Where Paul LePage and Robin Rage actually agree

In the fall of 2012, a homeless man wrote to me pitching an op-ed for The Bollard about “spice” — chemically treated herbs that mimic the effects of marijuana, like some kind of human catnip, sold at the time in headshops all over the state. The piece had some rough edges, but enough potential to warrant follow-up, which, due to my hectic schedule and the writer’s lack of Internet access, eventually resulted in the piece’s publication the following spring.

I met with the writer, who goes by the street name Robin Rage, at Speckled Ax, a coffee shop on Congress Street, to give him some money and discuss future work. He’d brought along his constant companion, a little dog named Bella.

Robin said he and Bella were living in the woods between Commercial Street and the Fore River, just west of the Casco Bay Bridge, and I told him a first-person account of his time down there would make an excellent story. He seemed to agree, but I’ve had enough of these conversations over the years to know that amateur freelance writers seldom follow through. The chances a homeless writer (who, I later learned, spent the cash I handed him on spice) would produce such a story seemed even slimmer.

A year went by with no word from Mr. Rage. One day last spring, a woman working at a different downtown coffee shop told me she was Robin’s girlfriend, and that he’d been working on the Fore River story for many months, but it had grown very long and there was no telling when this epic would be finished.

Then, at the end of August, with no prior notice, the story finally arrived in my inbox. It was 25 single-spaced pages long. And it was one of the best first-person accounts of life in Portland I’ve ever read.

I trimmed it a bit, moved a few things around, tightened and polished the prose here and there, but there was very little in the original draft that I felt compelled to cut. The final version was 23 single-spaced pages long. The entire story, including a few photos, runs for 11 pages in this month’s issue of The Bollard. The title: “Sherwood Forest: Life as an outlaw on the Fore River.”

Rage describes the rag-tag community of outcasts, anarchists, alcoholics and mentally ill people who shared this patch of woods with him from the late winter to late summer of 2013. He did a lot of research trying to document the history of this stretch of urban forest, the prior inhabitants of which — Native Americans and railroad tramps, for the most part — left almost no written records.

I won’t attempt to recount the whole tale here. Instead, I’d like to call attention to some remarkable things Rage said during an appearance he and I made this month on the public-access TV show “Out in Left Field” (available online at ctn5.org). Viewers may have been surprised to learn that this (now formerly) homeless, anti-capitalist, unemployed “streetnik” has views on welfare and other social-safety-net programs that echo those of another formerly homeless man: Gov. Paul LePage.

Work is “empowering,” Rage notes, and too few people receiving government assistance are being sufficiently encouraged to join the workforce. Social-service providers are caring people, he said, but their tendency to coddle clients often fosters a sense of dependence that becomes debilitating. Knowing their needs will always be met, many people Rage knows who are struggling with mental illness and/or substance-abuse problems find it too tempting to remain reliant on the system — just like the patients in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” who have to be harangued and bullied by Jack Nicholson’s character to stand up for themselves.

Rage is also on the side of neighborhood activists in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood who are already voicing opposition to preliminary plans for a larger facility in the area that would provide shelter, food and other services. As things are now, at least people have to walk to soup kitchens in other parts of town for some meals. Put everything under one roof and they’ll never leave, he said. And the social scene outside the Oxford Street shelter is already unhealthy — if you’re looking for drugs, according to Rage, that’s your destination.

Since we’re stuck with LePage for another four years, I figure I may as well try to be helpful. Gov., if you need Rage’s digits to arrange a press conference, give me a call and I’ll hook you up.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.