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A moment later a tall, thin man lugging a backpack stuffed with his few belongings, half-lit by the yellow-orange haze of a nearby streetlight, showed up in front of the shelter. He was followed by a man donning only a drab gray sweatshirt, thread-bare pants with a hole in the right knee and light-brown work boots, untied laces dragging on the snowy sidewalk. A disheveled-looking woman bundled against the cold ambled awkwardly in their wake, her scraggly gray-blonde shoulder-length hair partly covered by a multi-colored hat and a tattered secondhand scarf that had seen too many winters.

 

Others joined this small crowd, one by one. At 6:50 p.m. they huddled in a group of about 20, shielding each other from the biting wind, eagerly hoping for one of the coveted spots inside the shelter. The cigarettes many smoked lit the dark like tiny orange stars.

 

Two hours earlier, when the temperature was slightly warmer, a group of Christmas carolers sang holiday music in a park across the street from the shelter amid sparkling lights that adorned the park’s trees.

 

This group in front of the shelter seemed a world apart from that joyous scene. Their faces depicted the rough lives they’ve lived, each line and groove and scar and missing tooth a road map of difficulties past.

 

Their eyes most revealed the hardships they had endured. Most stared resolutely ahead, worn out from another day of wandering the cold streets.

 

For some, their eyes once shined with hope, their lives seemingly on the right path before a medical malady or ruined relationship or lost job dragged them from the right side of the tracks to the wrong, derailing their hopes and dreams. Others have never known a semblance of normalcy, their childhoods a dysfunctional mess, their adult minds addled by mental illness or alcohol or drug addiction.

 

Members of this gathering — a group that continued to grow outside the shelter on this night, quiet but for the occasional sharp crunch of car tires on snow and the raspy rattle of engine pistons struggling in the cold — live on society’s fringes. They’re not members of parent-teacher associations, book clubs, the Chamber of Commerce or other groups. Most don’t have jobs. Most don’t own vehicles. Most own few possessions. They live day to day, eating at soup kitchens or anywhere else they can get a free meal, hoping for shelter, wondering how to climb out of the desperate situations that have become their lives.

      hey appeared         one by one, like ghosts emerging from the darkness, the frosty white puffs of breath emanating from their mouths testament to the subzero air around them.

This group is comprised of all types of people. Former white-collar workers whose alcohol addictions got the best of them. Blue-collar types who worked as carpenters or in factories or on farms before they lost those jobs. Wives and husbands whose spouses died or divorced them, leaving them without enough money to make rent or house payments. Teenagers whose parents kicked them out of their homes for one bad behavior or another, or simply because they’re gay. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Drug users who spend nearly every dime to feed addictions. People with a wide range of mental illness. Adults who were abused as children. Con artists and cheats and hard workers and people with hearts of gold.

 

Despite those differences, they share a grim commonality. They are homeless.

 

A growing number of homeless people are calling Eau Claire home, according to police and agencies that provide services to that population. On any given night as many as 100 people can find shelter at Sojourner House, Beacon House, Western Dairyland’s homeless program and Hope Gospel Mission’s two shelters. Others call abandoned buildings, vehicles, a cave along the Eau Claire River and other places home. And hundreds of others don’t live in places of their own but instead reside with friends or relatives, often bouncing from place to place, officials said.

 

That growing population is stretching available resources, officials said, and has prompted a spike in crime and other unsavory activities in the downtown area where many homeless people congregate.

 

A few of those huddled in front of the shelter on this bitterly cold December evening spoke hopefully of escaping their homeless lives, of leaving the grasp of drudgery-filled days and nights, of living beyond the immediate scramble for the next meal or next dollar or next roof over their heads. Others seemed to have given up on a better life, resigned to their depressing situations.

Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on a frigid night just before Christmas, a heavy-set man wearing a worn, dirty tan coat, a stocking cap smudged with oil or grease or God knows what and jeans badly frayed at the bottom of each leg appeared outside Sojourner House, a downtown Eau Claire homeless shelter at 618 S. Barstow St.

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