Panama Hobos and Recycled Shopping


Panama Hobos and Recycled Shopping

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Written by Matt Landau

Thursday, September 14 2006

Walking out of my apartment the other day I saw one of the regular hobos who sift through the dead motherboards and soiled linens and dried out fish heads that most people call trash. To the public, these things are past their prime and are not worth the space they take up anymore. To this hobo though, the stuff is cool. I was sort of envious of the man, as he fished around in a garbage bag–one which I recognized as my own—as he pulled out one thing after another. Broken alarm clock, used up razor blades, batman blow-up doll with air leakage problem. He didn't look at the things as garbage though. No, he looked at them with optimism. He looked at them the same way a football coach might look at the scrub of the team, as if to say, I could make something out of you.

I saw him a second time in a different location and paused to watch, as he pulled a seemingly endless string of wire from a bag. A young woman passed by and made a comment to the hobo, eliciting a chuckle from the man. I was sort of angry that this woman was infringing on my hobo. He was MY hobo and she was encroaching.

On another occasion I was at the doctor's office, seated across from a man who looked like a squirrel. Just past him, outside the window, near the road was another forager. For the most part this hobo, like most of them, was polite and organized, not making too much noise and leaving the garbage more or less the way he found it. I liked the theory behind their work as it evokes ingenuity and imagination—seeing treasure in someone else's trash. They don't care who's watching them or who's gossiping about them behind their hobo backs. I admired this carefree attitude and more importantly I was jealous of some of the things they were finding.

Because I like free things and I enjoy being creative, I figured there was no pastime I could pick up, that would fuse the two together better than scavenging (or as we like to refer to it, recycled shopping). I started off in a quiet neighborhood about twenty minutes walk from my apartment: one that hopefully no one had gotten to yet. As a beginner, I wasn't sure how the rest of the world treated people like us, so I began my searches from a distance, simply looking at trash heaps and garbage cans casually, like I was trying to find a spot to put my gum wrapper. The more comfortable I got though, and the more intriguing the contents became, the further I wanted to dig. The deeper I wanted to delve.

There was an old Panama flag that had been stained by some sort of berry juice or bodily fluid and I wasn't about to touch that. Right below it was a family-looking portrait of four people; two kids and two presumable parents. The kids were wearing stiff turtlenecks and they had a look on their faces like, get me the hell out of this photo shoot. The parents had straight faces, probably concerned about the costs of the professional photographer they had hired. If they'd've only known, their photos would end up like this. Right below that sat, what looked to be a wheel. Not like a car wheel or anything. More like an old fashioned wooden-spoked wheel—the kind they might use on the Oregon Trail.

Just like there are high and low end shoppers, there are high and low end scavengers—me being an example of a cat from the upper crust. There are the cats who use what they find in order to survive, and then there is me: someone who uses what he finds to impress people. “Check out my birdhouse keychain”, I'd say. “Picked her up on 41st and Balboa.” To me, finding things is a skill that should not go unnoticed. I'll sometimes even add little made-up comments to further amaze my friends: “when I found her, she was covered with poop and cobwebs. Couldn't even tell she was a birdhouse.”

I pulled the wheel from the bin, tossing off the flag and several other pieces of smelly and wet paper. Turns out, as I suspected, the wheel was in perfect shape. The diameter was about the size of an umbrella and the wood seemed sturdy and strong and honorable. The sort of thing that scavengers like us dream about.

“Triumph” isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind.

Thrill came over me and I felt really lucky for once: like I had won the hobo lottery and this was the only real thing of value to be found that day. For such a novice, I had done pretty well.

Just down the street I saw someone I knew: the guard at a building I frequent. Obviously, normal civilians would not approve of scavenging so I considered quickly what to do with my wheel—pretend to be taking it to be fixed? No, it wasn't broken. Use it to prop open a door? No, I was not about to humiliate the wheel. So, without a good plan, I placed the wheel back next to the heap, leaning it up against the bin.

The guardman had a funky limp, the way I would imagine someone would walk if one leg was significantly longer than the other or if one leg was crafted from cordite. A little bit like Frankenstein. As he neared I said hello and asked him how he had been. We chewed the fat for a few minutes before I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, someone was moving in on my find. As I turned, I saw him: this cat, all sooty in the face, eyeing my wheel. Fondling it, testing it, checking it out. I nervously carried on chatting with the guard, all the while trying sneakily to supervise what was going on beside me: I was essentially witnessing a robbery.

“Fury” isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind.

This cat seemed satisfied with the wheel, and after all, who wouldn't? It was the find of a lifetime.

He picked it up and eventually carried it off as I humored my limpy guardman, listening to him talk about his wife and how she has three nipples. It's three times the fun, he told me.

I would never see that wheel again nor do I really care to. The man who stole it probably needed it more than I did. He would probably use it for something important, whereas I would've made some sort of coffee table out of it, using the wooden spokes as party snack dividers. But the lesson certainly taught me something about foraging: the guy who finds the first wheel is an idiot. The guy who finds the other three is a genius.

And so the search is on.

Panama Culture