Midnight Guerrillas-- Salt Lake City

Drop attempt #1:
My first guerrilla tract drop attempt was thwarted. I don't know. I thought the Amtrak station would be like the airport, trains coming and going every hour. The big shiny concrete and glass building in downtown Salt Lake that I thought was the Amtrak station is actually the Greyhound station. "This is the Greyhound terminal," the man behind the counter says. "Amtrak's over there," he says, pointing down the way at a seedy little shack, "but they're only open from 10pm to 6am."

Drop attempt #2:
I check the train schedule when I get home and discover that the California Zephyr comes through Salt Lake around midnight headed westbound, and around 4am headed eastbound. (Oh.) I call up one of the local tract designers, Lisa Bella, and ask if she's down for some mischief. Later, around 11pm, when I pull up in front of her house she's waiting for me on the dark curb. She jumps in and we squeal off, giggling and singing the Mission Impossible theme song.

As we walk from the fancy Greyhound parking lot toward the little Amtrak shed we're quiet and suddenly shy. A security guard passes us by under one of the streetlamps and we smile and walk naturally. There are people sitting on benches by the tracks, and people sitting in the station under fluorescent lights, reading and sleepy-looking. Lisa and I look around, steel our resolve (friendliness of steel!) and go up to a family sitting outside and explain the project, then ask if they'd like to take a tract with them on their travels.

"Is it free?" the mom asks. The 8-year-old daughter is half hiding behind the mom, half leaning toward us.

"Yes!" Lisa says. "It's an art project!" I say. "You don't keep it, though," Lisa says, "you take it with you on your journey, then send it back." "Or pass it on to someone else," I say.

"Ok," the mom says. I choose a tract I think the daughter will like and hand it to her.

We smile at them and we are this a strange happy anomaly on the somber platform-- the other four or five passengers sitting on the benches are looking at us but trying to avoid catching our eye, maybe, like the daughter, curious but not quite wanting to be implicated in whatever we're up to. Lisa and I divide the remaining tracts and head inside.

Inside it is more of the same: everyone seems aware that Lisa and I are up to something (missionaries? Hare Krishnas?) but pretend not to notice us. But then, once we start talking to people, asking them questions about where they're headed, telling them about the project, they open up and really want to talk. I work the room and Lisa ends up talking to a woman who looks like she might be a librarian and who is traveling alone for nearly the whole time we’re in there. Outside again, we talk to an enthusiastic young poet headed to San Francisco, and then a kind-eyed man who tells us he is headed home.

"Where's home?" we ask. "Little town in California. You probably haven't heard of it. It's called Orland." Which is not far from my hometown. "I'm from Chico!" I tell him. "I can't believe you're from Chico!" he says. And then, since I am from Chico, and because, we find out, he hasn’t had a friendly conversation in weeks, he tells us about how he moved to Salt Lake a month or two earlier with his wife and kids. Everything went wrong. They were staying at his wife’s brother’s house, and that relationship started going sour. He worked in home health care, and his client was a large developmentally disabled man who was physically violent and would beat him up. His wife hated living with her brother, hated Utah too and so she took the kids and went back to Orland. He was saving up enough money to get home, but couldn’t handle being beat up every day, so he quit his job. The relationship with his brother-in-law got worse (“He’d call up my wife and tell her I was in jail!” he told us) and then his brother-in-law hit him, so he left the house, and with no money went to the homeless shelter. “But there was a month waiting list,” he said. So for the three nights prior to our meeting him, he’d been sleeping in the park. “And I’m finally going home!” he said. He clutched the tract we gave him while he was talking, and his eyes were sparkling and happy. He looked so grateful to have it, and so grateful to be talking with us.

“Wow,” I said, as Lisa and I walked back to the car.

“He was so dear,” she said.

"I didn't expect that," I said.

Driving back we were grinning and giddy again, swapping stories and re-capping.

"Did you see the woman I was talking to?" Lisa asked, "I looked back when we were leaving and she was already writing in her tract."

I really didn't expect this part-- handing artwork to strangers-- to be so much fun or so moving.