Across the Great Divide

Shelter Report: And Finally the Smell Goes Away, Too.

On my way into town, I take a bike path that loops under both ends of a bridge over the Colorado River.

A solitary man has been spending nights under the east end all winter, buried in a sleeping bag so only the cap on top of his head is visible. A few days ago when I passed by at noon, he was still there and I had to resist the urge to check if he was alive.

His spot is more exposed than the one under the west end I wrote about here. It's much further below the sheltering span and right next to a well-traveled bike path. In the photo, you can see the slightly compacted spot near the fence and his ground cover rolled up and concealed just below the drop to the river bank.

A week ago the bridge reeked of skunk. The smell hit me first as I passed underneath, and the odor remained strong all the way across the river. I couldn't help but think of the man sleeping there, breathing it in all night.

Because he burrowed so deeply, I never saw the man's face when I rode by, but eventually I was able to connect him to the red bicycle he locked to the fence overnight.

I'd seen him at the Day Center before, but didn't know him. He had the florid, phyllo dough skin of a hard drinker and a history of misadventure showed in the tectonics of his face. He kept to himself, slumped in a chair against the wall, far from my station. He usually seemed to be thawing and simultaneously surfacing from a hangover. He didn't make eye contact, and all the other signs said No Trespassing, so I left him alone.

But today after a warm night, he seemed more animated. I heard someone call him Robert. He was at the table nearby, explaining the laws of algebra to Charley, who has having trouble preparing for the math portion of his GED exam.

When I got the chance, I asked Robert if the skunk smell had bugged him.

He didn't recall it being bad. He said there was a skunk that traveled along the fence every night and passed right next to him.

I can't run when I smell it coming, so I just freeze, he said. It's friendly, like a cat. It'll come right up to my face and sniff my nose. It never gives me any trouble.

I told him a car had hit a skunk on the bridge right above him just last week. Now it's just a matted black lump, with no odor at all.

I wondered why it hadn't been by, he said. That's sad, isn't it?

It is.

Shelter Report: Homeless Say Goodbye to the Point.

As spring turned to summer in 2010, three Grand Junction police officers visited a homeless encampment called the Point in search of a copper wire theft suspect.

A railroad trestle provided residents easy but illegal access to the Point. The police, though, parked high above the tracks and descended the steep bluff sheltering the Point and made their way around a bare mound that hid the wooded camp from the downtown side of the river.

What happened next was the beginning of the end of the Point as a decades-old homeless haven.

The cops cut down clotheslines and over-hanging tarps, slashed tents and tossed their contents, and flattened bike tires before climbing back up to their squad cars. Their reports gave no hint of how they'd treated what one officer later called "abandonded property."

Today, this flat triangle of land at the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers is scraped bare of all settlement. Tents, furniture, camp toilets, generators and even CD players and TVs are gone. Fire circles have been scattered. Pallets, propane tanks, porch swings and plastic water barrrels have joined shopping carts, space heaters, sneakers and car seats in dumpsters and recycling bins.

Scrap wood and other waste that wasn't hauled up the bluff was burned in pits where residents used to warm themselves during the winter.

Only flattened footprints of the shelters remain in the barren earth. Before long, there will be no trace of human habitation.

With the spring melt, the dog turds at the end of the beach will wash downstream and the waters around the Point will belong to the kayakers who once coexisted with the unhoused residents—except when the camp pit bulls waded into the shallows after them. 

The dozen or more men, women and dogs who lived here have already dispersed to shelters, other towns or down river, as did others before them. And later this month, Union Pacific Railroad will begin work to make the Point inaccessible and uninhabitable from this day forward.

But there's something I've held back from this picture.

The cops who slashed the tents were fired. The new Police Chief replaced the damaged property and decided his administration would do things differently. He advanced a plan to help the town's hundreds of chronic homeless without making the city more of a destination for transients in search of a friendly situation.

The department established a Homeless Outreach Team (HOT Team) modeled on successful efforts elsewhere in Colorado to reduce policing calls related to the homeless, who account for a disproportionate expenditure of public resources.

The HOT Team focused on connecting people with other resources in the community instead of busting them for warrants outstanding from past offenses. They built relationships, and though they never stopped being cops, their first priority was to serve, whether that meant getting a gallon-a-day drunk into rehab or helping a mentally disabled woman find safe housing.

The street cops added an important link to the soup kitchen, the shelter, the library, the day center, the housing agency, the VA, churches, treatment facilities and community clinics that all shared the goal of reducing homelessness and the pain and pathologies that accompany it.

So when I joined the other volunteers clearing the Point last weekend, I was not part of an eviction proceeding but of a celebration—of an important passage. Some of the people who'd lived there were part of the cleanup as were staff from the homeless shelter, a humanist organization, some religious folks, a great group of college kids and railroad workers.

 The transition off the Point has been relatively trouble-free, but it's not quite as rosy as stories from the very engaged local news media might lead you to believe. Mark Hirschberg, a widely interviewed Point resident, was one whose tent was cut two years ago. He's now staying at the shelter and is volunteering there and at the soup kitchen. But he also plans to move back to the river bottom as soon as the weather warms up. 

Some people love the river and hate walls.

The town always had uneasy relations with the homeless. On one side, a very generous and supportive charitable sector has built a safety net that serves local homeless and attracts others from less benign communities. On the other side, residents fret that the visible begging, petty crime and occupation of several city parks is diminishing quality of life for everyone else. See the comments on this story for a flavor.

That divide will remain in this politically conservative county. But there's no question there are lessons to be learned here about how private charities, government agencies, the media and other community institutions can work together to end homelessness.

Perhaps most striking—a few days after I joined college football players hefting mattresses, plywood and plastic sheeting up that bluff—is that no politicians made big pronouncements about ending homelessness, one way or the other. Political posturing was absent.

People just showed up and did what was needed. And instead of two days of work, we finished virtually everything by noon.

Two former denizens of the Point say goodbye.