A start the long project I want to work on this summer (a series of essays springing from the ideas in my "ended up midwestern" essay revolving around issues that were going on in Montana and California when I lived there that I may not have necessarily been a part of). This is the beginning of something about homelessness, or something?

The stench of fish guts has sunk into the wood of the Ventura pier, its wide thick planks sticky and wet with the blood and juices of fish that died there, and of the ocean. Salty Pacific water sprays the pier constantly, embedding sharp crystals and dank, faint rot into the meat of the wood. You become immersed in sea there: the loud caws of circling gulls like buzzards, the spray stinging your porous skin, the hot July sun sizzle into the top of your shiny hair and the stink of fish.

Some fish for fun: white and Chicano families gathered around one or two poles, a red plastic cooler with long necks of juice boxes, a portable stereo hissing a crackling connection from the mainland, sometimes a picnic with Zip locked bologna sandwiches, sliced cheese, and grapes. The fathers wrap their arms around children, guiding the long, thin line down into the sea. They throw fish bodies onto ice or the plastic cutting boards nailed to some of the piers’ benches. They laugh.

Some fish without laughing. These are the men—mostly men, almost always men—you see sitting cross-legged on sidewalks outside the Main St. Ben & Jerry’s or curled, sleeping surrounded by garbage bags beneath the trees in Fir St. Park. Men who walk more slowly than any others you’ve seen, not just because they are laden with all their worldly possessions—flannels tied around their waists, leading scrappy, matted dogs on leashes of rope—but because they have nowhere to be. These men fish off the pier with scrabbled-together equipment, with branches, actual tree branches stripped of foliage, and worms not purchased at the smell tackle stand on Fifth and Laurel, but dug from the ground or gather, after rain, in discarded Chinese take-out containers.