Staying alive
A look at the face of homelessness in Durango

Damien Widder, Dargo the cat, and Sunshine Widder, background, smile for the camera at their new home in Three Springs.  After the maximum allowed stay at the Volunteers of America homeless shelter, Damien and Sunshine were tent-bound. They recently found a home through Housing Solutions of the Southwest and were also reunited with Dargo, who spent the winter in the animal shelter./Photo by Stephen Eginoire

by Jeff Mannix

For some, the economy has never been better. Among those, the economy hasn’t been worse, either. In fact, for the population of homeless, economy is rooted not in the financial markets but how long a tent can last, where the next meal will come from or how to keep their kids dressed and clean for school. Economy means frugality to the homeless. It changes from day to day, season to season.

Sunshine Widder is a Durango native who moved with her husband to Oregon in 1993. By 2002 she had an 8-year-old son along with bruises, broken teeth and fear that her husband would someday kill her or their son. She packed a small bag with bare essentials, and along with her son, Damien, a cat named Dargo, and $200, fled an abusive relationship for the unknown. The two arrived by bus in Durango, where she had an ailing mother and an estranged uncle.

“We stayed with my uncle for a while, and a little while with my mother. But I didn’t have a car to find work, tensions were building, and we kept spiraling down until we wound up at the homeless shelter, and Dargo went to the animal shelter,” says Widder.

Volunteers of America runs Durango’s 36-bed homeless shelter, and according to director Sarada Leavenworth, 40 percent of clients are single women with children. With 500 people being served annually, the shelter can only provide emergency lodging for two weeks every six months, one week every three months, or three months’ extended stay in extraordinary circumstances, all subject to available space.

Tent living was OK with Damien, something like a game: “It was cool living by ourselves, seeing all the birds and animals, watching the river go by. But when winter came we got a little cold, and in the summer we got a lot of mosquito bites, and we were sometimes scared about bears and mountain lions and a few strange people we would see.’’

Widder adds that after the first year, Damien was chronically sick during the snowy, winter months, and one summer she counted 72 mosquito and spider bites on him. Widder worked every day cleaning rooms at a North Main motel, saving as much as she could of her minimum wage to rent an apartment or a small house. During severe winter storms, Widder’s motel manager permitted the two to sleep in the laundry room, on the floor, where the hot water heater kept them warm and the smell of soap and clean bedding were a pleasant change from dampness and wet ground. Most of the money she made went toward food, bus fare, and keeping Damien’s few changes of clothes clean and repaired for school. “I just couldn’t get ahead no matter how many hours I worked,” Widder confesses.

The streets hold many secrets for those who call it home, and after a while Widder figured out how to stay alive and keep her son well and in good spirits. Just when life was becoming the bleakest, when their tent had been torn to shreds by a large mountain lion that Widder and Damien saw and cowered from the night before, their names bubbled up on Lora Sholes’ waiting list. Sholes works for Housing Solutions of the Southwest, a nonprofit agency that coordinates transitional housing for families mired in desperation. “Lora literally saved my life,’’ says Widder, “and if it wasn’t for Lora, I can’t even imagine where Damien and I would be now.’’

In March of this year, Sholes placed the Widders in a two-bedroom apartment in Grandview. Rent is being subsidized by Housing Solutions until the U.S. Division of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) can process Widder’s application for Section 8 assistance, which Sholes is confident will materialize.

Sandra Smith, a sociologist with the University of California at Berkeley, was recently quoted in the New York Times saying that “poverty itself can deplete entire social networks, leaving no one to turn to. While the affluent suffer from ‘compassion fatigue,’ the poor simply run out of resources.” Widder got lucky, if you can call inching up from abjection to a new tent to welfare lucky. But for them, this is the best of times. And for Dargo, the cat, he too has survived and is again languidly reposing on the kitchen windowsill, glossy, well-fed and cheeky. The climb is not finished, though. Widder must find steady employment to stay eligible for HUD assistance and provide her son with the tools to join the mainstream. “She’ll do it,” says caseworker Sholes, “I know she’ll succeed.”

Sky King is representative of another face of homelessness. He’s 55 years old and has been homeless for 22 years. You might say he’s career homeless and has worked his way into the white-collar echelon. When spending time in Durango, where he’s been for the past five years, King headquarters at the Manna Soup Kitchen – for lunch, mail, laundry and showers – and would be indistinguishable at a gathering of environmentalists, in his hiking shirt, shorts and hat, and week-old beard. He’s contemplative, sober and uncluttered.

“Cynthia said adiós, and I left,” Sky wistfully recalls of his dissolved marriage, “first going down to the tamarisk bushes by the river in Grand Junction to camp and think things over for a while.” He wound up thinking things over in the tamarisk for six years, realizing that he was master of his fate and would follow the path chosen for him and guided by a higher power. “‘Take chances,’ God said to me, so I took the fence down, threw away the sword and walked with faith that God would do what he said he would do. And he hasn’t let me down,” Sky says with a twinkle in his eyes.

Living with no more than you can carry, and avoiding trouble, predators, killing weather and infirmities takes calculation. Sky King lives up to his sobriquet: clear-eyed, confident, canny and knowing. “I see my life as a staircase – it’s not a straight road, you have to put energy into it,” Sky reflects. “I don’t like being alone – funny, huh? – but you have to be alone to survive out here, so while I don’t have a physical person to be with, I have God as a companion, and we have the same good times and arguments I’d have with any other partner.”

According to King and other local homeless, during good weather, Durango’s foothills are home to an estimated 50 homeless campers, living in arroyos, under bridges, along the riverbanks, in alleyways. Ten or 15 reside year round. “I may go south this winter; we’ll see; it depends on where He directs me.” Questioned further about his conversations with God, King admits that he’s not religious and the voice he hears may be his own. “I came out of religiousness about four years ago,” he concedes. “I’m not working for an employer; I’m working for the one who got me the job. I love the work.”

Being on the road as long as Sky King has been teaches hard-won lessons, King discretely allows. “Alcohol is the big problem out there; about 80 percent of the campers are alcoholics. They’re at war all the time,” he says, “and they’re trouble.” King stays friendly with everyone, but he turns down invitations of companionship. “I have 30 different ways of getting into my camp, and I never take the same route. I pack up all my gear every morning, stash it where nobody can find it, clean up and leave by a different route than I came in,” he says as if it were military intel. “Only a bloodhound could find my camp or my stuff. I don’t reveal it to anyone.”

Sky King likens today’s culture to Babylon, one of the first empire city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, that flourished and decayed from within. “Everyone is in awe of the new Babylon,’’ King says with contempt, “I hate the hypocrisy, the phoniness and the broken-nail attitude. The Mayan calendar predicts an apocalypse in 2012, and they’re going to freak when it happens. Not me; I’m a free spirit.” •