Estranged from county services, rural homeless people grow together and fend for themselves
by BEN MYERS
photos by CONNER JAY
Fred Biscoe watched his friend Nick die on a sweltering afternoon last July. Fred was accustomed to friends’ deaths, but he had never before witnessed one. It happened in the makeshift camp where they lived in Veneta, Oregon, at the base of the Coast Range eight miles west of Eugene. Nick was the camp cook.
Like Fred, Nick spent that day on a can-collecting route. Some days Nick would ride up to thirty miles, traversing the mostly unincorporated communities around Fern Ridge Reservoir with a bike he constructed from spare parts — a red Raleigh frame, BMX-style handlebars, and pink brake cables. Fred worried about Nick on the busy roads, so he pestered Nick to tell him the day’s route over morning coffee. Nick — who spent a lot of time reading science fiction novels in his tent — was unusually chatty on the morning of his death. He headed north up Territorial Highway in Veneta, then east on Clear Lake Road to Eugene. Inexplicably, he did not bring water. Delirious when he returned, Nick ditched his rig on the railroad tracks near camp and staggered home.
Fred returned that afternoon to find Nick convulsing in his tent. A girl named Rockstar — a camp groupie — had a cell phone. Fred yelled at her to call the paramedics and go wait for them. Ten minutes later, the paramedics arrived and ordered everyone to leave. Fred stayed. “I should have listened to them,” he said eight months later. Nick tried to crawl from his tent but failed. The paramedics pulled him out and placed him on Fred’s new sleeping bag. Then Fred looked on as Nick perished in their arms.
Ten minutes later, the paramedics arrived and ordered everyone to leave. Fred stayed.
Fred’s friend Karla founded the camp, which sits on private property, and before Nick’s death it saw a flurry of tenants. Karla grew up in Veneta and knows the property owner from childhood, but she bounces from one camp to another in the area. After an extended hiatus, Karla returned to camp a few weeks before Nick died last July.
Nick’s death caused no ripples outside the camp in the rapidly expanding town of Veneta, which expects its population of 4,200 to quintuple by the year 2050. At an annual planning meeting in January, city leaders fretted about matching infrastructure updates with population growth. They did not mention the homeless camps on the outskirts of town.
Fred’s camp stabilized after Nick’s death. Karla stuck around and Patrick Molina, another of Fred’s friends, got out of jail and moved in. Fred, Karla, and Pat called themselves the “camp elders” and voted on important decisions. The elders admitted only people they knew because, Fred said, Veneta is an outpost for fugitives.
Two recent tenants stopped in Veneta en route to the Oregon coast. Although the elders admitted them temporarily, Fred was suspicious. Their practice of holding signs on the corner of Veneta’s main intersection violated the camp’s taboo against panhandling. “They don’t realize it’s a small community. They’ll get burned out of here,” Fred said in early February. By March, Fred heard the panhandlers reflected poorly on him and he kicked them out of town.
Fred spoke of the transients on February 5, his fifty-third birthday. Like many days, Fred sat on the railroad tracks with his campmates and nursed bagged cans of Steel Reserve and rolled cigarettes with brown and yellow fingers. Shielded by the camouflage hat that Karla bought for him, Fred’s pale eyes beamed from his earthen face at a rainbow ring around the sun. The ring meant rain was coming. “It usually rains on my birthday, ” he said. His friends gave him a pet rock as a present, and someone said he should expect AARP notices in the mail. “I don’t have any mail. It’s the third tree on the left!” Fred shot back.
Then the conversation blended with reminiscence of Nick. Pat, with typical bluster, called out, “Remember that shit he cooked that one time?” Fred was irritated at the apparent disgrace but relented. “He was wondering why all these bowls were laying around, nothing eaten out of them. Even the dog wouldn’t eat it,” Fred said with a melancholic chortle. It was the only bad meal Nick ever cooked. Most of Nick’s meals came with a creative signature, Fred remembered. “He liked fruit in his chili,” he said. “I was amazed.”
Above: Fred Biscoe takes a break near his camp outside of Veneta, Oregon.
Fred once tackled long can routes like Nick but is now “semi-retired.” The painful lumps in the joints of his hands make long-distance riding difficult. He now relies on “can accounts” — Veneta residents who invite him into their homes to dispose of cans.
On an overcast day in April, Fred and Pat trudged to Kyna Childs’ house. Childs met Fred three years ago when she saw him stooping by the roadside searching for cans. She impulsively invited him to come take the cans out of her garage. Later, her husband “felt him out” by leaving $300 in plain sight. Fred passed the test. He also refused sincere offers of food and a bike.
On the way to Childs’ house, a squat, middle-aged woman stooped over a weed whacker that refused to start. “Uh-oh,” Fred said. “Marianne is having a tizzy fit.” Pat approached and tried to help her. “Come on, Gorilla,” Fred encouraged Pat, calling him by the nickname he earned with his thick black hair and beard. Pat tried several times to start the machine with no luck. “Sorry,” Pat said, and Marianne thanked him anyway. Less than a minute later, they passed a younger Veneta resident. “Jeremy!” Pat called out. Jeremy asked the two what they were up to. They replied, “Going on a can account.” “Right on,” Jeremy responded, and the men continued on their way to work.
Some Veneta residents wonder why their sleepy town appeals to Fred and his friends. Last February, in an informal gathering of community leaders, one resident asked what draws homeless people to Veneta. She theorized that Eugene has better facilities. Lane County’s largest city has the highest concentration of social services county wide — along with the largest population that needs them.
A recent study by the county estimated that 2,278 of the 335,180 people in Lane County are homeless. Of those, 288 live in rural areas. Veneta resident Dean Schlect, who manages ShelterCare’s Royal Avenue program in Eugene, said the imbalance creates a safety hazard. “I know that if I were homeless, I would want to be in a smaller community without the kind of meanness you’re likely to encounter in a metropolitan area,” Schlect said.
Some Veneta residents wonder why their sleepy town appeals to Fred and his friends
Fred prefers his self-made role in Veneta, with no hope of rehabilitation, over the risks in Eugene. “I stay away from that place,” Fred said on a brittle winter day. “I’d rather sit out here by myself.” He woke up that morning soaking wet. “Just go out and deal with it. Start a fire,” he said. Starting a fire was difficult with wet wood; he used tree sap instead.
Churches try to fill the void of services in Veneta, but their pastors know they cannot provide adequately for the homeless. “Sometimes the misconception is that we expect the Christians to fix people,” said Pat Coy, associate pastor at Olivet Baptist Church. “I don’t think we fix anybody. We simply help people where we can.”
Coy sits on the board of directors for the Love Project, a food pantry in Veneta staffed mostly by volunteers from churches. The Love Project allots up to sixteen boxes of food a year per family; they also let Fred and his friends take leftover bread and vegetables.
The line between poverty and homelessness is thin but crucial. Schlect said that any program that deals with homelessness must deal with psychiatric disabilities. His comment reflects the distinction between situational versus chronic homelessness. Chronic homelessness, defined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, refers to people with a disabling condition who have experienced homelessness for one year continuously or four times in the past three years. It is usually associated with a psychiatric disability compounded by other diagnoses. There are no services in the Fern Ridge area for people who experience chronic homelessness.
Above: While on a walk to pick up a load of cans, Pat Molina stops to help Veneta resident Marianne Thompson.
Below: Fred and friends organize recycling collections at their regular daytime spot.
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Karla was absent on Fred’s birthday in February. She had contracted pneumonia in addition to chronic bronchitis. She also suffers from a debilitating mental illness. Fred heard she was staying on a friend’s couch, which is how he knew her condition was serious. He said that Karla, homeless for fourteen of her forty-three years, normally refuses to rely on others. Fred was worried but not noticeably panicked. “She might be the next one to go,” he said matter-of-factly.
Last fall, Lane County adopted a ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness, aimed at engaging community partners. Similar ten-year plans are sprouting up across the country. Project Homeless Connect, a one-day bazaar of services at the Lane County fairgrounds in Eugene on February 8, was part of the plan. The event was sponsored by the County, along with 150 partnering organizations and individuals. Volunteers from the Love Project gave bus passes to Fred and his friends in order to get them from Veneta to Eugene.
More than a thousand people attended, double the highest expectations. People swarmed in and out of booths. County employees darted around while local politicians looked on enthusiastically. Fred popped outside for a cigarette, looking excited and overwhelmed. He and his friends sat at cafeteria tables, feasted on burgers, and enjoyed live music. Six weeks later, “bumfest” — as Karla called it — was a fun memory with no lasting impact. Karla said she ate, saw friends, and saw how many people are homeless. But the guys were itching to leave before she could get a haircut.
“I’ve seen many towns like this grow. If they get too big, I leave.”
Things have changed for the worse since that day. Fred and Karla recalled Project Homeless Connect from their new daytime hangout spot, a grassy path a few yards from their spot on the tracks. Fred was pretty sure his ribs broke when his bike — Nick’s old bike — took an awkward turn downhill. Karla hauled off to settle elsewhere, leaving six tents to Fred and Pat. “It’s like a haunted camp,” Fred said. It was filthy and the rats were breeding. “Nick and I burned a lot of shit in that place before. Got it back to looking somewhat decent. Now it’s a mess again,” Fred said. He and Pat are planning another burn, once Fred’s ribs heal.
The camp may or may not survive as more new camps spring up and others are torn down. Some of Veneta’s residents will keep saving cans and others will observe the homeless from a distance. Veneta’s harmony with its homeless residents will endure.
But that prediction skirts two realities. The first is Veneta’s rapid expansion. Fred’s domain diminishes with every new resident who does not recognize him. “I’ve seen many towns like this grow. If they get too big, I leave,” he said. He’d just returned from Childs’ house, and he and Pat were sipping beers in the veranda of the Veneta Church of Christ. He articulated the second reality one month before his birthday: “I don’t think I’m going to last too much longer.” His words sometimes sputter forth in hacks and wheezes and they frequently involve death, the only permanence Fred knows.
It is uncertain what will happen when Fred’s time in Veneta expires, whatever the cause. After Nick died, Fred asked a sheriff’s deputy about funeral services. This is how Fred learned that Nick had been wanted for attempted manslaughter; “Nick” was an alias. He had no funeral or burial. Nick was lost for good.
