Stories of being homeless in Eau Claire
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On this night when the temperature would dip to 10 degrees below zero, most of those gathered at the shelter shoved any thoughts about their futures to the back of their minds. They had a more immediate goal: Spending the night somewhere warm.
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December 2013 was unusually cold, even by the standards of the hardy people of northwest Wisconsin. For people without a home, for people walking the streets, the frigid conditions were nearly unbearable.
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Night had fallen and Dan Biddle huddled inside his tent, pitched in a wooded site just north of downtown Eau Claire. He wrapped himself in warm clothes, a sleeping bag designed for winter camping and one blanket after another in a seemingly futile attempt to stay warm on this bitterly cold late-December night.
Biddle had endured plenty of cold during the first few weeks of this winter, the kind of winter old-timers talked about. This December night would be even colder than the last, Biddle realized. A stiff north breeze chilled his tent despite its wind-resistant design. Even his extra-warm sleeping bag and thick clothes couldn’t ward off the deep freeze setting in.
As the temperature dipped closer to 20 below zero, Biddle realized he needed help staying warm. Underneath a dark sky lit by blinking stars, Biddle fired up his trusty Coleman lantern for heat. The device warmed the tent a bit, enough for Biddle to feel warmer.
“That’s it,” he thought, grateful for the heat. “It’s damn cold, but I’m going to make it through the night.”
A while later, as he dozed, Biddle suddenly felt too much heat. Groggy, he turned his head to realize the lantern had malfunctioned, starting one corner of his tent on fire. The lantern roared, spewing burning fuel at Biddle’s right hand and face. Dazed and startled, he reached for the light, further scorching his hand. He groped for the zipper at his tent’s entrance and escaped the blaze that left his hand scarred with purple-pink lines.
“I was scared,” the usually defiant Biddle said of the fire in his tent. “I didn’t know if I was going to get out of that one.”
Biddle is no stranger to roughing it. The 64-year-old vagabond ex-con has spent his adult life in various locations throughout the Midwest and Florida, staying wherever he could, sometimes without a roof over his head. He did what he could to survive, sweating and straining at various jobs in construction, factories and as a furniture mover, scratching out a hardscrabble living. Biddle’s thick, worn hands are evidence of his life of labor. So is his face, each year etched into his weathered visage.
“Once I got to my mid-50s, I’d had enough,” Biddle said of the wear and tear years of toil took on his back, shoulders and knees. “My body just got wore down.”
Unable to continue physical jobs and lacking other job skills, Biddle began collecting a $500 per-month disability check and struggled to afford a home of his own. He moved periodically, bopping from place to place. Last year he left Duluth, Minn., where he had lived for years, and eventually made his way to Eau Claire, where he pitched his tent, spending nights outdoors.
“A lot of people talk tough, but most of them can’t do what I do,” he said defiantly, a distinctive shock of his hair that resembles a beaver tail or dreadlocks gone wrong hanging from the back of his head. “Not just anyone can sleep outside in this weather. You’ve got to be one tough (expletive). But it’s what I need to do to get by.”
As December progressed, all Biddle could do was hope for warmer weather.
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Eau Claire’s homeless population doesn’t always get along. Not by a long shot. Living lives of uncertainty, they’re protective of what little they have. They have to be to get by.
But sometimes this group of people with seemingly so little does what they can to help others sharing their plight. They give away money. Bus tokens. Warm clothing. Cigarettes. They carry backpacks and bags for their homeless colleagues who are too sick or weary to haul them themselves.
“We live desperate lives,” said Fred Stephens, 59, who has spent most of the past 15 years homeless in Eau Claire. “When you’re homeless, you’re in survival mode. But we do what we can to help each other because we know what it’s like to have nothing.”
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Even for this unusually cold early winter, Dec. 29 was a backbreaker.
Vehicles made their way along an ice-caked South Barstow Street, leaving exhaust clouds among the growing crowd in front of Sojourner House. By 6:30 p.m. the temperature had already dropped to 8 degrees below zero and would dip to minus-16 overnight. When the shelter’s front door opened at 7 p.m., each person seeking shelter took an alcohol Breathalyzer test and headed to the gathering room to eat.
Workers soon realized the shelter would be packed beyond its 48-person capacity on this frigid night, forcing them to send people who had been at Sojourner the longest back out onto the cold streets. Desperate to accommodate more people, workers set up chairs for people without beds.
But even that wasn’t enough. Shelter workers still faced the prospect of kicking a handful of people out into the dangerous weather. Then, without warning, four younger people who had secured beds for the night dressed in their winter gear and headed out into the brisk night air, freeing up space for older, frail people who had faced a night on the subzero streets. Jennifer Lokken, the shelter’s night shift supervisor, stood for a moment in stunned silence, then shook her head.
