Cold no more 

This morning, my outdoor thermometer read 21F. The dog’s water, in a 15-gallon galvanized tin washtub, was frozen solid. Little snow remained, a skiff here and there; most of it had been pushed eastward by the unrelenting wind.

At this elevation, solar gain is substantial, so by the time I left for work, the temperature on the sunny side of the house had climbed to nearly 40.  I wore a fleece jacket, knowing I’d probably carry it home this afternoon, or possibly regret not wearing a ski coat if the wind and the snow really kicked up.

Four blocks north of my house, there’s a church. Between the sidewalk and the wall are a row of bushes and a partially hidden space. The west-facing red-brick wall holds the heat well into the night, and most mornings last summer, when I walked past at 7:30, the three men who slept there were just beginning to stir.  In the late afternoon, on my way home, I’d see their bedrolls tucked neatly into a corner. Sometimes they asked for money; sometimes I brought them breakfast.

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These are among the men we call the “park rangers,” because they’re so often visible in the public parks, sleeping, drinking, panhandling.

Technically, most are not homeless. They have large extended families. Some of those families have asked them not to bring their problems home, but many "camp" here because the reservation is dry and the border towns are not.

Outsiders who see them — begging, stumbling, passed out — want to assign blame. There are plenty of targets —long-ago participants in the westward movement that made a former way of life impossible, architects of the reservation system and the “Indian schools,” liquor-store owners who profit, the lack of effective treatment programs, and the men themselves, caught by a combination of choice and circumstances that do not encourage alternatives to that choice. There are others here who will be glad to speak to all those failings. Those are not my issues. Mine are more immediate.

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Toward the end of August, someone complained, and one morning I found the bushes trimmed back  and the bark chips replaced by gravel. I inquired of the pastor, who said that elderly female parishioners attending evening events had been fearful — not entirely unreasonably, because the men sometimes entertained themselves by feinting at people who expressed fear or distaste. The last straw had been when they lit a small fire.

“We contribute generously to homeless ministries,” the pastor said, “but I can’t have them endangering people I’m responsible for.”

In our community, our local emergency shelter operates during the “cold months” between Oct. 15 and April 15. It is funded almost entirely by churches like the one north of my house. By early spring, the money always runs out, and clergy get pleading phone calls. We do what we can to balance the needs of the shelter with other ministries, including a food pantry, a domestic violence shelter, a child sexual abuse program, detox facilities, literacy efforts, a day-labor center, and keeping our own doors open so that the contributions to fund those ministries don’t dry up. We serve on boards. We do hands-on work. We write grants and hold bake sales, wash cars with our youth, try to stretch our own tithes.

Four weeks have passed since April 15, and this year they’ve been four weeks of cold, snowy, windy weather. Clothes never dry, and the wind is a worse threat because it can dissipate body heat so quickly.

For the past few days, the men have been back in the sheltered corner beside the church. The pastor will ignore them until someone complains, but someone will. One of the men is incontinent; as the weather warms, the little nook will begin to smell. The summer tourist season is about to begin, and that results in more alcohol being available to these men. One of them will, soon enough, expose himself, jokingly grab at someone’s ankle, or become a  little too forceful in his panhandling. The police will come, give him a night in jail to warm up, shower and collect some clean clothes. They’ll offer him a ride home, and when he refuses, they’ll tell him to move on. He will, amiably enough, wandering out in to the sage to squat in one of the little communities of appliance boxes and discarded furniture. The “owners” will keep him for a few days, maybe help him scrounge some furnishings of his own, and then boot him out. No matter; the sagebrush is nearly endless, and the town itself offers plenty of little hidden corners.

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This morning, as I walked by, two of the men were trying to wake the third. As I approached, they progressed from nudging him with their feet to kneeling beside him, shaking his shoulders. I watched them set his half-empty bottle carefully aside. I watched as they rolled him into his back — watched one arm swing limp across his body and slide to the gravel.  By then I was close enough to have no doubt that he was dead. A trail of frozen saliva broke free from his face and shattered on the ground. I watched their faces as they began to understand.

His companions’ next thought was to get away, lest they be blamed. That’s what we do around here: We point fingers. I knew they were far from anonymous or difficult to find, and that this wouldn’t be a crime that involved “suspects.” When they fled, they took his blankets and his bottle, and they looked longingly at his Carhartt vest.

Maybe he died of exposure. Contrary to prevailing local mythology, alcohol is not particularly effective as human antifreeze. The reason more people don’t freeze to death is that during the six months when the shelter is closed, the weather really doesn’t get that cold. When it does, people die.

Maybe he died of acute alcohol poisoning. Chronic drinkers build up a tremendous tolerance for alcohol, multiples of the level at which they’re considered legally drunk.

Maybe his liver failed, or his kidneys, or any number of other organs.

We’ll probably never know. It’s possible, I guess, that when the coroner peels off his nearly-petrified clothes, a knife wound will become visible, but real violence among that group is rare. More than likely, the coroner will wash him off and release his body to his family without probing further, because regardless of the immediate cause of his death, we all know what killed him: his “lifestyle.”

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When the police came, they asked me his name, just to double-check. Our information matched, and I felt justified in asking a question of my own: How old was he?

His hair, under the dirt, was nearly white. His skin had been thickened by years of drinking cheap liquor, mouthwash, cough syrup and “ocean water” — water through which hair spray has been bubbled. He spent very little time indoors, so the lines on his face were deep.

He was 37.