Friday, August 10, 2007

Some Urban Outdoors Man stories

Yesterday, while dropping off the boy at school (its not a traditional school, they run around and play the whole day) I almost ran over an urban outdoors man sleeping on the side of the road. I was turning right off the two lane paved (busy) main road onto a dirt road. The Urban Outdoors man was sleeping on the side of the dirt road. As I made the turn, he was on the starboard side of the 4x4 vehicle that I was piloting. As I passed him, I honked the horn.

I dropped off the boy. On the return trip, I was determined to wake that fellow up. So I made my decent down the unpaved road and stopped right beside the man's sleeping area. I honked the horn and yelled at him to get up. I asked if he was worried about getting ran over. He slightly stirred but refused to acknowledge my presence. I had to move on, as another vehicle was turning left off of the paved road into the Urban Outdoors man's sleeping area.

Last Saturday, I saw a fellow at about 2:00 pm taking a nap laying perpendicular across the side walk. He was sleeping very very sound asleep as there was a lot of traffic passing by him and he was not moving.

There's this gas station on the west side of Cartago that has a lot of these outdoors man that come by to visit folks while they are filling up their gas tanks. About 2 months ago, when we were getting gas, within 3 minutes, 2 different outdoors men had come by the driver's side window and startled my wife. I had some cold french fries, so I gave one of them the fries. He was very happy and ate them on up.

There's this other dude that's kind of close to the Mas x Menos grocery store. (Pronounced Mas por Menos). This guy has to be about 20 years old and seems to have a serious cash flow problem as he's constantly walking around in the intersection approaching drivers of stopped vehicles at the traffic light asking for money.

About 2 years ago, when I was down here I was approached by an urban outdoors man requesting money. At first I ignored him acting like I couldn't speak Spanish (you know, playing the stupid gringo). This guy then started speaking to me in perfect English. I realized I couldn't ignore him, so we spoke in English for a while. I finally gave him some change. He had spent time in California doing construction work. His English was really good.

2 comments:

Joel Odom said...

Once at Georgia Tech, I was approached by a bum who started giving me a story about needing bus fare to Florida where he had a job waiting. A few days later, the same guy came up to me with the same story. When I told him that he already asked me a few days ago, he shrugged and walked off. Sometimes I wonder if he's still walking around Atlanta trying to raise bus fare to Florida.

Then there was the time that a bum started hitting me up while I was making copies at a business. I chewed him out for bothering me in the business and they ran him off. I'll never forget his last words to me: "You... You... Cracker!"

reason said...

I remember you telling us about that after that happened. That's too funny!