Homeless

Spoiler alert: we aren’t. But for a hot second there it got more than a bit dicey. So much so that I now have an entirely new appreciation for what it means to be homed. To back up, we are in the midst of a gut renovation of our primary home. We have therefore been living off grid in our tiny home (Tiny Drop) for the past eight months.

We have lived in Tiny Drop before, but never for more than three months… three summer months, that is. For this stint, we moved in while there was still three feet of snow on the ground in April, in the midst of a pandemic. Because we are off grid on the mountain and still don’t have everything operational in Tiny Drop, we have been living without running (much less hot) water in the house, without a fully functional toilet in the house, with limited power from our half-functioning solar system, and without heat. 

When we started out on this adventure, I figured we would acclimate to our new conditions. I figured our new normal would become, well, normal. I figured life would then also feel normal. But it soon became clear that it’s one thing living off grid with little in the way of creature comforts when you don’t have to be or go anywhere. It’s another thing when you have to show up to work looking, well, normal. 

Just to give you a little glimpse into a day in the life, to shower required first filling up four one gallon jugs with spring water from an outdoor faucet, heating half of that up on an outdoor propane stove, mixing the hot and cold water to temperature in a big steel pail, pouring the mixed water back into the four gallon jugs through a funnel, carrying the four gallons in a milk crate into the house, undressing (important step, and highly unpleasant in a cold house), getting in the shower, filling up a bucket with two of the gallons, lifting the bucket up onto brackets that Shannon rigged up so that the plastic camping spout would be high enough so that you could sit on said milk crate to wash your hair, taking the first half of your shower being sure to get enough shampoo out of your hair so that you could see, because you need to see to lift the bucket down and fill it up with the remaining two gallons to finish your four gallon shower. Incidentally, that four gallon shower is the equivalent of taking a two minute shower with a water efficient shower head. Two minutes. Granted, doing it this way takes much longer than two minutes. Oh and don’t forget the dismount… freezing ass cold! 

Needless to say, we didn’t shower much. But I couldn’t show up to teach at an elite college looking and smelling homeless, so I had to shower twice a week. Add to this the five steps that have to be added to every other creature comfort to which we have become accustomed. Just push that button. Just turn this dial. Just flip a switch. Not so much. My morning routine, which is painfully slow even with all of those modern conveniences, suddenly drained half of my energy before my day even started. 

The end result is that by the beginning of October we were both running on zero. It had also become clear that we were not going to get construction on the house far enough along to move back in before winter set in. We had known that this was likely to be the case given pandemic related delays and so on, so we were prepared to seek out a rental to get us through the winter months. That process went, thankfully, fairly quickly and we found a place we could afford not far from our construction project. That was a huge sigh of relief. We just had to get through another month and we would be moving out of the cold and into a place with heat, a working kitchen, running (hot) water, a shower, a flushing toilet. Light was at the end of the tunnel. 

Then it got cold. Then it snowed. Then our spring water froze. Then our solar system stopped producing any electricity. We started heating stones on the grill to keep us warm enough in bed. On a scale of 1-10, our energy levels dropped from an average of say 5 down to an average of maybe a whopping 2. We were tanking by the second. But the light was at the end of the tunnel. We just had to get through a couple more weeks. That is, until the call came. The pandemic flexed its muscle. Our would-be landlord panicked. She and her family decided that it would be safer for her to winter in Vermont. One week before we were supposed to move, we suddenly had nowhere to go. We found ourselves face to face with the prospect of homelessness. 

There is this Zen Buddhist Center near Middlebury that goes on what they call “street retreats.” They basically go live on the streets with the homeless for a week in cities around the country as a way to develop an intimate understanding of the challenges. As somebody who works on affordable housing, I had only a year ago considered some day participating in such a retreat. On the one hand I thought maybe it wouldn’t be too different from hiking the Long Trail. But then I realized that shitting in the woods is one thing, while trying to find a place to go to the restroom in New York City when one is homeless, is something else. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. After coming face to face with homelessness, I now know for sure that I can’t. 

After an intense week of panicked searching and coming up with nothing (largely due to the pandemic), we finally found a new place through one of Shannon’s high school classmates. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a roof, a shower, hot water, a stove, a fridge, HEAT and luxury of all luxuries… a washer and dryer! And within the week we will also enter back into the 21st century…. we will have internet (which also means we will be able to access Netflix for the first time in eight months)!!! We have now been here for a week, unthawing and decompressing as we enter into what I presume will be a long, slow stabilization process. We have to reset, completely. We have to detox an immense amount of stress. 

Now I’m not telling you all of this in order to get any form of sympathy. The truth is that Shannon and I are privileged. We are Ivy League educated. We are white. We are employed. We have support networks. We would have found our way out of this situation one way or the other. I think. Because the thing is that as I work through how we ended up in this predicament, we would have to back all the way up to our decision to buy her family home in the first place to correct course. There isn’t, on close introspection, a different decision that we should have made along the way. Not really. I mean we could have decided to do this rather than that at any given moment, but we honestly made the best decisions that we could have given the information available to us at each moment. In spite of that, we ended up on the precipice of homelessness through no fault of our own. Do you have any idea how many people living on the streets ended up there by no fault of their own? How about this… just assume every single one of them regardless of whatever judgements we might throw at them.

The funny thing is that while all of this was going on, I have myself been working on three separate affordable housing projects: one in Middlebury, one in Houston, and one in Boston. I was, in large part, doing this work from my car in order to access free internet outside the public library. Incidentally, I now fully understand why so many homeless tend to hang out at the public libraries in Houston. That was enough immersive research for me. I think I get it now in a way that I am not soon to forget. What I can tell you is that, yes, we have to approach homelessness with a housing first strategy. If I, with all of my privilege, education, resources, etc, cannot maintain mental, physical, emotional and spiritual stability living in a precarious situation, then there is no way in hell that we should expect anybody to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Don’t believe me? Try not knowing where you are going to sleep the next night when it’s going to be 20 degrees outside. 

Let’s all keep this in mind this holiday season. Help somebody. Even the smallest things make the biggest differences. God bless. I am going to enjoy my newfound heat now!