The AMA Kitchen
The AMA kitchen became warm for the first time while they were putting together meals. One of the pipes that was thawing had burst, and now flooded the kitchen, so they shut off the water. You can’t operate a kitchen without water. My friend David, who I mentioned earlier, arrived and patched the leak, getting them up and running again.
I followed google maps to the kitchen downtown, crammed into a tight one story building that looked to be a hip Indian restaurant, old bricks painted yellow. Maybe a year ago it was a functioning restaurant. The pandemic, the greater crisis that encapsulated this smaller one, may have killed it off and left it standing like the cold was killing ligustrums across town. They would have to be cut down, but that was not the phase we were in today. I double parked across the street and carefully navigated the angled sidewalk, floed with ice and snow. It was a chaotic room, stacks of staples and donations were managed on the right, bags with styrofoam boxes of hot food on the left. A few people looked up but didn't seem puzzled by my entrance. A girl wearing a ski onesie unzipped and pulled down to her waist seemed to be in charge, but she found a moment to talk to me while looking around the room, as if still coming to terms with it. “Butter? Great, yeah, we’ll take all that, just put it over there.”
I asked her how things were going. She seemed spent but positive. “We burst a pipe yesterday, but a guy showed up totally clutch and fixed it. “
“Do you have anything that needs to be delivered?” I asked.
“Yeah, just… take whatever you think you can deliver.”
“Where do I deliver it to?”
“Wherever people need it. I mean, we’ve sent a lot to the Palmer Center but there’s a few regular camps there are still people in… “
She didn't seem to have any clear idea where this hot food should go. I wondered how she knew about the people who needed hot food, if she didn't know where they were. I supposed it was just facebook rumors. The entire operation, food collection, assembly, distribution, was based on threads on facebook, in which someone said they needed something and someone else said they would get it to them. I don't know what I expected, maybe some source of data from the city, some accounting of starving and freezing people. Something that showed where they were and how close they were to dying, maybe an estimate of risk by area, something to use to direct things like this.
I knew of several homeless camps. In Austin we had watched them sprout and expand in the previous year. I drove a few blocks to a parking area for the hike & bike trail where half a dozen tents cluttered in a line along the edge of Shoal Creek, below the new library, where it enters the Colorado River. The tiny parking area on the hike and bike trail which was always full was empty today. I walked down the trail, past the tents and yelled “HOT DINNER”. People came out of the tents slowly, if there were two in there, only one came out, according to whose turn it was to contribute and the other one got to stay under the covers. It was a squalid little tent city, encrusted with weeks, maybe months of detritus, wood pallets, improvised flooring and walls, bicycles, and trash. It was too cold to be smelly. The handful of people gratefully accepted the styrofoam boxes, which were still vaguely warm, and hustled back into their tents.
This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.