We travelers — a group of four — enjoy the warmth and hospitality of random travelers as well as those who host us when we’re eating or preparing to sleep.
Our accommodations are modest, neither luxurious nor bare.
In our travels, we suffer no inconvenience that prevents us from our pedestrian pleasures of food, shelter, clothing, shopping and sightseeing.
Our views are close as well as wide, a covered outdoor gas grille juxtaposing the Stanley Hotel, high mountains surrounding us in all directions, for example.
So it was I found myself yesterday preparing to pack our rental SUV and heard the honk of a loud truck horn across the street.
A Manitou Springs sanitation crew was waiting for homeowners up the hill from us to haul down two flights of red-and-brown stone stairs their garbage in white plastic bags.
The sanitation truck driver saw me and held out his forefinger, indicating he’d be over to my place in a moment.
I looked in the driveway of our rental cottage and found three rubbish bins, one a bit older and away from the other two newer bins.
As the sanitation truck stopped at the cabin, I quickly rolled the bins to the two guys dumping the trash at the back of the truck.
When the sanitation crew leader grabbed the older bin from me, he peered inside and gave me a questioning look.
He tipped the bin in my location. Inside the bin were a few small plastic shopping bags; old, tattered clothes; and ripped, weathered shoes.
I shrugged my shoulders to indicate they weren’t mine so the crew leader went ahead and dumped the contents of the bin into the truck.
Later, I noticed a very thin homeless guy walk by our cabin, then slow down to look in the direction of where the older bin had been. He was wearing a T-shirt covered in mud stains, a pair of barely held together, excessively-shredded blue jeans and a pair of flattened flip-flops, his long hair tangled in knots and pointing in all directions. Either he just returned from an outdoor music festival or lived along the creek like the fellows I’d seen whilst fishing earlier in the week.
I wonder: was the homeless guy and perhaps others using the older bin as a relatively dry, animal-free storage locker for their clothes and belongings, maybe even food?
Some say home is where the heart is.
Home can also be where you have a place to store your belongings, no matter how insecure, no matter how temporarily, just like the wanderers and fortune seekers who’ve hiked these hills for millennia.
Bog, Swamp, River and Garden 