Past a Boy Scout camp off busy Highway 160, veering away from the American River into forests of wild fennel, primary-color tents stood propped beneath willow trees kissed by spring.

Two Sacramento County park rangers made their way along dirt trails attaching a flier to each tent with blue painter's tape.

"Oh, just give it to me," said JoAnne Bush when they came upon her spot beneath a tree split by lightning. Then she tossed aside the notice that gave her 48 hours to move on.

It was another day in the transitory life of Safe Ground Sacramento, people for whom the most important information is what the weather will bring and how long they might stay in one place.

The loosely organized group of homeless people who camp together for safety, and increasingly for homeless advocacy, has been under pressure in recent weeks to move off the north-of-downtown stretch of the American River Parkway because of complaints from area residents and bicycle trail users.

"We've moved three times in the last two weeks," a tearful Peggysue Peterson said to no one in particular. "Do we not have a right to live?"

Dusk settled over the camp on this recent night as those who had received the notices discussed what to do. A dog chased a jack rabbit through camp and out again. A man ate a frozen pizza from the package.

Peterson, 47, came to Sacramento from Spokane, Wash. She said she spent three months with family, then ended up in a sleeping bag in front of the Union Gospel Mission.

"My sisters and I are like oil and water," she explained.

Rickey Edwards, 42, is an Air Force veteran who carried gold panning equipment and said he suffers from bipolar disorder.

Dale Jones, 56, grew up in Detroit and ran away from institutions deeming him incorrigible.

They all see Safe Ground – which bans drugs, alcohol and violence – as a respite from the loneliness of homelessness. But, as an organized group, they have been targeted, along with other illegal campers, by those who want homeless people off the parkway.

With his loping gait, Buzz Hoover arrived.

Hoover, 57, is one of Safe Ground's five elders. He seems constantly in motion, leaving only a trucker hat and red-hued beard in focus. He is not technically homeless – he has a house in Ogden, Utah – but has been working for homeless rights in New York, Miami, Portland, Ore., Nashville, Tenn., and Anchorage, Alaska.

He has been camping with Safe Ground for six months, directing an ever-fluctuating group that ranges on any given night from a dozen campers to 150. He solves disputes and polices the use of drugs and booze.

"We're going mobile," he told the group, explaining how it would set up camp each afternoon and break it down each morning it was not raining – and stay a half-step ahead of rangers.

A break from routine

Five nights later, a smattering of shopping carts and bicycle-pulled trailers lined the outside of a brick building next to the main chapel of St. John's Lutheran Church in Sacramento. A group of smokers huddled at the rear of the parking lot.

Inside, rolls of white sleeping bags sat stacked against a wall, several dogs were leashed in a corner, and volunteers scooped ladles of macaroni with hamburger and tomato sauce from pots.

Safe Ground coordinates with area churches so that at least one night a week the group gets off the parkway and inside for a hot meal. There've been several nights of shelter, after churches volunteered to give them a breather from the rangers.

There were 32 Safe Grounders at St. John's on this night. The movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" played on a large screen. A few people clacked dominoes at one table. Couples nestled together.

When a Narcotics Anonymous meeting finished upstairs, Hoover collected the women staying overnight and sent them to bed.

Bush rolled her luggage up the stairs, hitting the front of each riser along the way. She crawled under a large wooden table and unrolled her blue foam mat.

She didn't expect homelessness to reach out its hand and envelop her a month after she turned 64. Since Nov. 8, the day she left her one-bedroom apartment, Loaves & Fishes, a Sacramento homeless-services agency, has served as her mailing address, and a 25-square-foot storage locker has housed all that's left of her possessions.

Bush's "boisterous cab driver persona" caused residents in the subsidized Pioneer Towers in Sacramento to claim verbal abuse, she said. So, the former food-service worker and taxi driver bought a tent, practiced putting it up and taking it down in her living room, and joined Safe Ground.

Her tufts of white hair and wire-rimmed glasses with lenses that turn gray in the sun give her the look of someone who might run a bake sale. But the aquarium tubing keeping her glasses wearable, a lopsided smile due to a few missing teeth, and the dirt lodged beneath her fingernails speak of more difficult challenges.

Bush said she tried the county's winter sanctuary program – a coalition of church groups that has stepped up to run a shelter program for the homeless – but she was kicked out because she refused to give up Danny Boy, her 4-year-old Chihuahua/Jack Russell/labrador retriever mix.

The two became companions when Danny was 9 months old, after the great granddaughter of a Pioneer Towers resident gave him up. Bush – who takes a daily orange pill for depression – sees him as the only stability in her life.

"I choose to be out here," she said of Safe Ground, which allows dogs. "I can't be in the shelter with Danny."

Back to the river

The following afternoon, a motley caravan of bicycles, trailers and dogs paraded from Loaves & Fishes, east on McCormack Avenue, across North 16th Street and on to the bike trail from Dreher Street.

Bush pushed a dolly with a plastic bin bungeed to it across the footbridge spanning the American River and along the dirt trails on the other side.

Tent poles clacked together and tarps were added for extra protection against the approaching rain. On this night, the group camped at "the Knoll," a clearing beneath several power-line towers. They numbered just 15, a fallout from having spent several nights inside.

Marcelino Medina, 52, who said he has good relations with his relatives but doesn't want to impose on any of them, made coffee on a camp stove.

Hoover spoke with other homeless campers nearby and told one man he had to move on because of the alcohol on his breath.

Bush sang a line she remembered from a Sister Sledge song. "We ARE fam-ily," she crooned erratically as the sunlight dimmed.

Then, she folded up her dolly, closed the plastic bin and crawled into her tent, where Danny Boy already lay curled.

"You do it one day at a time, one step at a time," she said. "It's in the higher power's hands – whatever happens."

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