Homeless

I was having difficulty writing about my homeless experiences previously, but no one reads this, so fuck it.

I used to have a friend that was from a wealthy family. He needed me as a friend at the time, and he took pity on me, so would help me out when I was in a tight spot. He saw me go from a college student to a tech guy to a medical engineer to a tow truck operator to nearly homeless. 

The problem is, during my time wrecking, and presumably all my life, I managed to ruin my joints. I always had bad joint pain, and had a bad back and some muscle pain since I was a teen. I was poor and couldn't afford treatment, so resigned to suffering most of the time as I grew up and went through college and kept it up as a habit as I was older. I have to take a lot of pain killers and anti inflammatories to get through the day. The point of this is, when you have bad arthritis, you are rather limited to what sort of work you can do, and for how long you can do it. This is the sort of thing employers don't really care so much about, or want to see. So you have to hide it with alcohol or drugs. But that doesn't last long. Eventually you will miss too many days or you will simply be unable for the work. I tried to do some forestry and some arborist work because the certs were easy to get, I had a knack for it, and I loved it. But that work also tore my body apart. Today I can not kneel, or raise my arm much over my head, or lift much etc etc. I am basically crippled. But I really did this to myself. I should have stayed at a desk job at all costs. Anyways, that part of the story is boring. I'll go on to the homeless part. I just wanted to explain how people become homeless, even if they appear to be 'normal'.

So back to the wealthy friend. He was fine with giving me a few bucks here and there since I had no family and no means of income. At first, it was just enough to get by to help me as I returned to the US after losing my job back in Ireland. But this was during a global down turn. There were no jobs, and definitely none for a cripple. I was given barely enough to fuel a truck and go to another state in search for work. One day I literally begged him as I was sat in a pickup at a truck stop in the freezing cold if I could borrow enough to get a cheap room to rent and feed myself and maybe rent a room for a month to try and set myself straight. It was too much to ask. I was given the money, but then was told not to ask for anything else. I don't blame him. If I were in his position, I might have done the same thing, feeling like I was being taken advantage of.

I spent the cash doing a repair on the pickup because it had just began to act up, bought some canned and cured foods, some water, a tiny gas camping stove, some warmer clothing and equipment.  I had very little left over.

A man named Ron had promised me a job in Washington. I was fortunate the work began shortly after I arrived in the state.  It was planting trees and picking seeds and conifers. It was back breaking work even for a young person. I did 3 weeks before I started to flag badly. I was on about 3200mgs of ibuprofen a day near the end. I got through the planting at about the time my knees gave out pushing those shovels in to the earth. The good man who hired me said he had some other work for me, but I had to purchase some materials to get the job done since it was quite a bit more involved. I just didn't have the cash, and he paid monthly, so I wouldn't see anything from the work I did for him for weeks. I had already taken enough advantage of him by him putting me up in a hotel to do the job I was currently doing. I thanked him and honestly thought it would happen when I told him once I was paid that I would come back and do some more planting for him. We shook hands and went our separate ways. I never saw him again.

By this point, I had maybe $30 to my name. I would have to wait until the money from the planting came in before I could do anything at all, including move my truck. Fuel was well over $3/gallon at the time. So, I took out a map, an actual paper map, and I looked at my options for where I could camp. I started by staying a night here and a night there in various logging roads not far from a local river so I would have water. But at such a high altitude near where my last work was the nights were a bit rough. I should have stayed put, but I also want some internet access to search for other jobs maybe, and catch up with the news etc. I hadn't seen or heard anything of the outside world in nearly three weeks. That meant something like a truck stop with a Starbucks or a McDonalds etc. They would have a cheap shower I could use. I hadn't showered properly in weeks.

I found a Pilot truck stop on the map close enough I could reach it on what fuel I had in the truck. Still, it was a couple of hours way. It would put me near Olympia after midnight if I left right away. Ron said he had a job near there in a few weeks time, so it seemed like the right destination. I opened a can of pork&beans and had it with a piece of bread. It taste about the same whether hot or cold. So I didn't bother to heat it this time. I packed up all my trash in to a shirt I had ruined with all the sap from picking cones, and dunked it into a dumpster outside a restaurant in White Salmon, the town just below where we were working.

It was nearly midnight when traffic came to a stop on I5 well outside of Olympia. Judging by all the lights up ahead, it looked to be a bad traffic accident. The minutes eventually became hours. Eventually, traffic started moving, but they ended up diverting us off the freeway. I had no idea where I was and was soon lost. I was so tired and my leg muscles were beginning to cramp, I had to pull over and stop. I found a road to turn on that seemed a bit out of the way maybe. I only saw a scant few houses around, and one end of the road looked a bit industrial with trucks on it, so I decided to try and blend in and stay the night.