smoke had stopped completely, and the tow truck carefully backed up out of sight, leaving only yellow shadows from its siren to maintain the suspense in my tiny office. The air conditioning kicked on again, displacing a few tufts of Lori’s brown bangs and sending a fresh blast of Old Spice around the room.

I glanced around the city and noticed that the event down on Stonewall Street wasn’t our spectacle alone. Thousands of onlookers in a colossal theater of office towers stared down at the scene silently with us. Faces, hands, coffee mugs, suits and ties of all shapes and colors peered down solemnly on a brilliantly sunny August morning. Some of them could probably actually see what was going on.

“Can Stella can see it from her office?” Nick asked, gesturing across the street toward Two Wachovia. It wasn’t a secret that my fiancée worked in that building, but I had never had a conversation directly with Nick about it. Even after five years, I still couldn’t get used to office gossip. It annoyed me that he knew, but I had bigger problems to deal with, and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t matter in 30 minutes anyway.

Lori and Steven’s eyes darted to each other’s and back to the street.

“Stella can’t see it either,” I said flatly.  “The Duke building is in her way, too.”

“Hey guys, did I miss the show?”

It was late on an unusually warm June afternoon, and Richardson and I sat alone, talking on the patio of the Common Market Southend. The 26-year-old had spent a few years in a much hotter place, and he had made the drive up from his Lake Wylie home to tell me about it. In Iraq, scalding afternoons topped 120 degrees, and some of the locals weren’t OK with him being there. They proved how they felt by trying to kill him with little pieces of exploding hot metal shot in his direction. In the Marine Corps, he didn’t make a living dodging automatic weapons fire, though; he was paid to seek it out. His job description included finding the enemy and enticing him to shoot at him. And then shooting back at them even harder. Richardson’s eyes are ice blue and serious, and he speaks with a Long Island, N.Y., accent softened by a decade living in the South.

He’s been on the receiving end of no less than 15 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks in Iraq. As he explained the “pucker effect” – how certain anatomy puckers in anticipation of trouble when driving through dangerous intersections, serving as an accurate sort of sixth sense, the after-work beer crowd streamed in and quickly filled the surrounding tables. Boisterous laughter began to drown out the rumbles of thunder growing in the distance.

“You always knew something bad was about to happen when all the Iraqi civilians would suddenly vanish from normally crowded areas,” Richardson said.
“The force of an IED explosion is massive,” he continued. “My first one happened in Fallujah. A pretty good-sized IED exploded underneath our truck as we rolled over. When we stopped, everyone checked in on the radio, and there were no casualties. The vehicle was mangled, and there were a couple of concussions, but everyone was fine.

“Then the corpsman (medic) started yelling that he couldn’t feel his feet.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Richardson’s 5-foot-9-inch frame is burly, and he could be the all-American good guy in a cable TV action show. He projects an intensity that must have served him well in the Marines. So far he had delivered each of his answers in a methodical, factual manner that would make the Corps proud.

“His feet were fine though,” he continued. “The explosion had blown a piece of shrapnel up through the floor right up between his boots, and they were just numbed from the force of the blast and the vacuum created by the shrapnel. He was back on patrol the next day.”

Richardson did have the benefit of riding in the armored Humvees that were a favorite topic of the media a few years ago. It was a huge improvement over the unarmored “thin skinned” trucks that were easily destroyed early in the war. But getting blown up by an IED is still not ideal, and the armor makes it only about as safe as a face shield protecting a hockey player from bodily harm. He continued talking as dark clouds rolled in overheard.

“Another time we got hit by a pretty small IED. I mean it was so small that our truck wasn’t even really damaged that much. A piece of shrapnel slipped in between a tiny gap in the armor plating, though, and came in through the back seat and hit one of our guys.

“He was talking the whole time, and they got him back to medical pretty fast.” He paused for a minute, looking down, rolling his thumb over the graphics on the can of Monster.
They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

“He was fine. I mean, he was talking the whole time. They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.” He nodded his head, looking up, as he repeated this to both of us.

“They told us the next day that he didn’t make it.”

The joke told two tables over was a hit and the group erupted in raucous laughter. A single girl at the next table lit another cigarette, and the first few drops of the summer thunderstorm began to fall.

Richardson’s initial job in Iraq involved keeping one of the most bomb-riddled stretches of highway in one of the meanest places in the world – Fallujah – clear of danger for convoys. The road was a critical supply line for coalition forces.

“We were basically a heavily armed highway patrol,” he continued. “Insurgents would come out almost every night and plant new IEDs, and we’d deal with them the next day. This wasn’t official policy, but it was pretty much understood that if anyone was going to get blown up by an IED, it was to be our patrol and not one of the convoy vehicles.”
When I asked him how he felt about that, he shrugged. “All part of the job I guess.”

A common ambush tactic of Iraqi insurgents is to plant an obvious IED, knowing that an American patrol will stop when they spot it. Insurgents then rake the vehicles with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and the occasional Chinese- or Russian-made heavy machine gun. This was how Richardson’s first firefight began.

“What was that like?” I asked, realizing I had moved toward the edge of my seat. “Did you take it personally when you realized for the first time that someone you’d never met was trying to kill you?”

“Yeah, it got my attention when I could hear incoming rounds hit the truck, but you don’t really think about the danger when you’re in the midst of the fight,” Richardson said. “They weren’t coming that close to me anyway.” He laughed. “For the most part the Iraqis can’t shoot for shit.”  Richardson went on to describe how they identified two MAM’s (military aged males) shooting at them from an irrigation ditch about 200 meters away. Even despite his rigid, chronological delivery of the facts of the story, and frequent use of military terms, I could still see the angry orange muzzle flashes and tracers slicing up a postcard-pretty desert sunset. Palm tree silhouettes swaying in a warm desert breeze.

“We killed one and the other guy took off. We searched a nearby house but didn’t find anything. I remember right after all that happened a really big sandstorm rolled through.

“It was ominous.”

He glanced over at the group of hipsters comparing tattoos at the next table, and back to me.

“I was never really scared during a firefight. Instinct and training take over and you know you have to kill them before they kill you,” he confided. “It’s afterwards that you really think about it. Kind of like, ‘Did I actually really do that?’

Taste of Charlotte
With 12 years under their belt, the folks at Taste of Charlotte have got this event dialed in with samplings from over 100 of the city’s restaurants, live entertainment on its Center Stage, and even an “Adventure Village” for the kids.  Tavern at the Taste, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, is where we’ll be: “where the entertainment is lively, the beer is cold, and the wine is vibrant.”  Admission to this event is FREE, but alas, food and drink are not. June 11-13 on Tryon Street between MLK Jr. Blvd. and Sixth Street: tasteofcharlotte.com

Charlotte Criterium
Don’t think Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France; think more NASCAR on two wheels and lots of left turns. It’s called the Presbyterian Hospital Invitational Criterium (which is a fancy name for a bike race). Well, there is a bike race going on in the middle of lots of picnics and beer drinking, and if you’re lucky enough to get into the VIP tent, plenty of fine food. But skip the tents and head straight for Stool Pigeons on the corner of Fifth and Church, get an outside table, and set up camp. You’ll have your own waitress delivering beer and wings for the night. If you’re watching someone exercise, maybe the calories don’t count (check with your trainer).
charlottecriterium.org

Alive After Five at EpiCentre
One of the longest-running after-work parties in town, Alive after Five at the Epicentre is a glorious mixture of cold lite beer, warm summer days, and live music. Right after work on Thursdays throughout summer, most folks go home to change before hitting the top floor of the Epicentre, but they are ready to enjoy some of the best people watching in all of Charlotte when they arrive. The party is free and the bars are open, so it’s best not to schedule an 8 a.m. meeting on the following Friday. Check the website for the band lineup: aliveafterfives.com

~ Matt Kokenes

The Park
Freedom Park is THE BEST park in Charlotte for everything from a summertime first date to a lazy stroll with your first grandchild: walking trails, shady picnic spots, and 98 acres of  people to watch – all just two quick miles from the heart of uptown, at 1900 East Blvd.  The sparkling lake is the park’s centerpiece, and feeding the resident ducks is always fun, so don’t forget to bring a few slices of bread. Beware the geese, though; they can be a bit testy. Pick up lunch from one of a dozen restaurants just outside the park’s entrance, spread out your blanket, and enjoy.  Open from sun-up to dusk: charmeck.org
Day Hikes   Crowder’s Mountain State Park offers Charlotte’s best, and deservedly most popular, day hike. True, it’s a 45-minute drive from town, but it costs nothing more than a few gallons of gas to get there and back – entering the park is FREE. An extremely invigorating 1 1/2-mile hike will put you on top of the mountain and in front of 20-plus mile, 360-degree views. On a clear day you can count every crane in uptown Charlotte: ncparks.gov

Indoor Skydiving
Flying lessons were too expensive in 2005, and jumping out of a plane is still hundreds of dollars. The next best thing is indoor skydiving or what’s called body flight. They say it’s comparable to free fall from an airplane but takes place in a vertical wind tunnel. All you have to do is drive out with a couple friends, jump into a wind suit M.C. Hammer would be proud of, take a 30-minute lesson and then crank on the fan for realistic, controlled free fall. There are two wind tunnels pretty close by: one outside of Asheville and one east of town in Raeford. Call before you go to make reservations.
Raeford:
paracletexp.com
Asheville:
verticalwind.com/aac.html

Multi Sport
At the U.S. National Whitewater Center, as the name suggests, whitewater rafting and kayaking are the facility’s premier attractions.  But there are miles of mountain bike trails, a climbing wall, and a 1,123-foot-long Mega Zipline. The AllSport 2010 Season Unlimited Pass is a killer value – $149 buys unlimited access to almost everything the place has to offer and it’s good until the end of the year. For those on a tight budget, you don’t even have to own a bike or a boat; just rent one for the day from the Center’s array of the latest gear. Be sure to visit the website for the complete list of USNWC activities, pricing and for accurate driving directions to the center: usnwc.org

Disc Golf
Forget all the stereotypes you may have heard about “frisbee” golf, because they aren’t true. Well, okay, you’ll probably see some tie-dyed t-shirts, and might be offered a bong hit while out on the course, but it’s a ton of fun, and it’s FREE. Unlike “ball golf” courses, leashed dogs and coolers packed with ice-cold beverages are more than welcome here. I’ve even seen baby strollers out on the course. If you’re a golfer concerned about being challenged, know that extremely narrow fairways and infuriating tree placements go a long way to make up for the lack of club to ball contact. The Charlotte Disc Golf Club has an unbelievably thorough website with area course maps, printable score cards, information on competitive events, and even a list of stores where you can buy discs. Beginners should invest $15 on a brightly colored—and easy to find in the woods—Innova Pro Roc, a versatile disc that you can use to drive, approach, and putt. Choose from a half-dozen well maintained courses all over the city: charlottedgc.com

~ Matt Kokenes

Gravel crunched methodically underfoot as we followed worn steel rails, leaving a slow, drifting cloud of dry dust behind.  Tall grass, punching chest high up through the endless rows of railroad ties, swayed softly in the breeze. I knew we had to be close, but there was still no sign of Dale and Cleo’s place.

There was no mailbox with numbers to guide us. No driveway, telltale chimney smoke or power lines, even. We had no hints such as “white painted brick,” or “split level.” In fact, there was no roof or walls or any of that, as we were looking for a dwelling that, by design, is hard to find: a home with a million-dollar view of uptown Charlotte that hides in plain sight.
I was 20 feet from the campsite, and still completely puzzled as to where it might be, when Dale stepped out of the shadows and onto the track. The place was so well hidden that you could blink and easily stroll right past. Like a privacy screen for a computer monitor, looking at it from any angle except straight-on is fruitless. A thick tree canopy shielded the site from the air and was nearly as effective in concealing it on the ground as well.

“All guests must bring a 12-pack,” I learned only later, is Dale and Cleo’s No. 1 rule. Looking back, I’m thankful the case of bottled water and bus pass we brought didn’t get us off on the wrong foot.

Dale was good-natured and friendly, and he welcomed us over, smiling from behind his black leather hat. Between sips from a can of Milwaukee’s Best Light, the elfish little fellow with sparking blue eyes began to share a bit of his story.

“I was born in Kannapolis, but I’ve lived down here in Charlotte most all my life,” he offered, glancing past my shoulder, down the track. “I operated a printing press for over 20 years. Technology changed that business a lot.” Looking down, he said, “I was in the security business for over 10 years. That industry changed a lot, too, though.” His voice trailed off here, and we quickly shifted gears and looked around his campsite for a bit.

Dale and Cleo’s camp has been three years in the making, and it is impressive. A small series of landscaped gardens and raised beds built with railroad ties flank his sleeping quarters – a 6-by-6 cave he carved out by hand from beneath a 2-ton concrete slab. It’s a sort of deluxe spider hole of the type favored by wanted Middle Eastern dictators. A removable foam block serves as a trap door and hides him from the elements, among other things. A fireplace complete with chimney, cleverly crafted from bricks and scrap 2-by-4s, provides warmth on frigid nights. Incense smoke curled lazily through patches of sunlight as Dale described how items he’s collected over the years have been recycled into useful components of the campsite – a cooking area, utensils, a bench. Dale had even built a platform for Cleo’s tent, which would meet any building code.

A German shepherd puppy fought ferociously with my shoelace as I remembered to ask Dale why he was living here. For a guy with a degree in education from Mars Hill College, his answer was surprisingly concise:
“I love the freedom,” he stated without hesitation.

Cleo quickly echoed the sentiment.

In a previous life, Dale had worked as a security guard, and had run a printing press. For years, he had wives, kids…a mortgage. Now he braves wickedly cold nights, regular harassment from railroad detectives, and violence for the freedom his lifestyle offers.

“I consider myself a modern day pioneer,” he beams, “and she’s my Calamity Jane,” he continues, nodding toward his friend and neighbor, Cleo, who lived under a nearby bridge for over a decade until just recently setting up camp next to Dale.

“We’d be happy just to be left alone out here,” Cleo adds. “That’s all we really want.”

Dale and Cleo had repeatedly referred to Western themes and characters when describing their life by the train tracks, but as Dale spoke, it wasn’t Billy the Kid or Jesse James whom I envisioned.

It was Don Quixote.

National statistics indicate a noticeable increase in the percentage of college-educated homeless men in the past year.

The National Coalition for the Homeless contends that poverty, lack of affordable housing, domestic violence, decline in public assistance and increasingly, foreclosure are all culprits that push people toward life on the street.  The poor are essentially an illness, an accident or a paycheck away from living on the streets, and homelessness often results from a complex set of circumstances that requires people to choose between food, shelter and other basic needs. The group insists that only a concerted effort to ensure jobs that pay a living wage, adequate support for those who cannot work, affordable housing, and access to health care will bring an end to homelessness.

According to Carson Dean, executive director of the Men’s Shelter of Charlotte, as many as 40 percent of the homeless in Charlotte suffer from addiction disorders. Others have mental health issues or a combination of the two. Many are veterans of foreign wars who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychological conditions that go untreated. Homelessness often stems from a losing struggle with drugs or a mental breakdown, but just as often, plain bad luck or economic factors truly beyond their control are the reasons folks are driven into homelessness, Dean says.
“Even though less than half of the homeless in Charlotte are so because of drug addiction, it is still a very serious issue for us,” continued Dean.

Indeed, on a subsequent tour of other area campsites, all of which were just a short walk from Dale and Cleo’s place, the specter of crack cocaine could be felt looming in the leafy shadows. All of the places that our guide, Sylvester, had agreed to take us were practically at the foot of uptown’s skyline. They are passed by commuters every single day, but are so well hidden they would have been almost impossible to find without his help. Sylvester, who completed the program offered by the Men’s Shelter of Charlotte and is now employed there, had been homeless and entangled in a web of hopeless drug use in this same area for many years. By his own admission, he had smoked crack for nearly 30 years – hooked immediately upon taking his first hit at the age of 13.

“I was a welder for 11 years,” he offered. Explaining how he first ended up on the street, Sylvester said, “Then I lost my job, and it was just a downward spiral from there. I started running drugs for the dealers. Did a couple years in prison on a cocaine charge not long after that.”

We had walked along a trail for only a few minutes when we met Toronto.  He had lived at his campsite, which surprisingly was just a few feet from the outer fence of the Men’s Shelter, for several months, and was understandably guarded. After a few minutes, though, he warmed up and invited us into his dwelling. “Mr. Alfred’s not here, and he’ll be pissed off if he walks up and finds you guys here,” Toronto cautioned. Mr. Alfred was apparently head of the household, but wasn’t home at the time. The structure was little more than a tent constructed of black plastic sheeting lashed to tree branches above. A floor made of carpet scraps and mattresses had been soaked by days of relentless rain.  An old handicapped toilet device with a bucket of ammonia below served as the home’s bathroom.

“I had a pressure-washing business for a long time, and I worked all over North Carolina.” He briefly opened up, glancing around. “Then my old lady kicked me out.”

Toronto was fidgety and still visibly suspicious of us, but he was familiar with the location of many of the other campsite communities in the area and offered to help Sylvester show us around for the rest of the afternoon.

A narrow trail, cut through a densely wooded lot, led us to the next tent village, which was less than 100 feet away. It had some netting set up as a perimeter fence that closely resembled some that had recently gone missing from Toronto’s campsite. Sylvester was able to calm the brief spat that ensued but was unable to convince the camp’s residents that we and our camera meant no harm. We quickly walked along the path toward the next site.

The next small village of weathered tents and improvised fencing and chairs was tucked back in another wooded glen, again screened from view by dense tree cover. Clothing and empty bottles were randomly cast about, and the mosquitoes had no mercy. “You ever seen a chimney?” smiled Toronto, turning around with a burst of energy.
“Like a chimney chimney?” I asked, sure this was some sort of  trick question.

“Yeah – you know with bricks and smoke coming out and shit. A chimney. Come back down here tonight, and this whole place will be smoking like crazy.”
“You mean they’ll be smoking crack?” I asked, pretty sure the answer was yes.
“Hell yeah.”

Just then a horn beeped several times, and we all turned back to see a taxi pulled up to the trail’s entrance up at the street – the checkerboard pattern on the door unmistakable even through the trees.  Sylvester and Toronto quickly nodded that it was most likely someone looking to buy sex – evidently a cab driver in this case. It happens every day out here, they said dismissively, already heading toward the next campsite. It’s no big deal. The women live in the camp and they get high in the camp. They sell sex every day for as little as $5 to pay for their drug habits.

The horn beeped a few more times, but the only movement from any of the tents was a man who already had been suspiciously peering out at us the whole time. Toronto was certain the handful of women who live in the camp were already preoccupied with customers.  The horn beeped in vain twice more, and the driver finally gave up and drove away.
As the sun slipped off to the west, on we went all afternoon, from one site to another, none more than 100 feet apart from the next. It soon became evident that in a half-mile radius of the Urban Ministry Center and the Men’s Shelter, there were dozens of these sites – each a little different, but all serving the same purpose of basic shelter. We had inadvertently almost circled back to Dale and Cleo’s place, and I now realized that their camp was less like a wayward outpost on the Oregon Trail and more like just one of scores of houses clustered into a suburban neighborhood.

One camp had an entire village of buildings, complete with a walled entrance ramp, constructed entirely of shipping pallets. Others were more modest and weren’t much more than stumps surrounded by a sea of frosted beer bottles.

The Urban Ministry Center provides, among other services, a free meal every day to anyone who’s hungry. The Men’s Shelter provides men with a daily meal as well as shelter for nearly 300 homeless men every night.  Dale, Cleo, Sylvester and Toronto all quickly acknowledged that it’s no coincidence that there are so many campsites within a short walk of these uninterrupted daily sources of food.

Exposure to the elements can kill you, but starvation will kill you.
During our walk, I couldn’t help but think of Maslow’s human needs pyramid – the one we all learn about in high school. It’s that sort of prioritized list of human wants and needs. According to the pyramid, human beings’ most basic needs are food, water, clothing and sleep.  Once those are met, the next step up the pyramid, on the way toward self-actualization is a sense of security – the feeling of safety.

“Yeah, I’m scared all the time,” Toronto laughed nervously when I brought it up. “When you smoke, you’ll be thinking everyone wants to get you though.”

As if right on cue, a burly man emerged from the brush on the left side of the tracks, eyed the four of us for an uncomfortably long several minutes as we walked past, and disappeared to the other side of the tracks. Unfazed, Sylvester ambled along the track and continued talking.  I wasn’t able to comfortably turn my back and rejoin the conversation until the guy was out of sight.

“He’s right,” added Sylvester, “but most of the time, when you smoke crack, you’ll be afraid of everybody else. If you’re violent to begin with, you’ll be violent when you smoke. It ain’t the crack. A lot of people say that crack makes you violent, but that’s bullshit.”

That may be, but I had already heard a handful of heartbreaking tales of physical assault that day – more than enough to form my own opinion on the matter. A desperate addict recently approached Dale’s camp and gained his trust by feigning an injury. He attacked Dale, who is in his 50s and can’t weigh much more than 100 pounds. The second Dale turned his back to try to help the guy, he was pummeled on the head repeatedly with a scrap piece of molding. The guy badly wanted Dale’s bicycle and insisted he unlock it from a nearby tree.
Despite more relentless thrashing, Dale would not give up his bike.

Cleo served 81 days in jail recently for an altercation involving a knife and an undercover policeman.

Sylvester conceded that although his formidable size had discouraged many would-be attackers and thieves over the years, even he was no match for a group of robbers who took a baseball bat to his head in a struggle over his stash of crack cocaine. It wasn’t until some four days later, in a hospital bed, that he was finally able to even remember his name.

“A lot of these guys are Vietnam vets,” Sylvester continued, “and they’ll put traps all around their camps for protection.”

“You mean like booby traps?”

“Yep. They’ll dig out…

“Mr. Alfred has one of those things that’ll swing down out of the trees like Rambo has!” Toronto blurted out excitedly, cutting off Sylvester mid-sentence.

“The one in the movie ‘Rambo,’ with the sharpened stakes that swung down and stabbed the guy’s legs?” I asked in disbelief.

“Hell yeah.”  Toronto grinned. “Man that thing would fuck somebody up.”

“I’ve seen pits with sharpened sticks stuck in the bottom – you know, with the top covered with leaves and branches, so people fall in and get messed up,” Sylvester continued patiently, as he guided us along the railroad bridge over North Tryon Street. “When I was living out here, we’d always string up empty cans around our camp – you know, so they make noise when somebody walks up on you.”

Ultimately, all of these methods are just part of a quest for the feeling of security, and although some are a bit harsh, I can’t say I’m surprised. Security is next on the list after food and water, after all.

What is surprising is the number of people sleeping outside within sight of the two nonprofits’ facilities. Based on what I saw, I’d put their number well into the hundreds. The Men’s Shelter of Charlotte is full nearly every night, as is every other shelter in town, and yet that is still not enough housing for everyone sleeping outside. Not even close.
Sylvester seemed certain that campsite communities like this surround every facility like these that offer free food and services for the homeless across Charlotte. I’m sure this is also the case in towns and cities coast to coast.

The unseasonably warm afternoon was yielding to a seasonably cool fall evening, and our tour had come to a close. As the four of us emerged from the last stop on our trek – a giant wooded field of malt liquor bottles, so thick they covered the ground like snow – and back onto the Tryon Street sidewalk, a line of some 40 men had already formed. It was only 4 p.m., but they were already waiting for a bed at the shelter, the line growing by the minute.

They and a couple hundred more would be lucky enough to sleep indoors that night.

But an entire colony of troubled souls would instead be sleeping in the shadows.

~ Matt Kokenes

What a way to go.

Better to meet your end in this pool than some of the ones earlier in the process though. Where we stood, wastewater collected by the city of Charlotte was more than halfway processed for return to nearby Irwin Creek. I’d take my chances in these brown bubbles in a heartbeat over the sludge pond a few stages back. The site we toured, just off of Billy Graham Parkway, was spread over many acres and has cleaned up Charlotte’s wastewater for decades. Carefully planned stages of treatment separate water from sewage so effectively that, according to Erin Culbert of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities, “The cascade of clear water flowing from the wastewater treatment plant back into Irwin Creek is much cleaner than what is already there. Plus as it flows down into the stream, the water is oxygenated as well, which of course benefits the stream’s biosphere.”

However, many water-quality experts warn that while treated wastewater flowing back into the ecosystem from plants such as this may look crystal clear, there is much hiding below the surface.

A large metal screen catches the “big stuff” as soiled water flows from the city’s sewer pipes into the facility. Bowling balls, shopping carts, and even a 55-gallon drum have been found jammed against the screen, says Mike. Much later in the process, UV light scrambles the DNA of microorganisms, rendering them sterile and unable to reproduce. With such minute life cycles, this clever approach spells certain doom for deadly bacteria and other microbes. Across the sprawling complex, between the metal screen and the cascading waterfall, pools, chambers, and vats of all shapes and sizes progressively separate more of the “solids” from the city’s wastewater. The large majority of the solids will eventually part company with the water, and will be recycled as fertilizer at farms in surrounding counties.  The treated water will eventually make its way downstream toward the next town’s municipal water treatment plants, where it will be prepared for drinking, and consumed again.

But just how clean was the wastewater as it splashed down out of the plant and into Irwin Creek? How many unknown substances will this same water carry when it flows through faucets in the next town over? We should reasonably expect it to be devoid of bowling balls and killer bacteria, but is that good enough? Many of us might not give a second thought to spent water that’s well on its way to the next county.

The problem that every resident of Charlotte should care about, though, is that this same process is used by communities upstream from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake, towns whose treated wastewater flows into streams and rivers that feed these two sources of Charlotte’s drinking water.

According to The United States Geological Survey, treated wastewater is almost certainly laden with hundreds of unidentified substances: pharmaceutical drugs, cosmetics, hormones and antibiotics – all of which are interwoven into our image-conscious and highly medicated society. Almost half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug, and one in six take three or more medications. They’re prescribed to millions of Americans every day, but science suggests only a small amount of these substances are actually processed by our bodies. The portions of these chemicals that aren’t absorbed by the body are passed through and flow into wastewater treatment plants. And while these plants thankfully remove things like shopping carts and fecal matter from wastewater before it’s discharged back into rivers, streams and groundwater, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities itself acknowledges on its own website, www.charmeck.org, that these finely dissolved substances most likely pass from wastewater to drinking water supplies both here in Charlotte and across the entire country.
Part of the problem is that to date very little research, and no regulation – local, state or federal – yet exists for the presence of these substances in municipal water supplies. Only a handful of labs across the country even have the capability to test for the presence of pharmaceutical drugs in water. Setting up this type of detection for the labs that are capable is tedious, not routine, and therefore expensive. Indeed, two different quotes by commercial labs that did have the capacity to conduct these sophisticated tests landed in the $6,000 range – just outside of Uptown Magazine’s water testing budget.

Fortunately, a better-funded group – The U.S. Geological Survey – has developed a laboratory analytical method to measure the concentrations of eight widely prescribed antidepressants in environmental waters. Most are from the commonly prescribed class called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, and include Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil and Zoloft. Last year, the USGS applied the new method to samples taken from a stream in Texas, and detected high levels of the substances used to make the most commonly prescribed antidepressants.

Sure, Texas is a long way from Charlotte, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the country, and it’s likely that the findings would be similar in any U.S. water samples. Simply, if you drink from the tap, there is a high probability that you’re consuming a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, hormones such as estrogen, and lots of other stuff you didn’t sign on for, which have passed through the bodies of millions of other people.

In compliance with EPA regulations, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities supplies the millions of gallons of drinking water the city demands on a daily basis. Water pulled directly from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake will pass through treatment facilities like the Franklin Water Treatment plant on Brookshire Boulevard and flow through a complex series of purification stages to make sure that the levels of microbes, turbidity, copper, lead and disinfectants are within the standards set and controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency. Fluoride will be added to keep our teeth strong. Chlorine will kill tiny bugs that would do us harm. Nearly 42,000 treated water samples taken from the county’s drinking water treatment plants will be tested every year. Indeed, documentation provided by the utility, and readily available to the public, confirms levels of more than 100 regulated substances detected in local samples last year were within EPA standards.

But without EPA standards for pharmaceuticals, hormones, cosmetics, and antibiotics in drinking water, no tests are conducted by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department to look for these substances. To be fair, with no regulation, it wouldn’t even know what to look for. If it did find 5 parts per million of the chemical in Prozac, would that amount be dangerous? Would drinking a glass of that water stamp a plastic smile on your face, or pass through you with no effect? How about 1,000 glasses of Prozac-infused water?
On a subsequent tour of the city’s shiny new Environmental Services Facility, we saw plenty of beakers and white lab coats and test tubes in action. A chemistry nerd’s dream come true. Most of the thousands of tests performed on the city’s water samples will be conducted in this state of the art quality control center. But even the scientists there acknowledge that there are very likely all sorts of unregulated substances flowing undetected through Charlotte’s water treatment facilities, and all across the United States.
No one can really say for sure what’s in America’s drinking water. Even Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to know.

Thus the ever-swelling business of selling packaged water. Widespread public awareness of common contaminants sprouted demand for drinking water not just with legally acceptable levels of lead and copper, but with zero heavy metals or other pollutants. With their wallets, American consumers have spoken loudly. Drinking water was once the sole domain of municipalities, but now more and more new companies scramble to use clever packaging and relentless marketing campaigns to hawk the earth’s most important commodity.
Huntersville’s Midas Spring is one rare exception. The local bottler’s biggest change in recent memory was making the switch from glass bottles to plastic.

Owner Gianni Liburdi correctly points out that the company is the oldest registered business operating in Mecklenburg County, and unlike national water giants such as Coke, Pepsi and Nestle (Dasani, Aquafina, Deer Park, etc.), Midas Spring has been in the bottled water business since 1871.”Our spring flows up from an aquifer 200 feet below the surface. The water has trace amounts of magnesium and calcium, which are very beneficial to the human body,” Liburdi says.

Some studies do, in fact, suggest that a diet supplemented with magnesium can help prevent heart disease and Attention Deficit Disorder. And it’s no secret how important calcium is.
Naturally, Liburdi was happy to talk at length about Midas Spring, but in the process he also shed some light on the water industry, as well. “Every drop of Midas Spring water comes directly from our spring here in Huntersville. Many of the national bottled water companies, though – the big ones that we all know – some even with the word ‘spring’ in their names, fill their bottles with only a fraction of actual spring water. Demand for their product far exceeds what any natural spring could produce, so the rest of the bottle is filled up with purified water. Typically water from a municipality or even directly from a lake, that’s been stripped of everything – including any beneficial minerals – using the reverse osmosis process.”
Bruce DeBlock has been selling “RO” water for years from a kiosk in the parking lot of Park Road Shopping Center. Water he buys from the city, just like the rest of us, passes through a series of carbon filters, de-ionizers, ozone gas, ultraviolet light and many other stages before producing a finished product at 1 part dissolved solids per million parts water. The very knowledgeable owner of H2Oasis contends that his process, much too advanced and costly to be employed on the massive scale needed by the city, eliminates pathogens, viruses, carcinogens, arsenic, fecal matter, and lead that is present in municipal water in small amounts – amounts that are within EPA regulations. H2Oasis store manager Sonny Kiel assured me their filtration process even eliminates finely dissolved substances such as pharmaceutical drugs from the water his company sells.

Kiel demonstrated in an informal test, with a handheld digital dissolved solids tester, that his purified water did indeed come in at 1 part dissolved solids per million gallons of water. Municipal drinking water drawn from a sink 10 feet away measured considerably higher at 42 parts per million. According to Kiel, quarterly filter changes ensure the high level of purity the business is built on, and those who shrug at the difference between 1 ppm and 42 ppm, need only take a look at the stage 2 filter when it’s replaced. This filter, says Kiel, is positioned early in the process, and “looks and smells like shit” when it is removed for replacement.

But how do we really know that the water in a bottle of Poland Spring off the shelf is hormone free? Or what the 1 ppm at H2Oasis is made up of, or that Liburdi’s calcium-rich spring water isn’t brimming with other stuff that’s not on the label? Unlike municipal water utilities, which are looked on closely by the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration alone has the daunting task of monitoring the goliath industry of purified and packaged water. According to Nestle Waters North America, bottled water sales volume in this country, second only to soft drinks, exceeds beer, coffee, milk and fruit beverages.

In “Flow,” her award-winning documentary about the “world water crisis,” Irena Salina suggests that there aren’t nearly enough inspectors to effectively monitor the entire U.S. bottled water industry. Not even close.  According to Liburdi, an FDA inspector stops by and pokes around Midas Spring on a couple of surprise visits every year. By DeBlock’s own admission, no one from the FDA has ever been to H2Oasis.

The big players in the water business use such vast amounts of water that they often pull directly from the same lake or river that a municipal water utility might. Naturally, their RO purification systems and bottling operations are colossal and set up to meet national demand for bottled water. If there aren’t an adequate number of inspectors, as Salina suggests, they’ll likely be pulling some overtime.

Liburdi was well prepared for my follow-up question about the possibility that his spring could somehow be compromised by an outside source – a toxic industrial spill from a nearby business, perhaps, that could have seeped into the water table, and into the spring. To ensure purity, he says, his water is passed through a series of filters, and a UV light as well, before it’s sealed into little plastic bottles for sale. He seemed sure that his water was also free of unregulated substances, too, and it just might be. But without specifically testing for these substances, he’s in the same boat as the city of Charlotte, H2Oasis, and the hundreds of other entities offering drinking water for sale in this country. Without adequate data on what foreign contaminants might slip through even the most sophisticated purification processes, and a cost effective way to find out if they’re even there, none of them can know for sure, and therefore neither can the consumer.

Perhaps most troubling is that it would appear that the scope of what isn’t known about this phenomenon is enormous – much larger than what is known. Until there’s regulation and oversight, and a financially streamlined way for those who provide drinking water to test for these chemicals, as consumers we’ll remain in the dark. In our sophisticated society, we depend more and more on drugs, antibiotics, and all kinds of other stuff to get us through our modern lives.

But not one of us will live without water.

~Matt Kokenes