Gift of the Oregon Homeless Magi (Part 1)

James and Della lived in the Oregon woods. To be precise, they lived in a Nomad (brand name) travel trailer a logging outfit abandoned in the 80s after clearcutting the living hell out of the hills above a remote stretch of beach on the Southern Oregon Coast. To be precise, that beach was called Nesika after a long vanished Native American tribe.

As to what owned this plantation of private Douglas fir forestland where the Nomad forever surrendered its identity as a nomad, take your pick of private equity firms with headquarters in far flung metropolises run by factotums who had never stepped foot in a forest their entire lives but nonetheless liquidated them with nothing more than a tap on a phone.

In other words, James and Della were squatters and technically homeless, but one look inside the Nomad and you would see they had made a simple, warm, cheerful and utterly ingenious home for themselves from everything discarded by people who had everything except simplicity, warmth, cheer and ingenuity.

One decade from now, a crew of robots would lay waste to the plantation or, before then, a wildfire would incinerate the watershed, but James and Della would be long gone by then although we have no idea how their fate would unfold. Let us believe it turned out well because they had each other and trusted their love and the kindness of Oregonians.

Never underestimate the kindness of Oregonians when it comes to the homeless. This writer could write a book about this.

Let’s keep this tale in the present day: Christmas Eve has arrived and now let us visit their domicile and its appointments and surroundings this magical time of year; let us glimpse the life James and Della had forged in the midst of Oregon’s and America’s crises of homelessness.

James and Della were in their late 30s or 40s and met in the parking lot of a Brookings ecumenical church that served a hot meal to the homeless every weekday. That is until the Brookings City Council shut it down declaring human compassion violated a city ordnance. At the time of their meeting, James and Della were living out of their dilapidated, duct taped sedans from the 90s and cruising up and down Highway 101 on the Southern Oregon Coast, hanging on, keeping to themselves, parrying desperation, waiting for fortune to turn.

It did in the parking lot.

For James, Della was a special woman who embodied a line from an Isak Dinesen tale in Seven Gothic Tales: “I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.”

Della had been up on broomstick many times, even upside down, but that ended the moment she met James.

As for what James sparked in Della, a line from a James Cain novel says it all: “A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back.”

She saw his smile sitting across from him in the church basement while eating road kill elk and a green bean casserole and she was never going back.