Riley Strain, a young tourist and college student who went missing in downtown Nashville two weeks ago after reportedly being "overserved," was finally fished from the Cumberland River on Friday. His poor parents had to come down here to help search for him, and now they go home with a dead child. That is one hell of a souvenir, Nashville. Just one hell of a souvenir.
I don’t know about y’all, but Strain had come up in nearly every conversation I’ve had in the past two weeks. We speculated about whether it looked like he was drugged as well as intoxicated. We wondered why he was alone in body-cam footage recently released by MNPD. We shared rumors of kidnapping and murder. And I think Strain stayed on our minds because that so easily could have been any of us. For as much as we locals complain about the swarm of humanity constantly clogging up downtown, who among us hasn’t been in it? We go to the Ryman. We go watch the Preds at Bridgestone. We take our friends to Robert’s, and we complain about how it wasn’t always like this as we gesture to the bachelorettes and the pedal taverns and the throngs of people. Hell, many of us have been shitfaced downtown. He didn’t do anything the rest of us haven’t done. He just ran out of luck.
And, bless, as much as we bitch about tourists, no one wants them to die while they’re here. We don’t need planes full of worried parents coming into town on Monday when the planes leaving town on Sunday failed to contain their children.
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I got to thinking on Saturday — as I was, yet again, talking with a friend about Strain — about what might have prevented his death. Like, yes, one of his companions should have gone with him. That’s something they will have to live with forever. But obviously, people have shitty companions sometimes. And yes, Strain did run into people concerned about him, but other than checking on him, what could they do for him? It’s not immediately apparent. He talked to a cop. If cops detained everyone who was drunk downtown, the jail would be overflowing.
Last week, I went to see my new primary care physician for the first time. I went up to the Vanderbilt clinic in Pleasant View. (I don’t know how everyone else keeps Fairview and Pleasant View straight in their minds, but I think "P for Pleasant View and Phillips," because that’s the one near me, and "F for Fairview and far away," because it’s the one that’s ... OK, you know, I bet you figured out the end of that sentence.) I had not been to this clinic before. On one side there’s a walk-in clinic. On the other side is all the appointment stuff. I spoke to my primary care physician, and she asked me if I’d had my yearly mammogram yet. I said no and she said, "OK, let’s get it scheduled." And I assumed she meant like off in the future. No. Ten minutes after I got done with my appointment with her, I was standing in another room bare-chested getting images taken of my innards.
It was so easy and smooth and just disconcertingly nice. And as I was recounting this to my friend on Saturday, I got to thinking about what if there was a way Riley Strain could have had that experience. Well, not that experience. But what if a competent team of people could have seen that he was not in his right mind, and they could have assessed him and, if he was drugged, brought him some place safe to deal with the effects of it? And if he was just exceedingly drunk, made sure he was safe and hydrated?
And I got to thinking about the police presence downtown — how I’ve seen them down there on horses and bikes and on foot and in cars. Just tons of different ways for them to move through the crowds and be where the trouble is.
And I had an idea. What if we had trained medics downtown to help deal with tourists? Imagine if, when that cop talked to Riley, he had said, “Wait, let me just call for a medic to check you out”? There’s not the pressure and expense of calling an ambulance. It’s just going to be a person on a bike or whatever coming up to assess you and provide any basic medical care you might need.
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How police are present downtown is much different than how they’re present, say, in my neighborhood — both in terms of how many officers are present and, like I said, how they’re moving around. Why can’t we make a similar change in how medical professionals are present downtown?
So, OK then, we innovate and have patrolling medics. But say someone has been drugged or got in a fight. They’re going to need more than a street medic handing them some aspirin and a bottle of water. And the medics will need a location to work out of. This brings me to the second part of my idea: a downtown walk-in emergency room that focuses on the kinds of medical issues that happen downtown — overconsumption of alcohol, drug overdoses, being unwittingly drugged, assaults, etc. People with more serious issues could still be moved to hospital ERs, of course, but imagine how much more prepared everyone on down the line would be if the call for an ambulance came with actual medical information about the patient because a medical professional was right there — either on foot dealing with problems at the bars or on the streets or at the downtown ER.
Downtown tourism is an important part of the economic engine that powers the city, and for better or for worse, downtown tourism involves a lot of public drunkenness. What if we reimagined part of our role as host to these tourists as dealing with their drunken needs? We are already serving them oceans of alcohol, why not be honest with ourselves and be innovative with the ways we handle the problems that serving that alcohol brings? We kind of joke about how people are coming here to put their lives in danger with their drinking. What if we truly acknowledged that’s what is indeed happening and then respond accordingly?
Right now, for the majority of people downtown who are in a state where their life processes are impaired in some way, we do nothing for them. But we are a health care industry city! We can certainly at least make it more convenient for the people who have chosen to impair their life processes to seek help if they find themselves impaired beyond where they’re comfortable.
As long as people downtown are getting shitfaced, some of them will need medical attention, and many more of them, while not in dire need, would benefit from it. Think of what a difference it would have made if anyone who saw Riley Strain staggering around might have stopped to talk to him if they’d been able to flag down a medic for him.
Every other plan we have for dealing with downtown tourists involves curtailing something or other, and the state legislature never lets us do it. But this is different. This isn’t curtailing business. This is expanding the safety net.
Please, let’s learn something from this needless tragedy. Let’s do something to make sure no other family has to go through this. Let’s not be unchanged by this.
