Finding a Way Home: On Homelessness
My son Jesse and me in Austin, Thanksgiving 2019.
Friday, June 17, one moment in a sixteen-day road trip I’ve just returned from, some tame version of the journeys of my late teens and early twenties. Even in those days, for all the pleasure I took from the act of vagabonding and hitchhiking, of going where the climate suited my clothes, I appreciated the value of home, which by the time I turned twenty-two had become Iowa City.
On this trip taken in my sixth-eighth year, I was always able to make a temporary home somewhere – in Louisville, the home of my girlfriend’s brother and sister-in-law; in Roanoke, the home of my daughter and two grandsons; in the Long Island town of Centerport, the home of my high school girlfriend and her husband; in Columbus, Ohio, the home of one of my sisters. In all these places, I was blessed with the comfort and security that home represents.
Lately, I’ve been troubled by a world that forces some to live without that comfort and security. In the last fifty years, the withering of government funding for social services, mental health care, substance abuse programs, and low-income housing has resulted in the tragic fact that over a half-million Americans now experience homelessness every night. In March, I watched a documentary film, Lead Me Home,[1] that introduced me to those who reckon daily with housing insecurity, and with the arbitrary twists of fate that landed them in such circumstances.
As I watched the film, I kept thinking about my youngest son, Jesse, who recently lost his home and is living on the streets of Austin, Texas. A talented cook, he began to suffer from bipolar disorder in his early twenties while living and working in New York City. His condition undiagnosed, he self-medicated the extreme mood swings, which led to an alcohol addiction. When my wife and I learned of this, we invited him to move back home, and encouraged him to seek help, with mixed results. Over the last fifteen years, various stints in rehab have offered glimpses of hope followed by relapses.
That Friday, I drove Interstate 81’s compass-precise northeast route, 360 miles nearly nonstop, following the Roanoke Valley, James River Valley, and then Shenandoah Valley from my daughter’s home in Virginia to Locust Lake State Park in eastern Pennsylvania. The lake and camping area of the park were nestled alongside Locust Mountain in the Appalachians’ Ridge-and-Valley range, an oasis of second-growth forest and wetlands surrounded by land first mined for coal in the middle of the 19th century. These forests were harvested to build and support the mines and tanneries but have been untouched since.
By 6:30 on one of the longest days of the year, I’d found a campsite, set up my tent, and scrounged for dinner at the camp store. (One apple was all that remained from the food I’d started out with that morning in Roanoke.) I sat at a picnic table edged with moss, pieces of sunlight filtering down on a slant, illuminating the west side of gray tree trunks. Streaks of light green foliage angled toward the ground, against a backdrop of darker green shade. Sixty feet up, through a canopy of northern red oak, chestnut oak, red maple, eastern hemlock, tulip poplar – blue sky.
I was surrounded by an understory of mountain laurel in bloom, of ironwood and sassafras saplings. Good Sir Chipmunk, with his handsome stripes, wandered through my campsite to see if I had anything for him. I tasted the sassafras leaves, a childhood favorite, chewing one into a creamy mush, conjuring up memories of its earthy aromatic flavor.[2]
After finishing a long rehab in Austin four years ago, Jesse seemed to be making peace with his life, but a double charge of DUI and DWOL landed him in jail. One of the terms of his probation was that he wear an ankle monitor and report his sobriety via a breathalyzer, those items costing him at least $600 a month to rent, a heavy burden for anyone trying to get back on their feet.
In the past year, unable to keep up with the rent of an apartment he shared with a friend from rehab, Jesse was asked to move out. Since then he’s been living in his tent in various spots around Austin, relocating when the scene got too volatile. Spending a single night camping, by my choice, in Pennsylvania woods, I think of Jesse doing that night after night, by necessity, in Austin. We’ve been corresponding by email, my small attempt to be there for him, and to be with him. His dispatches are both heartening and heartbreaking:
Met a girl named Deseree. She gave me a dollar. Well, two. Followed me into the Home Depot parking lot. Shared stories about life and her cigarettes.
I told her my name. She had bad memories of Jesses and told me the stories. Reaffirmed my belief that there can be only one. As a pacifist I guess I just have to outlive them all.
Been a long time since something like that has happened. Sitting on the curb, talking, smoking her menthols. Said she had never done anything like this before.
I have, but not with you. So, I guess I haven't either.
The camping area was quiet, just two campsites within view – a young couple and another couple nearly my age. The lake was a half-mile away by trail, and I could hear the faint sounds of children laughing and squealing with delight, while nearby birds intoned vespers, the last songs of the day. I made dinner with what I’d found at the camp store: Round Top white bread, Kraft American singles, mayo. I thinly sliced the apple to add some crunch to my sandwich while sipping from a waxed carton of green tea brewed at Guers Tumbling Run Dairy, located in nearby Pottsville, home of Yuengling Brewery, which has been in business for nearly 200 years. In 1930, the brewery survived Prohibition by opening that dairy.
Dude threatened me tonight. –“You got a problem with somebody?” –“You think you can just walk by me?” Snatched at my pockets. –“What you got?”
Walked away and stole a bus ride. It ain’t safe no more. Makes me sad. Feel that there should be unity amongst the desperate despite disparity. Common bond for fuck’s sake.
Off to sleep in an alley behind a church. Help them in the morning. I like helping. And because 7 bucks is 7 bucks.
I welcomed sleep, although in the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of an animal heavily treading on dead leaves outside my tent. As the first rays of sunlight peeked over the mountain, I studied a wood thrush’s flutelike two-part call moving from tree to tree through the woods. Packing up my tent, I discovered, beneath the dead leaves, moss completely covering the ground.
Surrounded by native prairie which is sort of sanctioned to not be fucked with. ’Cept they mow it. Which seems not right.
Still full of native flowers. I wear them in my hair. Not that I need adornment, but shit, I will wear my environment like a boss.
Out of the campground and down the mountainside past religiously segregated graveyards – this one for German Lutherans, that one for Byzantine Catholics – and into Mahanoy City, a five-by-twenty-block coal mining town squeezed into a narrow flat stretch along a creek. Before getting back on the road, east toward Long Island, I stopped at the 123 Cafe for breakfast. After requesting flapjacks and coffee, I overhear three women at a nearby table all order scrapple with their eggs, and realize I missed a chance to try that local specialty.
I woke up this morning thinking of you. That I should tell you what is going on and how I am doing. I’m back to work through a temp agency. That’s sort of adjacent to what I wanted to tell you.
Life out here is strange; I need to get out. I know that I got myself where I am and am the only one that can change that. I am surrounded by people who blame others for their situation and expect someone else to get them out of it. That mentality doesn’t work. So they just get angry. It’s a hard environment to live in.
Although homelessness has reached crisis status, there have been successes addressing it. In the last ten years, Houston, Texas, has reduced its homeless population by 63 percent, thanks to its “housing first” program, which has moved over 250,000 people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, not with the prerequisite that they’ve been weaned of drugs, or completed a 12-step program, or landed a job, or found God.
I try to find magical shit in life to keep me moving. There are good people and I try to help them. The sky last night at dusk: clouds torn to shreds and ribbons, layered, glowing pink and orange. It was beautiful. I told the other people on the bus to look out the window at it. None of them looked up from their phones. I saw it and I hold it with me because ... fuck, it was beautiful. I can’t help the people who don’t want to see something so magical.
Couldn’t sleep that night because there were gunshots and a lot of strangers around. Apparently some cop was involved and is now suspended. Meth, ice, clear, whatever you want to call it is an epidemic here. I don’t even know what it is now; it’s like a mystery drug that everyone is on because it’s dirt cheap.
It’s hard to stay positive surrounded by so much negativity and complacency. I guess that’s what the clouds are for. I never forget that there is so much that is wonderful in this world. I have so much to say and no one really to say it to, so I’m trying to write it down.
Be well, Papa
The documentary Lead Me Home ends with Angel Olsen’s song “Endless Road”: “Well, every road I see/ Leads away from me/ There’s not a single one/ That leads me home.” Still, I hold out hope for Jesse, and for all homeless people, that they may find a way home.
Footnotes:
[1] The 2021 film by Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk was an Oscar nominee in the documentary short category. It’s available for streaming on Netflix.
[2] Dried and ground sassafras leaves are the main component of filé, used as a spice and thickener in Louisiana Creole cooking.