In the summer of 2024 I drove fourteen hours from my San Diego, California, home to Grants Pass, Oregon, to write about homeless people there. Five years earlier the town of thirty-six thousand had made national news when some of its unhoused residents had sued the city over its no-camping ordinances. The suit had gone all the way to the US Supreme Court. Two months before my trip, the Court had ruled in favor of Grants Pass. The 6–3 decision meant cities everywhere could enforce camping bans, even if there was no other shelter for the homeless. In a conciliatory gesture, Grants Pass went on to designate two homeless camps: one on J Street, in an industrial section of town, and another on Sixth Street, near the downtown police station. These “rest areas,” as the city dubbed them, provided no services or shelter. The stony ground served as a bed.
I’d made arrangements to stay at a Presbyterian church where a formerly homeless woman named Helen worked as a live-in caretaker. She spoke in a sandpaper voice and walked with a demanding strut. Her thick brown hair roiled about her head whenever a strong wind blew. Helen volunteered for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, delivering sandwiches to the camps, and she advocated for the homeless at city council meetings. She’d been a meth addict and a drinker during her own unhoused years. She still drank but had dialed down her intake to a shot of vodka a day instead of a half gallon.
“I call that progress,” she told me.
I’d been a social worker in San Francisco for fourteen years, helping homeless alcoholics enter recovery programs. My clients weren’t perfect, but more than a few of them were no longer homeless either. Most who succeeded in getting off the streets found employment at social service agencies, where they worked alongside other recovering addicts. Among my colleagues I was something of an anomaly, having never faced homelessness nor addiction. I did not share their sense of vulnerability, that something as simple as a drink would unravel their lives. This gave me outsider status, even though I hung out with many of my coworkers after work.
Helen shared a room with a young woman named Jessica, who had dyed-red hair down to her shoulders and wore skintight jeans that emphasized her thin frame. She’d spent time with Helen on the streets and had been addicted to meth, alcohol, and a host of other drugs—but not fentanyl, for which she was grateful. She still smoked pot to keep her sanity, she explained with the rapid-fire delivery of an auctioneer. She could be difficult to understand, and I often asked her to repeat herself.
The morning after I arrived, I followed Helen to the J Street camp. Along the way we stopped at St. Vincent de Paul to pick up sixty ham-and-cheese sandwiches. The camp stood next to a gravel company where crews operated excavators and crushers, and we had to shout above the noise to hear each other. Homeless people milled about among a patchwork quilt of tents and parked cars packed with clothes. Porta-potty doors slammed open and shut, and men and women bummed cigarettes and rinsed their faces with water from plastic bottles. A nonprofit medical team was going around checking on people.
Helen had just started handing out the sandwiches when a van pulled up and a blond woman with a “Trump for President” button pinned to her sweater stepped out. She opened a sliding door to reveal bags stuffed with blouses and pants. Her name was Sandy, she told us, and she’d heard about the camps and thought, Why not give away some clothes I no longer wear? “I’m going to bring men’s clothes tomorrow. These are women’s. You want to take them to somebody?”
“I’ve got my hands full here,” Helen said, offering a sandwich to a man in a jean jacket with no shirt. His ribs showed through his sunken chest. “How many you need?” she asked him.
“Two, for me and my girl.”
“Do you know if anybody would like books?” Sandy asked Helen.
“Probably.”
“How do they get meals?”
“Through nonprofits or on their own,” Helen said.
“Oh. Showers?”
“They don’t supply that here.”
“Cooking?”
“No.”
“What if I were to bring some hot food? I thought of making spaghetti. I’m going to ask neighbors for donations.”
“You can do that,” Helen said.
“All I hear about is drugs and needles.”
“Regardless, they’re still people,” Helen said. “If they had a safe place to live, maybe they’d turn their lives around and get a job. But you can’t go to an interview without a shower and clean clothes.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Sandy replied.
After she’d handed out the sandwiches, Helen left. Sandy remained by her van with a look of consternation on her face, as if trying to absorb everything Helen had said. Then she, too, drove off. I stayed and explored the camp.
A man wearing a baseball cap stood by a tent, staring at the ground, scratching his thick gray beard and toeing the dirt. I told him I was a reporter, and he said his name was Phil and he was looking for his glasses. Inside the tent a woman lay on her stomach, moaning. “She’s not feeling well,” Phil said without much interest. I leaned into the tent and asked if she was OK. In a barely audible whisper she complained of a staph infection in her left buttock. I asked if she had any medication for it, and she shook her head. I went to inform the medical team.
“Oh, we know Rhonda,” the woman said. “We’ll check on her.”
I returned to Rhonda and told her that someone would stop by to help, and she thanked me. Phil continued staring at the ground. “No luck with the glasses?” I asked.
“Nope,” he responded. He said if he was working, he’d just buy another pair. He’d been a heavy-equipment operator in South Dakota for twenty years before getting laid off. He didn’t consider himself homeless so much as unemployed. He’d slept in his truck at first, then sold it and lived in the woods on Devil’s Slide, a mountain on the outskirts of town. That was where he’d met Rhonda, but other homeless people had stolen from them, so they’d left and camped in the city parks until the Supreme Court ruling. Now they were here.
“No one wants to hire a sixty-four-year-old.” It didn’t matter what kind of work, Phil told me. He’d do anything.
I wished him well and continued interviewing people, all with various reasons for being on the street: divorce, health issues, unemployment, addiction. As I went to leave, I noticed a medical worker helping Rhonda to a waiting vehicle. They were taking her to the hospital.
Back at the church, I mentioned Rhonda and Phil to Helen and Jessica. Jessica called Rhonda her “street mother” because years ago Rhonda had let Jessica stay with her at her government-subsidized apartment. Rhonda tended to take in people—and cats, Jessica said. Spending about $150 of her monthly Social Security check on cat food, in addition to supporting her meth habit, had left her broke most of the time.
“Is Phil on meth too?” I asked.
“What do you think?” Jessica replied.
The next evening Jessica asked me to drive her to J Street to see if Rhonda had returned from the hospital. Jessica limped to my car, saying a spider had bitten her foot sometime in the night. It had become swollen. Helen had cut the blister with a knife, disinfected it with vodka, and wrapped it with gauze.
We drove past the dark outline of Riverside Park, one of seven in Grants Pass where the homeless used to stay. Trees stood dark and solitary in the mist, and the few streetlights illuminated the damp grass and a small playground.
At the camp I helped Jessica walk toward the entrance. Residents hustled past, some muttering furiously to themselves. Jessica shouted to a young man that we were looking for Rhonda.
“Oh, shit, that’s a trip,” he said. “I haven’t seen her.” He shook like electrical currents were coursing through his body, his face pale.
“You staying here now?” Jessica asked.
“Barely. I’m just trying to get some dope. You still at the fucking church with Helen?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her I said hey.”
He walked away scratching his arms. Jessica had known him since he was little, she said. He actually looked way better now than the last time she’d seen him.
Faded missing-persons posters hung from a wire fence around the camp. Dogs tied to tentpoles barked at us, and the scattered, firefly light of cell phones flashed on and off. Jessica shouted to one of the members of the medical outreach team, “Dr. Bruce!”
Bruce Murray had been a physician in Grants Pass since the early 2000s, and he’d been volunteering with the homeless since 2021. He had thinning gray hair and a blue shoulder pack with a blood pressure monitor and a first aid kit. He told us Rhonda was at Asante Three Rivers Medical Center. He dialed the hospital’s number and handed his phone to Jessica, who waited while it rang.
Jessica gave Rhonda’s name to the person who answered. “She’s my mom.” (She didn’t specify “street mother.”) “I don’t know her room number. Any way you can transfer me? Thank you.” She waited again. After a while she hung up and returned the phone to Bruce. “She’s probably asleep.”
“She’ll be in the hospital all night at this hour,” Bruce said. “Where will she go afterward?”
“I don’t know,” Jessica replied. “Here, I guess.”
They talked about the difficulty of getting help for Rhonda and how Phil sometimes made it harder: They’d get her into a recovery program, but she’d leave to be with him and start using again.
Jessica and I went back to the church. While Helen prepared a pizza for dinner, Jessica asked if I’d ever been homeless. I said no, but, feeling a little defensive, told her about my years as a social worker. She shrugged. I understood her indifference. Sure, I’d checked people into detox, but I’d never been one of them. One afternoon at my old job, I was working the intake desk when a young woman with a bruised and swollen face walked in. She said she’d been drinking with her boyfriend, and he’d assaulted her. I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, and she said no—she wanted detox. As I took her information, she asked how long I’d been sober. I told her I wasn’t an alcoholic. She thought about that for a moment and then said, “I need to talk to someone who understands,” and she left.
While Helen served the pizza, Jessica wondered aloud if the hospital would refer Rhonda to a housing program.
“That’d be good,” Helen said.
Jessica had been in a court-mandated drug program once, but then she’d started using again and had gotten locked up for thirty days for violating the program’s rules. She didn’t understand the logic of sending someone to jail for messing up one time. “That’s a joke. They should work with that person.” She’d had a lot of sober time before she’d slipped.
One time, Jessica said, while she was using, her parole officer had shown up at her grandmother’s house to make her take a urine test. Jessica had bolted out the back door and hidden at Rhonda’s apartment. Rhonda wasn’t with Phil at the time but some other “piece of crap,” and this dude had a lot of friends living with them. Rhonda would kick them out, but they kept coming back. A few of them had robbed Jessica, and one had attempted to rape her. When Jessica told Rhonda about it, Rhonda didn’t miss a beat. She’d lost a leg in a motorcycle accident years ago—as well as two toes on her remaining foot to frostbite—and now she detached her prosthetic, held it by the foot, and beat the robbers and the would-be rapist with it until they ran out the door.
Eventually Rhonda’s landlord kicked her out for not paying rent and because of all the people she allowed to crash with her. “It was a crappy house anyway,” Jessica said. “But it was better than no house.” Ever resourceful, Rhonda had settled on Devil’s Slide and hooked up with Phil. “He was a real piece of work,” Jessica said. He didn’t do anything but sponge off Rhonda, and Jessica had no time for him. “Why do you think women hook up with worthless guys?” she asked me. I said I didn’t know. “They’re lonely,” she replied. Jessica had had her share of loser boyfriends. She hadn’t seen any of them that way at first, but they’d all kind of become that way. By then, she was stuck. And it’s hard to get unstuck.
The next day I asked Helen and Jessica to show me Devil’s Slide. Homeless people at the J Street camp had mentioned it more than a few times, and I wanted to see it for myself.
Helen said she’d lived on the mountain for five years, having built a round tent near a stream. She’d lay sapling branches over the tent and drape blankets over them to keep warm in the winter. She left notes on trees beside the trail out of her camp—reminders to herself not to forget essentials when she went into town: Do I have enough water? Do I have food? Do I need more blankets? She could live on the mountain again if she lost her room, she said, but it had been at least four years since she’d lived outside. She didn’t know who might be up there and whether it was safe.
Jessica had stayed on the mountain about the same amount of time as Helen. She’d built a shelter from wooden pallets and planted a tomato garden. She loved being able to make do with so little. One time, she said, a deer had approached her with its babies.
After dinner we got our coats—“It gets cold on the mountain,” Helen warned me, “even in the summer”—and piled into her car. We turned on Upper Hill Road and passed through a suburb before Helen parked near dense woods. I followed her and Jessica along a leaf-strewn path to some railroad tracks, the trees closing in behind us. My sneakers slipped on the damp cross ties. Lizards scampered in the grass. A wet wind carried a musky odor.
We hadn’t gone far when Helen and Jessica stepped off the tracks and onto another trail. I followed them into a wide meadow of knee-high grass that brushed loudly against our pants. A dog barked nearby.
“Hello, in the camp!” Helen shouted. “We’re just passing through.”
The dog barked again.
“Who’s that?” a man shouted.
“Helen. I used to live up on this mountain.”
The man told the dog to shut up.
“Is that Glen?” Helen said. “Sounds like Glen.”
“Helen?” He told us to come on up.
Glen wore jeans and a faded green sweatshirt, and he smelled of sweat and woodsmoke. His shaved head bore scars. The black dog beside him looked like a Labrador mixed with another, larger, breed. It growled, the hair raised on its back, and Glen clapped his hands for the dog to be silent.
“My dog gets territorial ’cause he thinks this is his hill, and a lot of people are moving up here,” he explained. “You know Ashley and Caitlin? They moved up here because of what’s going on in town, kicking people off the street.” He said he’d stayed in Riverside Park for eight years and had been on the mountain ever since that Supreme Court decision had come down. “Everybody’s watching everybody now.” One homeless man on the mountain had robbed another of $1,000 worth of rare coins and then taken off. “Might be in Arizona.”
Glen rubbed his face. Dirt was etched in the circles beneath his eyes. Cicadas chewed the air. The dog growled. Glen led us to his camp, where he shone a flashlight at a rectangular hole he’d dug in the side of the mountain. “I scraped this out with a pickaxe,” he said proudly. Within was a cot and a jumble of pots and pans hanging from the dirt ceiling. Heaps of blankets on a torn couch. The odor of damp earth. A blanket served as a door; Glen hoped to put up a wooden one someday.
He showed me a chair straddling a hole, its seat carved out to make a toilet. Across from it was a pile of ash ringed by stones—the cooking area. He’d been on the mountain for two months, on the street for about ten years. He blamed his kids: Pretty much every time he found a decent job, they harassed his boss to get him fired. They resented him for divorcing their mother, he said, and accused him of keeping her away from them. But really, he insisted, she was busy partying and wanted nothing to do with them. Before she went nuts on meth, they’d had some good times. He’d bought a home for $424,000, had a nice job in a plywood mill, but their divorce had sucked him dry. Now he worked odd jobs—digging ditches, dishwashing, whatever. He just needed a truck and a chainsaw to make real money cutting firewood. He figured a used pickup would run him $1,000. Power saw, maybe $600. He’d saved $1,100, hidden under his cot, but someone had stolen it. Now he wouldn’t keep money in his camp anymore. He hoped to come off the mountain in six to eight months.
The dog growled, and Glen told him to shut up. I hoped his plan would succeed, though I doubted it.
Helen wanted to visit her old camp, downhill from Glen’s. We sidestepped our way down, grabbing branches to keep our balance. At the bottom was a shallow creek. A mattress heaped with wet blankets lay among discarded tents, sleeping bags, and rusted tin cans. Helen pointed out a collapsed outhouse she’d built. She’d washed dishes and clothes in the creek and burned her trash nearby. An old car grill was where she used to dry her laundry by a campfire, careful not to let a stray spark set the woods ablaze.
“Someone came here after me,” Helen said, considering her camp. “They left their shit and bounced.” We stepped around torn sacks of garbage as she wondered aloud what had happened to an ice chest she’d buried to keep food cold. “I never got the place set up the way I wanted, not all the way,” she said.
As we hiked back uphill, Glen shouted goodbye, then yelled at his dog. The wind picked up, and I heard the flapping wings of birds we could barely see, their small bodies darting above us.
We stopped to catch our breath. “If I was in town late, and I came back here in the dark,” Helen said, “I’d act all crazy, jumping around and talking to myself so nobody would mess with me. There could be some creepy people up here. One time a guy pulled a gun on a man I shared my camp with. He said he was looking for wind chimes. Know what wind chimes are? Child molesters.”
“I just learned that,” Jessica said.
“My friend said, ‘I ain’t no fucking wind chime,’ and punched him.”
Helen said the cops used to wait for people to come off the mountain and then line them up and check them for warrants. There was no way to avoid them. If you lived on the mountain, you had to come into town sometimes for supplies.
The next morning at J Street camp, the sun burned through a lingering haze. I saw no sign of Phil, but Rhonda was inside her tent, sorting through clothes. I asked how she was feeling.
“I’m OK,” she said in a faint voice. She’d gotten out of the hospital that morning.
They’d given her a prescription for antibiotics, but the Walmart where she could get it filled was too far to walk. She rummaged through the pockets of a pair of jeans. “You seen Phil?” she asked. I said I hadn’t. “He has my food-stamp and ATM cards. I have direct deposit for my Social Security. At least he didn’t take my phone. I had it with me, or he probably would have.”
I asked why he had her food-stamp and ATM cards.
“He asked for them, and I gave them to him. I don’t know why. Not smart of me, I know.” She pointed vaguely toward another tent. “The lady over there said he left out of here.”
I offered to get the prescription filled for her. She looked to be about my age, sixty-five. She had probably made more bad choices than any one person should, but she wasn’t a bad person—she was an addict like all of my former clients. I was in a position to help.
After I dropped off the prescription with her, I returned to the church and found Helen mopping the kitchen floor and Jessica wiping countertops. I told them about Rhonda. Helen cursed and stopped mopping. The camp was no place for someone with a staph infection, she said. She began texting people she knew through her advocacy work to ask them to put Rhonda in a motel for a few nights.
By evening she’d scored a motel room: An attorney who’d represented the homeless plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case had agreed to pay for three nights. Helen left to run errands while Jessica and I went to pick up Rhonda. We would meet back up at the motel.
As we drove away from the church, Jessica worried she wouldn’t be allowed on the motel grounds: The manager lived with her ex, and a few days ago in town the manager had gotten in Jessica’s face, screaming and calling her a whore. The cops had shown up. “Who does that chick think she is?” Jessica said. When she told her ex, he just laughed.
When we got to Rhonda’s tent, Jessica said, “Knock, knock. Helen call you?”
“I can’t believe she got me a motel room,” Rhonda said. She sat cross-legged by three plastic bags stuffed with clothes. A black roller suitcase stood beside a drooping potted plant.
“Your plant’s dying. Want to take it with you so it survives?” Jessica asked.
“No,” Rhonda said. “I’m embarrassed my tent is such a mess.”
“You should see our place,” Jessica said. “Get your purse. Don’t forget your phone.”
Rhonda leaned on the suitcase and got to her feet. I helped her with the bags.
“Think you have enough stuff?” Jessica asked.
Rhonda laughed. “I think so.”
At the motel, I left Jessica and Rhonda in the car and met Helen in the office. The receptionist smiled at me, so I assumed she wasn’t the woman who’d cussed out Jessica. Helen got the key card, and I got the bags and followed her to the room. It had a neatly made bed and brown vinyl flooring. A refrigerator and a microwave took up one corner. Hangers hung in an open closet.
Rhonda stood in the doorway, her mouth open. “Thank you,” she said.
“We’ll bring you some food to heat up,” Jessica said.
“It feels weird to be inside.”
“You were inside at the hospital,” Jessica pointed out.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t alone.”
“We’ll visit,” Helen said. “You only have three days. Enjoy it.”
Outside, I heard a car pull up and kids clamber out, asking if they could get in the pool.
Rhonda told us she’d canceled her cards, but Helen promised we’d find Phil anyway. “We’ll try Grandpa Mark. Phil hangs out with him a lot.”
“Grandpa Mark has a place?” Rhonda asked.
“Yeah, across from the Dollar Tree,” Jessica said.
“He got a Section 8 voucher,” Helen added.
Rhonda hugged Helen and Jessica. She hugged me too.
“Thank you for caring,” she said.
At the Dollar Tree on Sixth Street, cigarette butts and old gum littered the cracked pavement. People sat in cars with rust spots painted with primer. A man in a faded jacket and torn jeans walked out of the store holding a shopping bag.
“Grandpa Mark!” Jessica shouted.
“What are you girls doing here?” he asked.
“You seen Phil?” Helen said.
“No. Not for a good minute.”
“He took Rhonda’s food-stamp and ATM cards. We need to find him.”
Grandpa Mark set his bag on the hood of Helen’s car and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Can’t remember the last time I got with Phil,” he said. Helen and Jessica saw someone they recognized across the parking lot and went to talk to him. I slouched against the car and introduced myself.
“Those two girls know everyone on the street,” Grandpa Mark said. He asked where I lived. San Diego, I told him. “Oh,” he said, “the big city.”
He’d grown up in Orleans, California, a town of just under a thousand people, not far from the Oregon border. His mother had raised him; she was his everything. As a teenager he hitchhiked from state to state and would call her when he ran out of money. She always bought him a bus ticket. He lived on the streets for more than twenty years before a social worker helped him get an apartment two months ago. He pointed to a row of dirty white buildings with red doors across the street. “That’s where I live now,” he said. He couldn’t sleep worth a damn the first few nights—too quiet—so he’d opened the windows to hear the sound of traffic.
Grandpa Mark figured he could become homeless again. He told me he still dreamt about the streets, still had friends out there. Like a soldier home from war, he didn’t know how to talk to people who didn’t share his experiences. So he hung out with homeless people. He’d met Jessica through Fingernail Polish Kenny, her old man at the time. Grandpa Mark didn’t know why Kenny wore polish. He knew Helen from Devil’s Slide, where he’d lived for three or four years in a four-foot-by-four-foot shelter made from pallets and layered with cardboard to keep out the wind and the bugs. For years he’d lived in the parks. Drinking had something to do with his homelessness, he figured, especially after his mother died. He felt lost, and guilty for not looking after her in her later years. He ate food he found in dumpsters. Was never much of a thief. Didn’t like taking things that didn’t belong to him, he said. He felt his mother watching him anytime he considered it. He knew other homeless people who stole, however, because they thought they had to or because they were having a spell of bad luck.
Grandpa Mark said pretty much everyone on the street knew he had a place now, and many of them would stop by to take showers and wash clothes. Sometimes items went missing from his closest. Grandpa Mark brushed it off. He let people use his apartment because they were company. He grew quiet, crossed his arms. The sky had turned gray, and a penetrating wind had begun to blow. A car pulled up, and a hunchbacked old man got out.
“Cat Man, how you doing, ol’ buddy?” Grandpa Mark said. “How many cats you feeding?”
“I don’t know. Three maybe on Washington Boulevard. Four here.”
Cat Man opened his trunk, revealing sacks of cat food. He scooped a cupful into a bowl and walked behind the store, where I presumed four cats waited for him.
Helen and Jessica wandered back.
“Who were you talking to?” Grandpa Mark asked.
“Davey. Remember him? He used to stay in Riverside Park,” Jessica said.
“Yeah, he couldn’t catch a break,” Grandpa Mark said.
“He’s been up at the Travelodge for a year. Working. Looking really good.”
“You still with Kenny?” Grandpa Mark asked.
“No. He did rehab. He’s clean now.”
They stared at the traffic racing by on Sixth Street, headlights sweeping the sidewalk. Parents wandered in and out of the Dollar Tree, their squalling children trying to keep up with them. Grandpa Mark suggested we go over to his place. I waited for Helen and Jessica to mention Phil again, but they didn’t. The knee-jerk impulse to find him and presumably mete out punishment—or, at the very least, a verbal tongue-lashing—had passed to this moment where we’d follow Mark to his apartment and whatever drama might await us. Except there was no we.
“See you later, Malcolm,” Helen said.
I wasn’t offended. She, Jessica, and Grandpa Mark reminded me of expats gathered together in a foreign country, secure in their commonality among people who had no understanding of them, and in the knowledge that, for now at least, they had a roof over their heads, but for how long, I doubted they could hazard a guess.
“See you,” I said.
I watched them cross the street. I thought of Rhonda safe and asleep in a motel filled with overnight travelers as transient in their own way as her. And I thought of Phil, too, out there somewhere.
I got in my car.
