Back into the Breach

A friend living on the Southern Oregon Coast and fan of The Old Crow Book Club educated me how I might proceed trying to help through official channels some of the homeless people in my Coos Bay neighborhood of Empire.

He was certainly knowledgeable about the various non profit and governmental agencies in Coos and Curry Counties tasked with alleviating the crisis of homelessness. He also served on the ground in Gold Beach as a volunteer who assists homeless people clean up their encampments. His hard, unpublicized work inspires me.

Four months had elapsed since moving to Coos Bay from Portland. Since then, I had met a dozen or so homeless people, almost exclusively while walking Elmer in the early mornings on a bay beach adjacent to a boat ramp. I’d chronicled those encounters on previous posts of this newsletter and also learned via cursory research that there was absolutely nothing in place like the vast bureaucratic system in Portland I used to obtain housing for several members of the book club.

I now felt it was time to take action as a concerned citizen and member of my new community. Writing alone wasn’t cutting it anymore and I realized this as my brief observations and interactions with several homeless women became more disturbing.

Woman #1 wore bizarre outfits and I’d seen her doing push-ups on a sidewalk with bloodied eyes. Later, I saw her jogging with a face done up in makeup reminiscent of a Goth rocker and raccoon.

Woman #2 emerged from an encampment, came up to me and Elmer, grunted something after I said hello, then went down on all fours and began playing with the dog as if she was a dog, barking and howling the whole time.

Woman #3 smoked cigarettes while digging in the mud flats. She was not clamming. I asked what she was looking for and she said something unintelligible.

Woman #4 gathered up seaweed washed ashore and stacked it in a pile.

These women were probably in their 20s-40s but it is often impossible to determine the age of homeless people.

Only one of them exuded the facial appearance of hard core methamphetamine or fentanyl abuse. The rest of the faces were utterly vacant.

I am no expert on mental health but it seemed like severe mental illness afflicted these women.

The encampment, once relatively benign when I first discovered it, had recently taken on a decidedly more menacing atmosphere. There was even some evidence that suggested prostitution of at least one of the women.

So what to do because I had to do something? It would be a failure of my humanity to do nothing and many of us battle this terrible dilemma every day wherever we live in the United States when it comes to the crisis of homelessness. What can we do?

It was time to jump into the breach of bureaucracy again, only this time in rural Oregon—a totally different political and cultural climate than Portland when it came to serving the homeless.

My first course of action would be to call the county’s mental health agency. To my astonishment, the call was answered on the first ring. That never happened in Portland whenever I contacted agencies or non profits in similar situations.

I briefly explained to a receptionist my observations/encounters with the women on the beach. Could the receptionist direct me to a staffer that might be able to assist them or tell me who else to contact? I was transferred and my call went to voice mail where a recording informed the staffer was out of the office until a certain date.

That date had been a week ago, meaning the staffer hadn’t changed her voice mail greeting.

I left a brief message and my phone number. Call me anytime. I hung up and wondered if she would return my call.

The next morning I came back inside after performing some home improvement and saw that I had a voice mail. It was the staffer and she would be happy to discuss the situation; she was on the road that day and would try again later. I immediately returned her call, got voice mail, and left a message.

Phone tag continued into the next day but finally we connected and I gave her the lowdown. She listened, asked questions, and provided me with options. What follows are those options with my concerns for each one.

Call 9-1-1 if you sense someone is in danger. That means I’ll have to start carrying my phone on my morning walks. And if I call, do I wait around and direct the police to the woman’s whereabouts? Yes, that would seem necessary. If the police intervene, what do they do? The staffer said all of the local police had received training for people engulfed in a public mental health crisis. Still, the mantra in Portland was: don’t ever call in the cops when a person is having a mental health crisis in public. Call the Street Response Team.

Call the non emergency number for the police. By the time the police responded, who knows where the woman might be. Am I supposed to wait around for hours?

The county did have a center where they admitted people experiencing a mental health crisis. It was approximately two miles from the encampment. The county also had a van that could respond to a crisis and transport the person to the center for intake, assessment and possible courses of action. But the person had to consent to that. From my perspective, these women had no ability to consent to anything whenever I encountered them. They were basically incoherent. Of course I wasn’t a trained social worker so perhaps such a professional knew and could employ strategies to obtain consent. One problem with the van: it wasn’t available until eight in the morning and every incident I’d witnessed had occurred between six and seven.

The staffer said I could attempt to persuade the woman to let me drive her to the center, which had 24-hour access. Well, I was always on foot with a dog. Moreover, there was no way a private citizen should perform such a service. These weren’t situations like shooting victims who needed immediate transport to an emergency room.

Our conversation lasted 20 minutes and the staffer showed remarkable enthusiasm for my concern. I never heard that level of enthusiasm from any Portland area staffer. I liked hearing it.

She told me to call back or even visit the center if I wanted to learn more. Her office was located in that building complex, but she was out in the field a lot, mostly investigating elder abuse.

I thanked her for working so diligently in an impossible job in a shattered nation. She said she was born to do this type of work.

So what to do? I have no idea. It occurred to me that I have no personal relationship with any of the homeless people I encounter in Coos Bay, which was completely the opposite of my experience in Portland. It took a year to build that foundation with members of the Old Crow Book Club. But I did it, built the trust, they became my friends, and they trusted me to help them. We were in it together and eventually met with partial success.

So again, what to do?

For now, keep walking Elmer to the bay every morning, keep alert, and be ready to act when a situation demands it.

As of this writing, I can’t conceive of what that action might look like.

(Postscript: several weeks after my conversation with the social worker, I saw Woman #1 surrounded by police officers, including a tribal agency, on a sidewalk in front of a convenience store. A week after this incident, I saw her back in the encampment.)