Firsthand accounts shed light on challenges faced by the homeless in Eau Claire
By Julian Emerson, The Leader-Telegram, Eau Claire, Wis. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
They appeared one by one, like ghosts emerging from the darkness, the frosty white puffs of breath emanating from their mouths testament to the subzero air around them.
Shortly before
A moment later a tall, thin man lugging a backpack stuffed with his few belongings, half-lit by the yellow-orange haze of a nearby streetlight, showed up in front of the shelter. He was followed by a man donning only a drab gray sweatshirt, thread-bare pants with a hole in the right knee and light-brown work boots, untied laces dragging on the snowy sidewalk. A disheveled-looking woman bundled against the cold ambled awkwardly in their wake, her scraggly gray-blond shoulder-length hair partly covered by a multicolored hat and a tattered secondhand scarf that had seen too many winters.
Others joined this small crowd, one by one. At
Two hours earlier, when the temperature was slightly warmer, a group of Christmas carolers sang holiday music in a park across the street from the shelter amid sparkling lights that adorned the park's trees.
This group in front of the shelter seemed a world apart from that joyous scene. Their faces depicted the rough lives they've lived, each line and groove and scar and missing tooth a road map of difficulties past.
Their eyes most revealed the hardships they had endured.
Most stared resolutely ahead, worn out from another day of wandering the cold streets.
For some, their eyes once shined with hope, their lives seemingly on the right path before a medical malady or ruined relationship or lost job dragged them from the right side of the tracks to the wrong, derailing their hopes and dreams. Others have never known a semblance of normalcy, their childhoods a dysfunctional mess, their adult minds addled by mental illness or alcohol or drug addiction.
Members of this gathering -- a group that continued to grow outside the shelter on this night, quiet but for the occasional sharp crunch of car tires on snow and the raspy rattle of engine pistons struggling in the cold -- live on society's fringes. They're not members of parent-teacher associations, book clubs, the
Call them
This group is comprised of all types of people. Former white-collar workers whose alcohol addictions got the best of them. Blue-collar types who worked as carpenters or in factories or on farms before they lost those jobs. Wives and husbands whose spouses died or divorced them, leaving them without enough money to make rent or house payments. Teenagers whose parents kicked them out of their homes for one bad behavior or another, or simply because they're gay. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Drug users who spend nearly every dime to feed addictions. People with a wide range of mental illness. Adults who were abused as children. Con artists and cheats and hard workers and people with hearts of gold.
Despite those differences, they share a grim commonality. They are homeless.
A growing number of homeless people are calling
That growing population is stretching available resources, officials said, and has prompted a spike in crime and other unsavory activities in the downtown area where many homeless people congregate.
A few of those huddled in front of the shelter on this bitterly cold December night spoke hopefully of escaping their homeless lives, of leaving the grasp of drudgery-filled days and nights, of living beyond the immediate scramble for the next meal or next dollar or next roof over their heads. Others seemed to have given up on a better life, resigned to their depressing situations.
On this night when the temperature would dip to 10 degrees below zero, most of those gathered at the shelter shoved any thoughts about their futures to the back of their minds. They had a more immediate goal: Spending the night somewhere warm.
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Night had fallen and
Biddle had endured plenty of cold during the first few weeks of this winter, the kind of winter old-timers talked about. This December night would be even colder than the last, Biddle realized. A stiff north breeze chilled his tent despite its wind-resistant design. Even his extra-warm sleeping bag and thick clothes couldn't ward off the deep freeze setting in.
As the temperature dipped closer to 20 below zero, Biddle realized he needed help staying warm. Underneath a dark sky lit by blinking stars, Biddle fired up his trusty Coleman lantern for heat. The device warmed the tent a bit, enough for Biddle to feel warmer.
"That's it," he thought, grateful for the heat. "It's damn cold, but I'm going to make it through the night."
A while later, as he dozed, Biddle suddenly felt too much heat. Groggy, he turned his head to realize the lantern had malfunctioned, starting one corner of his tent on fire. The lantern roared, spewing burning fuel at Biddle's right hand and face. Dazed and startled, he reached for the light, further scorching his hand. He groped for the zipper at his tent's entrance and escaped the blaze that left his hand scarred with purple-pink lines.
"I was scared," the usually defiant Biddle said of the fire in his tent. "I didn't know if I was going to get out of that one."
Biddle is no stranger to roughing it. The 64-year-old vagabond ex-con has spent his adult life in various locations throughout the Midwest and
"Once I got to my mid-50s, I'd had enough," Biddle said of the wear and tear years of toil took on his back, shoulders and knees. "My body just got wore down."
Unable to continue physical jobs and lacking other job skills, Biddle began collecting a
"A lot of people talk tough, but most of them can't do what I do," he said defiantly, a distinctive shock of his hair that resembles a beaver tail or dreadlocks gone wrong hanging from the back of his head. "Not just anyone can sleep outside in this weather. You've got to be one tough (expletive). But it's what I need to do to get by."
As December progressed, all Biddle could do was hope for warmer weather.
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But sometimes this group of people with seemingly so little does what they can to help others sharing their plight. They give away money. Bus tokens. Warm clothing. Cigarettes. They carry backpacks and bags for their homeless colleagues who are too sick or weary to haul them themselves.
"We live desperate lives," said
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Even for this unusually cold early winter,
Vehicles made their way along an ice-caked
Workers soon realized the shelter would be packed beyond its 48-person capacity on this frigid night, forcing them to send people who had been at Sojourner the longest back out onto the cold streets. Desperate to accommodate more people, workers set up chairs for people without beds.
But even that wasn't enough. Shelter workers still faced the prospect of kicking a handful of people out into the dangerous weather. Then, without warning, four younger people who had secured beds for the night dressed in their winter gear and headed out into the brisk night air, freeing up space for older, frail people who had faced a night on the subzero streets.
"They gave up their warm beds for others," an emotional Lokken marveled. "Those younger people did it to help the older ones, knowing they would head out into the cold. It's one of the most amazing, selfless acts I've ever witnessed. To see something like that, it really makes you think about how you live your own life."
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This small group of people was determined to ring in the new year in style, regardless of the frigid elements they faced. As 2013 became 2014 amid a temperature that approached 20 degrees below zero on
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This was no way to celebrate the new year.
The previous day,
That sense of calm had been shattered a month earlier. Despondent for various reasons and struggling with depression, Johnson and Palmquist felt hopelessness overwhelm them. They decided to die the same way they lived -- together. On a dreary November day when they saw no way out of their troubles, they ingested way too many prescription drugs and lost consciousness. The next thing they knew they awoke in hospital beds. They had survived. Barely.
"The doctor told us we were lucky," said Palmquist, whose walking ability was impaired by the overdose attempt. "With how much (drugs) we took, we probably shouldn't have made it."
The couple recovered and returned to their apartment. But they wouldn't keep that home for long. They were able to afford their living quarters with help from Palmquist's family. But his relatives cut off that money when they learned of the couple's suicide attempt. Without it, the couple couldn't afford their place. On
They headed to a
They were in luck. The shelter had space for them.
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On this night there was no celebratory party for the Dashes to ring in the new year. No champagne. No revelry. Just another night at Sojourner, another night without a home of their own.
"We've been here since it opened (in
Unable to make ends meet, the couple moved in the late-1990s from
Sometimes, in between stays in apartments, the Dashes resided in hotels. When their money ran out they lived in whatever vehicle they owned at the time, sleeping with the doors locked on streets off the beaten path. On the coldest nights the brisk air painted those vehicles' insides in a silver-white blanket of frost.
"Somehow we survived it," said Rebecca, dressed as she was most days this winter in a bright-red snowsuit to ward off the cold. "You wrap yourself in as many layers as you can and hope for the best."
Nearly three years ago the Dashes said they were evicted from yet another apartment after their landlord blamed a cockroach infestation on them. By then Rebecca had lost her job when she got sick with what was later diagnosed as a chronic lung disease. The illness qualified Rebecca for monthly Social Security Disability payments. Ralph already received payments from that program after he suffered serious injuries in a late-1980s motorcycle crash. The couple take a variety of prescription medications for a number of illnesses, at least when they can find them.
"Sometimes we don't take our medicines because we can't find them," Rebecca said, motioning one morning toward the couple's van jam-packed with items of all sorts. "They're in there somewhere, but I don't know where."
The Dashes said they would like an apartment of their own. But they have stopped looking, they said, dismayed by a series of failed attempts to convince landlords to rent to them.
"I hope we can find a place someday," Rebecca said one night at Sojourner House, staring at the floor during a break from one of her cross stitch projects. "But I don't see how it's going to happen."
Ralph, sitting nearby, nodded, staring resolutely ahead.
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Sperry, 29, had arrived in the
"You see that?" he said, rolling up his sweatshirt sleeve. "That's my vein going bad from too much meth. I'm hell on wheels, man. For me, it's either full blast or nothin' at all."
Sperry dealt meth and other drugs, using part of the profits to feed his habit. He met Sundberg at a party in rural Stanley and they bonded through an affinity for the fast life. But their relationship involved something deeper. When Sperry's continued run-ins with the law landed him in jail in November, Sundberg told him it was time to give up drugs, to seek a better life. He surprised himself by agreeing.
But that decision came with a heavy price. Gone were the big drug profits, the
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It was only the beginning of January, but already meteorologists and other prognosticators were talking about the prospects of the winter of 2013-14 being one for the record books. As people staying at Sojourner House ate supper, a weatherman on the large flat screen TV mounted on the wall discussed the upcoming forecast, which featured a series of below-zero temperatures. One bearded man who looked much older than his 47 years listened to the report, shook his head in exasperation and continued eating his hamburger hot dish. He and his fellow homeless colleagues didn't need to be told about the arctic temperatures. After spending days on the streets, they knew about the cold only too well.
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Winter was only a month old, but it had already taken hold in a big way in
One early January night, just as he had each night during this frigid winter, Korn, dressed in layer upon layer, topped by a thick leather Polaris jacket. He covered his bushy-haired head in a fur-lined hat. He crawled inside his sleeping bag, wrapped mummy-like in blankets, hoping to ward off the cold. Korn's mustache and beard were dusted with frost. His breaths hung in seemingly solid clouds above him, lit by bright moonlight shining through a window of the unheated bus he calls home.
Korn's school bus was parked at one end of a parking lot near the old
The bus' interior was the same arctic temperature as outside, which on this night plummeted to 24 degrees below zero. The roar of a nearby train whistle split the night's silence, followed by the loud clickety-clack and the screech of cold metal wheels on frozen rails.
Enveloped in his sleeping bag. Korn stayed warm enough to survive this night and others like it. Doing so takes a tough mindset and practicality, he said.
"You have to wear lots of layers," Korn said one late afternoon as he proudly showed off his refurbished bus-turned-home. "It's coldest when you wake up in the morning and climb out of the (sleeping) bag. Oh boy, that air bites."
Korn, 56, doesn't consider himself homeless. For a decade or longer he has called his old, rusting van, distinctive for its unusual red-and-yellow paint job with the words "
In
"This place gives me room to breathe," Korn, donning a small spotlight on his head to illuminate the growing darkness inside the bus, said of his bus one late afternoon. "I was like a sardine packed in (the van)."
Korn isn't deterred by the arctic temperatures inside his living quarters. He can't be. He is a prisoner of sorts to the vehicle, using it as his place of solitude to escape the world's noise and chatter. Staying there helps Korn deal with the schizophrenia he said has plagued him since his mid-20s, when he was discharged from the military and arrived in
Then, last summer, Korn said, a doctor prescribed a new medication. This one seems to work better. While he still deals with anxiety, the panic attacks that send his life spiraling out of control are mostly gone.
"I like to be around people, to be part of this world," said the hard-working Korn, who operates a lawn care business during summer months and clears snow for money during winters to subsidize disability money he receives. "But I can't be around people all the time. I need to get away from them or bad stuff happens. Living here is how I keep on the good side of things."
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People staying at
"I'm grateful this place is here, but I can't say I like it," said one pregnant woman in her early 20s who spent a couple of weeks at the shelter this winter before finding another place to stay. "The beds are right on top of one another. There's no privacy. I've seen more naked body parts here than I ever thought I'd see."
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Laughter sounded from the TV in the Sojourner House gathering room on this February Saturday night, a stark contrast to the grim mood among the people gathered there.
It had been another tough day, another extremely cold day during this extraordinarily cold winter. When they could afford it, many of these people without homes of their own spent time at hotels, a break from shelter life. But that drained their bank accounts, forcing their returns to Sojourner.
Earlier that day heavy snow pelted
Despite the cold, snowy conditions, and despite the fact DeMars' life has crumbled during the past decade as his aspirations of college and a profession collapsed into drug use and homelessness, he remains relatively upbeat. He thoughtfully discusses topics ranging from international affairs to national politics to issues impacting
On this day, as he entered The Community Table for a noontime meal, DeMars talked about the homeless colleagues around him.
"This crowd fights a lot of issues," he said. "We battle drugs and alcohol. We have mental health issues. We don't always make wise choices with the little money we have. We don't have the answers. But we try."
Later that night, as DeMars sat amid others spending the night at Sojourner House, the wear and tear of another day wandering the cold streets, of a relentless winter, had dampened even his usually upbeat spirit. He sat dejectedly amid the somber shelter gathering, shook his head and said, "This winter is getting all of us down."
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As winter progressed,
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Soulier, 27, made his way from
"When you're 5-foot-4 and have tattoos in the inner city, that's going to happen," he said.
Since arriving in
Despite having spent much of his life surrounded by dysfunction, alcohol, drugs and crime, Soulier has goals and dreams. He hopes to attend college one day, to obtain an education allowing him to open a shelter of his own that provides homeless people and others down on their luck with the help they need to get on their feet.
But Soulier knows he has a steep climb ahead to get to that point. He's trying to put his difficult past behind him, determined to earn enough money to one day afford a home of his own. He said he doesn't have any form of medical insurance or other benefits. He said he doesn't want them.
"You do what you've got to do," Soulier said matter-of-factly of life as a homeless person. "It can be damn hard, but it's what my life is right now."
Soulier sometimes spent nights at Sojourner House. But on other occasions, according to shelter policy, because he had been there for more than three months, Soulier was shown the door on nights when the shelter was full. On this night, shortly after
Now, four hours later, Soulier was just plain tired, unable to sleep as the bitter temperature dropped ever lower amid his harsh stone surroundings. He pondered his difficult past and the events that had led him to this dark, desolate night. The full force of his desperate situation, the depths of his loneliness, enveloped him like his frozen surroundings. He hoped his determined spirit would see him through to another morning.
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Finally, after nearly three months of unrelenting cold,
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After the warmest day spent wandering
"I'm feeling real good today," DeMars said, reflecting on the day's relatively warm, sunny weather. "It's a great day to be in
From
That's why this break in the bad weather felt so good. Across the room from DeMars,
"My mom and dad told me to stay away from him," Rebecca said, chuckling. "They told me he was trouble. But I didn't listen. We've had plenty of tough times. And through it all, we're still together."
The winter break was short-lived. On
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A bitter winter that seemed like it would never end had gotten the best of
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Soulier spent part of this night at a Sojourner House packed beyond capacity. The list of names of people allowed to spend that night at the shelter didn't include Soulier's. At
"It's just the way it is," Soulier said as he headed from the shelter entrance into the dark.
Soulier would spend this night the same way he spent many others this winter, wandering
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On that same night in another part of town,
It was shortly after
Just as he had for the past several nights, Lawton spent this one at the Perkins restaurant along
The mostly-empty restaurant was a good setting for Lawton, who struggles with multiple mental health issues including anxiety, depression and bipolar and schizophrenic disorders. Too much noise, too much activity around him prompts Lawton's brain to jump into hyper drive, creating panic and angst and, sometimes, anger.
"I have a lot of issues," the soft-spoken, morose Lawton said four hours earlier as he sat in a cushioned chair at Sojourner House.
Lawton said he gets by on just
Lawton spent plenty of nights this winter at Perkins, drinking coffee and watching sports via his cellphone to stay awake. But on this night, all alone, Lawton pondered his difficult life, recalling how a sense of hopelessness eventually came to dominate his every waking moment. How he tried to drink himself to death in his mid-20s. How he woke up in a hospital bed, lucky to be alive. How he has slid ever downward for the past decade, unable to land a job, barely able to exist.
"Most of the time I can hardly function," Lawton said. "I'm pretty much a basket case."
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As April turned to May, winter finally released its grip, providing
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The winter of 2013-14 didn't just feel colder than most. It really was. The winter tied 1903-04 as the coldest winter on record in
Then came May and with it, warmer temperatures and a sense relief among
The frost that coated the inside of
"To get through this winter, it was no small task," Korn said, a pinch of snuff protruding like a golf ball from his lower lip as he sipped from a glass of V-8 one morning at Positive Avenues, a drop-in center for people with mental health issues on downtown
Korn and
Korn relocated too after the
Korn sat inside his van Wednesday morning as rain poured down outside, waiting to begin his morning job cleaning the
"The gas lines had lots of leaks," Korn chuckled, his grease-stained hands evidence of the repairs.
Despite his forced relocation, Korn wasn't bitter. After work he was headed to a
But first there was work to do. Korn bid his visitor farewell, then strode toward the
Emerson can be reached at 715-830-5911, 800-236-7077 or [email protected].
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