Rainy Camp

The most jarring first impression of a homeless camp is the incomprehensible and immeasurable multiple levels of filth.

Usually the first impact is the smell. Everything that human beings eat, sleep in (or on) wear, or excrete, is public. There is no privacy - and certainly no plumbing.

Every scrap and residue of human appetite or survival is on display.

Everything in a homeless camp is on the surface. There are no pipes or wires to deliver - or take away - electricity, water or waste.

In fact, to a large degree, nothing moves. Everything, tents, blankets, piles of garbage - even people - just get dirtier and more broken.

Everything seems meticulously coated with a weary filthiness. There is an almost tangible momentum of degradation. Real or not, there is a prevailing sense of muddy finality - as if there is no escape.

Each of the camps I have seen has felt like a living monument to the opposite of freedom.

There is no nobility there.

And not much humanity either.

And yet sometimes…

Once in a while, among the food scraps, broken bottles, torn up tarps and ripped and moldy blankets, a treasure is found; the ultimate human treasure that glistens like living gold among the squalor and clutter.

That treasure is beyond description - and even, somehow beyond most of us who live our sheltered lives with heat and plumbing and privacy.

That treasure that resonates with the fire and fury of eternity and seethes with the steely faith and authority of the divine burnished by unspeakable desperation, that treasure is one that one person in a thousand my find, though it is everywhere if we could see it. But for that one who finds it, it is a treasure that burns through every barrier or discouragement or broken dream.

I got to know one woman (I’ll call her “Rainy”) who lived in a series of these camps for at least two full years. She spoke of the tents and shelters as if they were apartments. They were scavenged, hand-built huts or roped off tarps on brush-filled muddy hillsides, instead of identical rooms terraced around a parking lot or pool.

She was from another state and had been molested as a child. She had run away from home - to nowhere in particular. She, like most people who are homeless, had a fractured beginning that was compounded by a series of poor decisions. In short, like many others, she had embraced the cruel momentum of self-destruction.

She had one main guy she lived with most of the time. Except when other opportunities - or difficulties - arose.

Or when her main man had other ideas.

One time he “needed” some crack cocaine and didn’t have any money, so he followed the dictates of the earthy economy of the streets. He traded a night with her for some crack.

Or at least that was her side of the story. He was gone on a crack fueled binge for the next week or two.

When he finally came back, his story was that she had been cheating on him, so he went off by himself for a while. And he insisted that she ran off with the crack dealer for her own crack and sex binge.

Truth is one of the rarest commodities on the streets - you’d think it was the ultimate controlled substance.

Rainy got her mail delivered at the rescue mission. Sometimes my job was to collect the mail for our office and the people we could track down. I noticed that she subscribed to one of the thick glossy bridal magazines.

I grabbed all the mail to bring up to where she was. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry as I handed her the bridal magazine.

Was it her wedding fantasy I should admire because it persisted through her bleak and bedraggled circumstances? Or was her delusion so total that she couldn’t see the immense - and unbridgeable - gap between her meth and crack based homeless scene, not to mention almost certain exposure to HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, in stark contrast to the glistening virginal brides in their thousand dollar gowns and entourage?

Many of my students were delusional in different ways, but Rainy’s delusions made me the saddest.

I can only hope that Rainy will one day see the treasure I see, and through her many struggles this newfound secret will get her through:

“I am better than this.”