Stories of being homeless in Eau Claire
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Christopher Sperry and Lisa Sundberg spent this first day of 2014 and many nights in ensuing weeks on the streets, looking for shelter from the ever-present cold wherever they could find it. The city parking garage. An abandoned house. A hospital emergency room. Anywhere to stay warm.
Sperry, 29, had arrived in the Chippewa Valley in 2005, hoping to escape the mean streets of Chicago, where he sold drugs and took part in other illicit activities as a gang member. But his past soon caught up with him, evidenced by the blue-brown vein that shoots up the underside of his tattooed left forearm.
“You see that?” he said, rolling up his sweatshirt sleeve. “That’s my vein going bad from too much meth. I’m hell on wheels, man. For me, it’s either full blast or nothin’ at all."
Sperry dealt meth and other drugs, using part of the profits to feed his habit. He met Sundberg at a party in rural Stanley and they bonded through an affinity for the fast life. But their relationship involved something deeper. When Sperry’s continued run-ins with the law landed him in jail in November, Sundberg told him it was time to give up drugs, to seek a better life. He surprised himself by agreeing.
But that decision came with a heavy price. Gone were the big drug profits, the $500-a-crack shopping sprees, replaced by the grim reality of trying to get a job while possessing a long rap sheet. Without drug money and job prospects, Sperry and Sundberg, 31, couldn’t afford a place of their own. They were homeless, out on the streets in this coldest of winters.
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It was only the beginning of January, but already meteorologists and other prognosticators were talking about the prospects of the winter of 2013-14 being one for the record books. As people staying at Sojourner House ate supper, a weatherman on the large flat screen TV mounted on the wall discussed the upcoming forecast, which featured a series of below-zero temperatures. One bearded man who looked much older than his 47 years listened to the report, shook his head in exasperation and continued eating his hamburger hot dish. He and his fellow homeless colleagues didn’t need to be told about the arctic temperatures. After spending days on the streets, they knew about the cold only too well.
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Dan Korn was living in a giant freezer, a freezer that threatened his life.
Winter was only a month old, but it had already taken hold in a big way in Eau Claire. Below-zero temperatures had already become the norm. A thick layer of snow blanketed the city like a frosty white blanket.
One early January night, just as he had each night during this frigid winter, Korn, dressed in layer upon layer, topped by a thick leather Polaris jacket. He covered his bushy-haired head in a fur-lined hat. He crawled inside his sleeping bag, wrapped mummy-like in blankets, hoping to ward off the cold. Korn’s mustache and beard were dusted with frost. His breaths hung in seemingly solid clouds above him, lit by bright moonlight shining through a window of the unheated bus he calls home.
Korn’s bus was parked at one end of a parking lot near the old Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Co. plant in a gritty, run-down part of Eau Claire’s downtown. Weeks of arctic air had coated the inside of Korn’s bus — painted black and bearing the name “Buck” on its front, a reference to the vehicle’s previous use as a deer hunting camper — in a sparkly layer of white frost and ice.
The bus’ interior was the same arctic temperature as outside, which on this night plummeted to 24 degrees below zero. The roar of a nearby train whistle split the night’s silence, followed by the loud clickety-clack and the screech of cold metal wheels on frozen rails.
Enveloped in his sleeping bag. Korn stayed warm enough to survive this night and others like it. Doing so takes a tough mindset and practicality, he said.
“You have to wear lots of layers,” Korn said one late afternoon as he proudly showed off his refurbished bus-turned-home. “It’s coldest when you wake up in the morning and climb out of the (sleeping) bag. Oh boy, that air bites.”
Korn, 56, doesn’t consider himself homeless. For a decade or longer he has called his old, rusting van, distinctive for its unusual red-and-yellow paint job with the words “Wolf and Co.” inscribed on one side, home.
In November Korn added the bus to his vehicles-turned-home collection, paying $3,000 for it. He quickly filled it with a hodgepodge of possessions, from the beloved guitars he builds himself to amplifiers to tools to a tennis racket to a wide array of electronics projects he works on at all hours. An old photograph of a band his father was a member of hangs on the bus’ back door, a nod to Korn’s lifelong love of music.
“This place gives me room to breathe,” Korn, donning a small spotlight on his head to illuminate the growing darkness inside the bus, said of his bus one late afternoon. “I was like a sardine packed in (the van).”
Korn isn’t deterred by the arctic temperatures inside his living quarters. He can’t be. He is a prisoner of sorts to the vehicle, using it as his place of solitude to escape the world’s noise and chatter. Staying there helps Korn deal with the schizophrenia he said has plagued him since his mid-20s, when he was discharged from the military and arrived in Eau Claire, where he subsequently was diagnosed with mental health issues. For decades he felt like a lab rat as one medicine after another failed to keep his mental illness in check.
Then, last summer, Korn said, a doctor prescribed a new medication. This one seems to work better. While he still deals with anxiety, the panic attacks that send his life spiraling out of control are mostly gone.
“I like to be around people, to be part of this world,” said the hard-working Korn, who operates a lawn care business during summer months and clears snow for money during winters to subsidize disability money he receives. “But I can’t be around people all the time. I need to get away from them or bad stuff happens. Living here is how I keep on the good side of things.”
