Gift of the Oregon Homeless Magi (Part 2)
They gave away one of sedans and moved into the other. They were exploring a rutted logging road one afternoon, dodging potholes, searching for a place to bivouac, away from the frequent chaos that attends homelessness, when James spotted a spur road with a gravel berm blocking the path. Something white-colored and certainly irregular nestled back in the trees caught his eye. He stopped the sedan and they decided to investigate.
It was the Nomad, marooned for almost four decades, surrounded on four sides by thin alders and thin hemlocks. It was almost if nature had erected a fort around it, with palisades to boot!
James and Della bushwhacked around the trailer. Somehow it miraculously was intact from the outside. Not a single broken window. The tires were flat but that hardly mattered. The rig was never moving again.
He opened the door and a blast of mold filled their nostrils. They stepped inside. Not too bad. Minimal interior damage from water. The cabinets remained sturdy. Kitchenware? Check. Plates, glasses and cutlery? Check. Cleaning supplies? Check. Not a single rodent dropping. The propane stove and burners didn’t sport a trace of rust.
James turned on a burner knowing it would never fire. He heard a hiss…then found a box of matches…and…behold! Della clapped. She said it was sign of good luck.
The Nomad needed a significant refit but was livable right then and now. A good union team from the Midwest had built her solid, but never in a million years would they have imagined homeless people would one day make these trailers their domiciles, instead of weekend shelter for Grandpa’s annual drunk hunting excursion. America had a lot more promise back then.
They moved in that very night.
It took three months of labor to restore the Nomad but James and Della loved the work. It was called homesteading.
They replaced all the flooring and then covered it with carpet remnants. They replaced all the curtains and cushions. They caulked every window and coated the roof. They spread multiples tarps over the trailer in tepee-like fashion to better repel the rain.
James built an outhouse that could be moved every month or so; a catchment system from a nearby rivulet that piped water into the rig. He improvised with a second propane tank and car batteries to provide heating and lighting. He built an outdoor fire pit. In due course, James and Della scavenged windfall, stacked the equivalent of 20 cords, and laid wood planking around the Nomad. They spent a lot of time around the pit in the evenings and often said nothing to each other because the forest was talking for them, to them. And the forest’s words made much more sense than the gobbledygook uttered by garden variety therapists stuck inside antiseptic offices.
Virtually everything they needed for restoring the Nomad was gathered at the county dump for free. Whatever else they needed, they found in Gold Beach’s three tiny thrift stores for dollars and sometimes pennies.
At one point, they decided to ditch the sedan and traded it for mountain bikes. James rigged up tiny trailers for them and they began their new new life in the woods.
Their routine, weather permitting, went like this:
Monday: church food bank, library to charge Della’s phone, track her Oregon Trail Card (SNAP) benefits, and communicate with her daughter.
Wednesday: searching for and redeeming cans and bottles, a grocery store run, hit the thrift stores, peruse the book store for $1 Westerns and bodice rippers.
Friday: two beers at Turkey’s Tavern on the Rogue River and five dollars played on the slots.
Saturday: salmon fishing in the afternoon at the North Jetty of the Rogue River.
Sunday: perch fishing in the morning on Nesika Beach and panning for gold at the secret beach at Otter Point.
Every day: foraging in the woods for edible plants and…
Della became an accomplished mushroom hound and during the season, sold lobsters and chantrelles to two local fine restaurants. She earned over a thousand bucks a year this way and saved her mushroom money for an emergency they both surely knew was coming one day.
They kept the magic mushrooms for themselves and dosed every other month, always on the beach, always with a bonfire raging. It wasn’t really their thing. Alcohol was, vodka, a lot of vodka.
James and Della’s routine was sometimes interrupted by the demands of their own handyman business in Gold Beach. When they started bicycling around, they met people, homeowners, mostly senior citizens who had trouble maintaining their decaying residences. James and Della were voluble people in town, and the more curious homeowners took a shine to them, and wanted to help. James and Della cleaned gutters, mowed yards, hacked blackberries, strung Christmas lights, split firewood and walked dogs. They earned cold hard cash and often with a big fat tip. These grateful folks also frequently gifted James and Della with cookies, tools, clothes, DVDs and venison steaks.
What did they do in the evenings in the Nomad? Besides drinking? They read books and played board games and cards. They watched VHS and DVD movies on an ancient dual player. They listened to a radio that somehow captured the signal from the greatest station on the West Coast, Radio Free Humboldt out of Arcata, California. They always went to bed early and rose at first light, hungover or not, usually not.
James and Della did not regularly interact with other homeless people around Gold Beach. Most were benign, some were dangerous or insane. They helped out other homeless when the opportunity arose, and of course, it did all the time. They never revealed where they lived. They didn’t want visitors, at least the human kind. Wildlife was always welcome, especially the American marten who showed up weekly. Della adopted him as her spirit animal. James was partial to the mystic charms of elk.
It was important to them to live lightly on the land. They hauled out their garbage. They didn’t burn what shouldn’t be burned. They knew one day a timber cruiser would come along and probably blow the whistle on their trespassing, and a young man had shown up one afternoon. James and Della befriended him and gifted him with a pound of magic mushrooms and smoked salmon. He never peeped a word. There are still plenty of Americans out there like this.