To Be Homeless

         Mainly, the most interesting thing that ever happened to me was living as a homeless person for 6 months. It began in the summer of my 9th year, in 2001, when my family numbered 10. My brother Jackson was a baby then, so he doesn’t remember, but he learned to walk amidst cactuses and lobelia bushes, on the uneven terrain of the Arizona desert. Yet, although he can’t remember it now, he was once a homeless child. Now, I suppose that the term homeless is better suited to the dirty, shabbily dressed 40-something people that one sees standing around a fire in a barrel, but when you have no fixed address, what else can you call yourself?

         My mother and father were always very religious and spiritual during my childhood. As my parents saw it, when God speaks, you listen. God told them to sell their home, buy a motorhome, and live in the desert of southern Utah and Northern Arizona. So they did. The next few months were part of God’s plan for us. It was our pathway to enlightenment. Or, at least, that is how I understood it at the time.

         When we first set out, we lived more like perpetual campers than homeless people. Having never been homeless people, we weren’t quite certain of the proper approach. We bathed considerably more often than is customary, each night being covered in either oxidized red dirt from the sandy earth of Saint George, or the yellowish gypsum of Black Rock, AZ. Free showers in KOA campgrounds couldn’t come often enough, as far as we were concerned. We didn’t beg, strictly speaking, in fact, we had all of the necessities of life, as long as our money lasted.

         Being only 8 years old, I remember playing at every possible opportunity. There were many opportunities on the road to the Promised Land. I played in giant pine forests, heaps of volcanic boulders, winding dry riverbeds, and open, grassy fields. Each new place was a new playground. I remember making up games to suit the exhilarating terrain. The giant pines were pirate ships, tossing in the wind of an ocean storm, and we were the loyal shipmates, climbing the mainmast and taking in the sails to save our beloved ship from certain disaster at the bottom of the deep. The forests of the Pine Valley Mountains were deep and quiet, with thick carpets of dry pine needles to muffle our childish seafaring distress calls amid fits of laughter. Every night while we were there, my mom read us a story from the scriptures, and we had several family prayers. My parents used to go for a walk after dinner, and we knew that they were praying for direction from God. When he told them something, we drove to a new place.

         There is an 80’s fantasy movie called The Neverending Story. In one of my favorite scenes, Atreyu, the young hero, rides his horse through a montage of fantasy landscapes, and stops now and then to rest and look at the dazzling scenery. That’s how I remember much of those six months. I can picture flashes of breathtaking landscapes and a few highlights from our time spent there, but just as the movie’s viewers might wonder if Atreyu suspected the approach of the dark creature, I wonder now if I ever suspected how the story would end.

         We came and went as we pleased, being in no hurry to get to our destination. God would get us there in his own due time. We stopped by Cove Fort, on occasion. Not to see the fort, but to buy wooden spinning toys and to climb the trees. Cove fort has small, well-pruned deciduous trees planted in rows. There was never fruit on them when we were there, but we weren’t interested in the orchards for their own sake. Our pet dragons lived in the orchards. They ate the patches of reddish crab grass from the lawns, and came at our calling. We could climb onto their backs and fly away on a gust of wind. We used to ask to visit cove fort long after that stage of the journey, because, as we children established, our dragons might get lonely and fly away.

         We spent much of the fall in Pine Valley and near the Kolob Fingers national monument in Zion’s national park. The Kolob fingers are a group of five giant boulders, each jutting out of a hillside in a pattern that exactly resembles an open-palmed, human hand. We camped near the monument, and each morning when we looked out the windows of our motorhome, the sun’s rays would shine onto the red sandstone pillars, and it looked like the hand of God.

         The first big snowstorm of the winter saw us camping on the roadside near Cedar City. The dirt there is good, old-fashioned brown dust, covered in smashed beer bottles and clay ducks. Bullet casings and roadkill abound. We sheltered safely inside our motorhome as the storm billowed outside, and slept, comfortably insulated by a layer of the snow. When we awoke, several feet of snow had fallen, and as we soon discovered, there was too much snow to permit traction for our tires. Up till now, we had always called the motorhome “the motorhome.” Now we called it “big ol’ bucket of bolts.” Through the windows, we saw more than one car slip and slide down the freeway and into a snowdrift, and watched them struggle back onto the road to get on their way. One car was unable to move their vehicle, and had someone come pick them up, and they left the car in the snowdrift. The roads didn’t get shoveled for at least a day and a half afterwards.

         It was the unfortunate fate of our motley crew that we all caught a strain of the flu during the few days prior to the storm, and now that we were snowed in, we were contained to the interior of the same 30-some-odd foot long vehicle in our misery. We got along fairly well for the first few days, until we used up the last bit of our water tank. We melted snow from the roof (being the cleanest source, not contaminated by roadkill), in our largest pots, both for cooking and washing hands and dishes. For six days, we sat stuck in the mud and ice, and each day, our father and oldest brother dug and packed down more snow as it fell, and put boards in front of the tires. On the sixth day, we finally pulled out of our rut and got back on the road. When we looked back, we saw four muddy guage marks in the earth, and the sorry stains of our sick water poured out on the snow. I’m glad to never have seen that place again.

         Only in Cedar City and the surrounding area of southern Utah are there snowstorms and frozen roads. Further down I-15 you find only rain and the occasional sprinkle of snow, never enough to kill the palm trees or to frost the grasses. It was in Saint George that we soaked up the last rays of warm summer sun before it became rainy and windy. Saint George was magical. It was the place that we always went for vacation—who knows why, except that my dad loves it there. Something about the air, something about the red dirt and the palm trees. We loved it there, too.

         The first place we always went to in Saint George was the park. I couldn’t tell you the address, but I could find my way there from my childhood memory of it. There’s a big, Frisbee, soccer and baseball lawn, with big, tall shade trees, and a playground fit for a king. It may not have been something so special, but I always remember it as the best playground in the world. It had circus animals with saddles, each on rocking springs. It had slides and swings and a teeter-totter (why don’t they make those anymore?), but best of all, it had a Chimney. There was a cement patio area fenced in by a 2-foot, stone and mortar wall, with a big, wide fireplace at one end. The fireplace was just big enough for a couple of kids to crawl inside and shimmy up the chimney, and poke out their heads to look down on the world. I had never been covered in soot before, mainly because I had never been in a chimney before, but at this point I didn’t much care, because I had climbed a chimney, just like Santa Clause. Mother put her foot down, of course, and forbade us ever to climb into that filthy, dangerous fireplace again, but as I said, the memory is magical.

         That winter, we met the Windsors. They were related to us, somehow, though we had never met, and they lived in Saint George. Their daughter and grandsons lived with them, and we spent thanksgiving at their house. I had a little crush on the oldest grandson. They took us for picnics at the park, sometimes. I remember watching the video recording of Cats! the musical at their house for the first time. I found the story boring, in fact I can’t remember it, but I vividly remembered the set, the costumes and the characters’ faces ever afterward. When I remember that movie, I always think of myself as a little girl, longing to be a cat, playing cats with my sisters beneath the giant walnut tree in the Windsors’ back yard.

         Now that we were staying in Saint George, we picked a different campsite near the edge of town at night, and came into the city during the day. We camped in a campground a few times, but we also often camped in a parking lot or on the side of the road. We still had money, then, and we often went to fast food restaurants for the odd lunch or dinner. There’s this Arctic Circle restaurant where we would sometimes buy ice cream that we particularly enjoyed visiting. For some reason, now I can never  remember what it was, if I ever knew, my father and mother would spend such a seemingly long time doing other things while the kids waited in the car or the motorhome. We liked it best when they left us parked near Arctic Circle. Someone had painted a huge mural along the inside of the cinderblock fence around the edge of the parking lot. There were fantastic forest and ocean scenes, with the scene changing from one section to the next. We played I Spy. Whatever our parents were doing, I remember playing a lot of games in the car.

         We were always excited to go the grocery store and the Laundromat. We had a radio in the motorhome, and we liked to listen to Avril Lavigne’s latest songs. The Laundromat was all kinds of interesting, because we had never seen the inside of one before. We looked for quarters in and under the washing machines, so we could buy a handful of chiklets or play street fighter. My mom wanted us to stay in the motorhome, but we got antsy, so she had us “help” with the laundry. We liked washing the sleeping bags, especially the giant cloth ones that we zipped together for the kids’ bed. The washing machines looked so huge, and we wanted to climb into them, but of course, we weren’t allowed. We entertained ourselves by watching the giant sleeping bags tumble in the suds.

         Grocery shopping usually entailed buying bread at a small bakery, where we bought the day-old bread and bagels, and sometimes my dad bought powdered sugar doughnut holes or poppyseed muffins, our favorites. My mom always bought whole-wheat bread, and sometimes she baked lovely bread and rolls in our little oven in the motorhome. It felt much more like home when there was the smell of fresh bread wafting through whichever parking lot.

         We went driving in the car almost every day for a while. Driving seemed to be the preferred method of waiting for God’s guidance and direction. I counted Joshua trees to pass the time, although there were no Joshua trees if you went too far north. I was always happy to see one, because it meant we were in the warm zone, close to Saint George. Once, we drove through a Joshua tree forest in the Arizona or Nevada desert. I tried to count them, but I stopped somewhere in the thousands. We sang church songs and prayed while we drove. Our parents left us in the car a lot, and I suppose they were praying or looking at houses. Meanwhile, the kids spent hours and hours playing I Spy, Yes & No, and 20 questions.

         No memory of the motorhome is more starkly etched in my brain than the first time we visited Black Rock, Arizona. My dad saw it on the road map, and we went out to survey the area. There is only one structure to be seen in Black Rock, Arizona. It’s a broken-down, wooden shack with boarded-up doors and windows, and a chain-link fence partially surrounding it. At one time, it may have been a utility building. I can’t think of any other reason to build something in that neck of the woods.

         I remember that it was a cool, overcast evening when we first arrived. We camped in a big gravelly clearing next to the shack—don’t ask me why we didn’t avoid that creepy thing. We built a huge pile of tumbleweeds and lit them on fire. There were huge tumbleweeds out there, some as big as a half-grown juniper tree. And tumbleweeds light ablaze like a dry Christmas tree.

         Those days seemed like they ought to have been dull. There was nothing but desert plants and rocks out there in the wild, and I only had three toys: a green care bear missing the nose, a white teddy bear in blue pajamas, and a blonde dolly whom I dressed in pink. I had left the others in storage after we sold the house—I only took my favorites. I remember that I slept with those toys every night, and took them out sometimes when I played in the desert. We made up a lot of games.

         In the big clearing, we drew giant mazes and house blueprints with long sticks. We made the mazes and the houses bigger every day, and soon, we each had our own “house,” although we mainly played in my sister Jessica’s house, because she was the oldest, and hers was the best. I filled my room with a four-poster bed, a dresser, chairs, a table, and doll furniture. We played house.

         The house games became more elaborate as time went on. Whenever it rained, our houses washed away, and we had to start over again. So, we got smart and lined the whole thing with small, white pebbles. We never destroyed these, although they have washed away since those days.

         We camped in that clearing for something like a week, and then we moved to another one, further from the freeway. We tearfully said goodbye to our homes and quickly got to work replicating them in the new area. This time, we got a little distracted with delightful shiny bullet casings with which we made loud whistling calls, at different pitches, according to the caliber. We found broken clay ducks, which I thought were plates, not ducks, but someone explained that they only serve the purpose of ducks for hunting games, they don’t look like ducks. But, I carefully treasured the whole ones so that I could make a set of dinner plates for my house. The others caught on, and whole clay ducks became a highly valuable commodity. Sometimes we had a bicker over who found them first, and had to consult our parents over the question of ownership. I’m not sure what my parents did all the time while we were out, but they never seemed too interested in our games.

         We moved again after a week or so, and one night, there was a cold, rainy wind storm that leaked into our humble abode and froze us half to death. So, we began looking for a more sheltered camping spot. The best we could find was a small, sandy patch of level ground near a hill. The hill seemed more like a mountain to us, and we immediately set about exploring it. At the top of the hill, there were several weathered lobelia bushes in a circle. We built a fort with some raggedy flannel sheets that we had turned into capes, and only took them down at night, when we feared the wind might blow them away. We had tea parties in the fort, minus the tea set.

         When I was young, my favorite book was The Hobbit. My older siblings and I prided ourselves on being voracious readers. At eight years of age, I’m sure I had read The Hobbit three times already, not counting the times my mom had read it to us. I dearly wanted to be a hobbit, and to live in an underground house with round doors and windows. Not surprisingly, my siblings and I got this idea of “building” hobbit holes. The lack of empty space didn’t stop us. We drew huge, elaborate round hobbit holes, and either incorporated the bushes and weeds into the house as a piece of furniture or decoration, or made them a part of the walls. We lined these houses with white pebbles as well, and we worked on them every day, eventually connecting them all together. The whole thing grew to resemble some kind of ancient Indian burial ground or a desert version of crop circles. I would have liked to see it from an airplane. I would have liked to hear what strangers thought when they surveyed the scene. “Druggies, maybe? Some Indian cult? Extraterrestrials?”

         Though we never got bored of adding rooms and hallways to our hobbit hole, we soon began to explore the desert. There was a network of dry river beds that wound around the whole area, and was almost deeper than I was tall. I liked exploring them and looking for places I’d never been before. Sometimes I found pretty rocks in the riverbed, and I kept them in my pockets with my set of bullet casings and plastic shotgun shells.

         At night, we built fires with my dad. We went out looking for wood, and if we found any tumbleweeds, we saved them for him. We roasted marshmallows and hot dogs sometimes, although there weren’t many good roasting sticks in the desert. We had to take turns with the metal ones. My dad used to play the guitar by the fire after dinner, and I remember going to sleep almost every night to the sound of Stairway to Heaven and Seven Bridges Road. I’ve always found those songs comforting.

         Night time was always the most crowded part of the day, when the beds were unfolded and the whole crew was inside. We took turns changing in the tiny bathroom, and using washcloths to wipe off as much dirt as possible. There were three one-man bunks, one pull-out bed that three of the kids slept in, and then the two youngest slept with my parents in their double-wide pull-out bed. In the morning, we put all of the sleeping gear on the two top bunks and folded them up. They looked like cabinets when they were shut.

         Now and again, we piled into the car and drove around. I suppose we were looking for houses for sale, but we didn’t always stop when we saw one. I think we were waiting for a sign from God, or a prompting that the house was right for us. There was one house in New Harmony that we liked, but it didn’t work out. That was within walking distance of the Kolob Fingers. There was a house in Hurricane that we liked very much, and it had two pomegranate trees in the back yard, but one of the partners decided not to sign our lease, because he didn’t want to rent to a family like ours. We looked at a lot of houses, and we prayed a lot as a family. I never liked house hunting, and I got tired of not getting the houses I liked, and looking at houses I didn’t like. I liked it best when they went house hunting by themselves.

         At night time, my dad brought out this drink called O’douls sometimes, and he let us taste it, but we didn’t like it. It came in green bottles with brass caps. Once, a cop stopped him at the gas station because he thought my dad was drinking while in control of a vehicle, but it was only O’douls. Sometimes my dad took out silver cans, but we weren’t allowed to taste those.

         We drove the motorhome less and less often. It was a horrible gas guzzler. My parents went house-hunting every day. We prayed and had family scriptures every morning and night. We tried to be patient with God.

         One day, my mom and dad came home with a lot of groceries, and they were brands that we didn’t buy. I felt a little queasy to my stomach. I asked where they were from, and my mom said, “The Food Bank.” I went in the river bottoms and cried.

         I was sullen all say and hardly spoke at all. That night at dinner, my mom asked me what was wrong, and I burst into tears. I said that I was upset because we’d run out of money and couldn’t buy a house anymore. I said it was too late for God to show us the way, because we couldn’t even afford food. My parents consoled me and said everything would be all right. I went in the river bottoms a lot and played by myself. I didn’t pray for a house anymore. I prayed that someone would take care of us. My parents called my grandma with a calling card.

         I don’t remember how it happened, but my mom and dad told us one day shortly thereafter that we were going home to Utah County. So, we walked around Blackrock and said our goodbyes to our hobbit holes and our collections of bits and pieces of the desert, and we said a family prayer that we would be safe on our way home. Home, that uncertain place.

         Our parents were very quiet after that. My dad drove the motorhome, and my mom drove the car. My dad didn’t say anything on the ride home, and nobody radioed in with the walkie-talkies. I was a little sad when I watched the Joshua trees give way to junipers, and when I saw drifts of snow and ice as we drew nearer Utah County, but I knew we needed to be responsible again. I was relieved.

         We stayed with our grandparents for a little while, and some of us got sick that week, but never was there a more grateful group of kids, when hot showers and soft beds were once again plentiful. We hastily rented a house in Palmyra, where we took our sleeping bags and slept on the floor until we could move our things from the storage unit. It took weeks to break the habit of conserving water to the very last drop, and it felt strange for a while to have a hallway as big as the motorhome. But I was glad to forget that part.