Ryan Courtright loves to read, but his vision has deteriorated.
“When I start squinting, people think I’m giving them the evil eye,” he said.
The good news: On Monday, Courtright, 29, picked up a pair of free reading glasses and a library card. The tough truth: From day to day Courtright has nowhere to call home.
About a year ago, he lost his job at a Port of Portland shipyard, he said. For a while he crashed on friends’ couches. Then his luck ran out, he said, and he took to squatting. He was sneaking sleeps in somebody’s shed near Leverich Park, he said, until he was discovered “and nearly scared the crap out of this nice old lady,” which he felt awful about. He went back later just to collect his sleeping bag and other stuff — but it was all gone.
Still, on Monday, Courtright was counting his blessings. His new glasses are courtesy of medical clinic Sea Mar and the library card came from the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. Those two organizations were among dozens who turned out to offer free services, consultations, advice and comfort to the local homeless population Monday.
The event was the third annual Project Homeless Connect, masterminded by the Council for the Homeless and hosted by the Red Lion Hotel Vancouver at the Quay. Hundreds turned out for free help of all kinds — from coffee and cookies and donated shoes to haircuts, health checks, legal assistance, mental health counseling, affordable health insurance, housing connections, educational opportunities and even pet care and grooming.
Two volunteers from Top Dog Grooming of La Center occupied the end of one hallway and showed off their excellent bedside manner as they clipped canine toenails, shampooed and brushed tangled fur, and chatted with grateful pet lovers like Ed Roe.
“They haven’t been to the vet in, like, a year,” said Roe, 40, of his two chihuahua mixes, Jax and Grace, who were a little skittish but submitted to the nail clipping and other TLC. About a year ago is when Roe — who once co-owned a restaurant in Fresno, Calif., then had to downgrade to managing fast-food franchises — lost his latest job. Since then he’s been living in a minivan, bouncing between friends’ and family members’ driveways.
Now the van has broken down, and Roe’s not sure what will happen next to his little family. Local shelters don’t allow pets.
“People need to have someone,” said Deborah Willoughby, an information and referral specialist with regional help hot line 211. “And sometimes a dog is what they’ve got.”
“Sometimes your dogs are your only reason for getting up in the morning,” said Roe.
Old, new homeless
Add to the bad economy and its trail of layoffs and foreclosures the ongoing problems of the chronically homeless, said Council for the Homeless executive director Craig Lyons, and you’ve got an especially busy time for service providers and volunteers who aim to help. Monday’s event was set to run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; by 11 a.m., when The Columbian stopped by, a couple hundred pairs of free shoes were just about gone and another shipment eagerly awaited; the same was true of nonprescription reading glasses. The haircut station was constantly mobbed. Other big draws were the state driver’s license and health insurance stations.
And due to a slight mix-up, Project Homeless Connect was bumped at the last minute from a standalone Red Lion building called the Centennial Center to the hotel’s main ballroom. Lyons said that worked out just fine. For one thing, it brought more private rooms into play — allowing some confidentiality concerns to be satisfied and some one-on-one mental health counseling to take place. That counseling was supposed to happen in an RV outside — which would have felt a little weird, Lyons said.
“We got a first class upgrade,” he laughed about the ballroom setting.
Health checks were also held in a private room with a volunteer minding the door and two Sea Mar nurses inside. Blood pressure and glucose tests were standard fare, nurse manager Kathy Wolff said, but folks were also coming in with long-untended injuries and maladies — a broken hand, a smashed finger, lingering cavities, aching backs.
‘Vancouver is awesome’
One of the most difficult things about homelessness, said Todd Webb, 43, a six-year veteran of the streets, is not falling back into drinking and drug abuse. That’s what landed him in trouble to begin with, he said. He lost a good job, he said, and now lives on food stamps, odd jobs and friends’ couches.
“Luckily I haven’t gotten back into those bad ways,” he said. “And I haven’t burnt out the friends I do have.”
The care and concern her family has received locally led 29-year-old Jacqueline Croasmun, previously of Kelso, to conclude that “Vancouver is awesome.”
Her husband, Randy, was laid off from his job as a wrecking yard mechanic just 45 minutes before Croasmun went into labor with their second child. That was nearly five months ago; since then the newly expanded family lost its home, ran through its savings staying in motels and eventually fled Kelso for Vancouver — where, they’d heard, the services are better and the people just plain nicer. It turned out to be true, she said.
In Vancouver, the family stayed for a week at the makeshift Winter Hospitality Overflow shelter at St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Orchards. Then they were admitted to the Share Orchards shelter. Now they’re feeling like they might just make it.
“Moving was the scariest thing we ever did because that was the world we knew,” said Croasmun, who’s expecting a third child in September. “But we had to get out of there.”
