A homeless encounter

This past week, my roommate and I worked at the new overnight warming center here in LaCrosse. The warming center exists so that those homeless who cannot go to the Salvation Army for whatever reason have a place to be for the night. 

 

There were four men, and Michael and I. 

 

The four homeless men left at 6:30 in the morning. We opened the doors, said goodbye and watched them step outside. They stretched in the cold, then shivered as their bodies remembered the bite of winter, lit up a cigarette, and strode off to no place in particular. 

 

I talked with one of them for a few hours during the night. He had come to the city in hopes of finding an simple paced life, good church, and peaceful scenery. He was hoping for Mountains. I told him we didn't have any mountains in LaCrosse, but that the bluffs are nice. He told me he'd check about that. 

 

We sipped on coffee and nibbled oranges to the rind, and talked about how you can guess at where a person is from by the way they talk; Texas for him, mid-west for me. I asked what its like to be homeless in winter. 

"Cold," he said. 

 

We sat in bursts of quiet during our conversation. He seemed better than I with dealing in silence. 

"So where will you go from here?" I asked him. I wondered what a person does at six in the morning with nowhere to be in LaCrosse. 

 

"Colorado," he said.

 

I had expected him to tell me that he would head to a gas station, or make for the Library, or the YMCA and wait for them to open. I expected him to go somewhere warm. And in truth, he did end up going to the Y when he left at six the next morning. But to him the question "where will you go" didn't mean in the morning, it meant in life. 

 

Life sat before him like a globe, the whole thing spinning meaning home. To me, a map of the south side of LaCrosse was the same thing. To him time was measured in how long a place would show him love and let him stay; to me it was minutes to go before I could head home and sleep. 

 

I don't know his story, and I don't know where he is now.