Sleeping Like a Criminal

Dignity and the Vagabond

There is an hour at which the sun’s hue shifts burnt orange — an hour when dusky alien light licks the sweat-soaked and tired traveler’s brow and the day recedes into the twilight’s dark, breezy yawn. At this hour, the wayfarer’s muscles stiffen from the day’s arduous miles upon shimmering pavement and his shoulders burn and bruise from the gravity of his rucksack. Absent-mindedly, our traveler remembers that a day is not a centurylong affair after all — that in spite of the passage of his day’s hours weighing him down like decades, the day will end, and as it it ends, he must indeed sleep. With bloodshot eyes, stupefied with exhaustion, he searches his environs for a burrow or a hole in which to die his nightly death amid brush and bramble, behind strip malls, high in trees, or upon trash-strewn riverbanks.

Such a search would prove dismally worrisome to the great majority of people who have ever traveled —