Fiona K.N. Stewart-Campbell

Downtown streets feel dark and cold; on a late Sunday afternoon, post-church and pre-Super Bowl parties, bored yuppies and younger metrosexuals filter downtown to wander and kill time. Seniors totter carefully on ice, amassing in favourite restaurants for post- church brunch. A few displaced teenagers, faces dull, pace the "circuit", all four blocks long and three wide: theatre, gift shops, art galleries, sleazy bars, espresso shops, hot new pubs: doing the "Juneau Stroll." Nobody ever stops, though, in front of the Gastineau Apartments. Everyone seems to pretend that it, along with its residents, doesn't even exist. But this afternoon, a gaping, silently guffawing crowd are ringed outside the grimy front door of the seedy, aging structure.

On hands and knees, there crouches a vintage Juneau artifact, as soiled and derelict as the building he lives in. I edge closer. I live in a pleasant condo building just on the next block. In Alaskan terms – and in Christian terms – he's a neighbour.

His scanty dun hair falls into his eyes. His thin drab coat flaps in a freezing ice-laden wind, and salty ice tears track down the gulleys of his sunken whiskered cheeks. I don't know his name, but I've seen him around town for years. He's one of the old miners who used to toll beneath the quartz and basalt laden mountain behind us. When the mine closed, so did many of these mens' prospects. Now, like the dusty fragile tunnels they toiled in, most residents of the Gastineau are beginning to collapse of old age. His crumbling apartment building now sags, leaning creakily into the rocky hillside.

Tears spatter his gnarled hands; his fingers are arthritically twisted. Still, he's scrabbling frantically in an inch wide crevasse between sidewalk and building foundation. I've lost it!" he wails, and suddenly he looks up to peer with foggy pale blue eyes into frozen granite faces whose chilly mirrors do not reflect him in return. "Gone! It's all gone! My precious, precious jewels, it was gold! It's fallen down in! It's lost!" Perhaps he has dropped a precious quarter. Perhaps an old watch or pin has just fallen Into oblivion. Perhaps the illusion is in his muddled memory.

What matters is that not one person steps forward to help him retrieve his lost treasure. Sobbing, he beseeches each set face in turn: "can YOU see it? Can YOU help me find my treasure?"Then, pitifully, "does anyone have a dime?"

Sardonic grins twist unresponsive mouths. I recognize these faces, too. Juneau holds the distinction of being one of the wealthiest cities per capita in North America .These people are people of power and prestige, people who spend their every breath amassing the imagined wealth of power, of influence, of illicit pleasure, of material goods. Several of them had been seated with me in Mass at the Cathedral up the hill not one hour before.

I recognize a rising lawyer, a young newspaper intern, a middle aged Deacon, several collegiate legislative aides among the throng. On the outskirts of the circle stands an aging Senator. A tie dyed young couple, local musicians, shuffle their feet nervously and drift silently away, afraid to raise their voices.

Winking at one another, one by one the onlookers check their Rolexes, adjust the collars of their North Face jackets, shuffle around him and begin to disperse in search of places to spend the coins that make heavy their trendy Thai travel pouches and weight their leather wallets. There is no warmth – no gold – in those veins.

The old miner drops his head into his hands, coughing on tears and stale waves of vodka. I crouch down, and take his hand, waiting for his hiccups to recede. He turns his eyes toward mine, his face that of a broken child's, his face that of an ancient tragic warrior, too weary to rise again .

But I help him rise; trembling knees, unsteady feet. I will walk him over to the nearest coffee shop, buy him coffee and something palatable to eat. My tears are splashing onto his hand as he steadies himself, and my heart crumbles within me, crushed beneath the weight of the indifference and contempt which I have just observed. I feel at once deeply akin to him, and utterly desolate and alone, as if the entire town had been swallowed by the sea that surrounds us. For in all that crowd of dozens of people, not one was willing to take the time to reclaim this most precious treasure on that Sunday afternoon.