Stories of being homeless in Eau Claire
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“They gave up their warm beds for others,” an emotional Lokken marveled. “Those younger people did it to help the older ones, knowing they would head out into the cold. It’s one of the most amazing, selfless acts I’ve ever witnessed. To see something like that, it really makes you think about how you live your own life.”
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This small group of people was determined to ring in the new year in style, regardless of the frigid elements they faced. As 2013 became 2014 amid a temperature that approached 20 degrees below zero on New Year’s Eve, a half dozen of Eau Claire’s homeless residents bundled against the cold huddled in a corner of a downtown Eau Claire parking garage, ingesting a cocktail of alcohol and drugs to celebrate a new year and forget their troubles for a while.
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This was no way to celebrate the new year.
The previous day, Annette Johnson and Paul Palmquist grabbed what items they could fit into a car and left the small apartment at 1433 Bellinger St. they shared. The apartment, in a run-down part of Eau Claire, was nothing fancy. But for Johnson, 49, and Palmquist, 52, both of whom have mental health issues, it was home. The apartment, home to Johnson’s stuffed animal collection and a well-lit room where she painted, was the one place she found solace from a difficult past and the panic-stricken thoughts that often flood her mind.
That sense of calm was shattered a year before, when, despondent for various reasons and struggling with depression, Johnson and Palmquist felt hopelessness overwhelm them. They decided to die the same way they lived — together. On a dreary October day when they saw no way out of their troubles, they ingested way too many prescription drugs and lost consciousness. The next thing they knew they awoke in hospital beds. They had survived. Barely.
“The doctor told us we were lucky,” said Palmquist, whose walking ability was impaired by the overdose attempt. “With how much (drugs) we took, we probably shouldn’t have made it."
The couple eventually recovered and returned to their apartment. By the next summer they struggled to pay rent when Palmquist’s disability checks were significanlty reduced when the government learned he had a retirement account. Without that money, the couple couldn’t afford their place. On Dec. 31, they were evicted.
They headed to a Minneapolis homeless shelter but left just hours after arriving and returned to Eau Claire when Johnson suffered a panic attack in her new, unfamiliar surroundings. Hours later, on a bitterly cold night, they waited with others in front of Sojourner House, shivering as a brisk wind blew from the nearby Chippewa River.
They were in luck. The shelter had space for them.
Ralph and Rebecca Dash spent this New Year’s Eve in the same place they spent the last one, at Sojourner House. The couple, both 55, are no strangers to Sojourner or homelessness, having lived without a place of their own for parts of the past quarter century.
On this night there was no celebratory party for the Dashes to ring in the new year. No champagne. No revelry. Just another night at Sojourner, another night without a home of their own.
“We’ve been here since it opened (in November 2011),” Ralph said between bites of his hot dish supper at Sojourner, his southern drawl, a testament to 18 years he spent in Arkansas, difficult to understand because of his missing teeth.
Unable to make ends meet, the couple moved in the late-1990s from Cumberland to Chippewa Falls and then, in 1999, to Eau Claire, where, for a time, they cobbled together enough money to rent a place of their own. Since then they have bounced between renting various apartments and homelessness.
Sometimes, in between stays in apartments, the Dashes resided in hotels. When their money ran out they lived in whatever vehicle they owned at the time, sleeping with the doors locked on streets off the beaten path. On the coldest nights the brisk air painted those vehicles’ insides in a silver-white blanket of frost.
“Somehow we survived it,” said Rebecca, dressed as she was most days this winter in a bright-red snowsuit to ward off the cold. “You wrap yourself in as many layers as you can and hope for the best.”
Nearly three years ago the Dashes said they were evicted from yet another apartment after their landlord blamed a cockroach infestation on them. By then Rebecca had lost her job when she got sick with what was later diagnosed as a chronic lung disease. The illness qualified Rebecca for monthly Social Security Disability payments. Ralph already received payments from that program after he suffered serious injuries in a late-1980s motorcycle crash. The couple take a variety of prescription medications for a number of illnesses, at least when they can find them.
“Sometimes we don’t take our medicines because we can’t find them,” Rebecca said, motioning one morning toward the couple’s van jam-packed with items of all sorts. “They’re in there somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
The Dashes said they would like an apartment of their own. But they have stopped looking, they said, dismayed by a series of failed attempts to convince landlords to rent to them.
“I hope we can find a place someday,” Rebecca said one night at Sojourner House, staring at the floor during a break from one of her cross stitch projects. “But I don’t see how it’s going to happen.”
Ralph, sitting nearby, nodded, staring resolutely ahead.
Ralph and Rebecca Dash spent this New Year’s Eve in the same place they spent the last one, at Sojourner House. The couple, both 55, are no strangers to Sojourner or homelessness, having lived without a place of their own for parts of the past quarter century.
On this night there was no celebratory party for the Dashes to ring in the new year. No champagne. No revelry. Just another night at Sojourner, another night without a home of their own.