Melinda Tuhus Photo
As record snowfall collapsed the tarps of her “Tent City,” one homeless woman named Mary stayed outside, making her way to her post selling New Haven Registers by the Boulevard. Another woman named Mary joined 80 other homeless New Haveners in staying inside at Columbus House, which decided to keep its doors open all day.
While many New Haveners shoveled out cars or sidewalks Thursday and decided whether to stay home or make their way to work, the city’s homeless faced a more fundamental choice: Inside or outside.
The two Marys made two different choices.
The Mary pictured above, who declined to give her last name, lives in “Tent City” with her sister and a handful of other men and women in the woods on the New Haven-West Haven line. (Click here for a previous story, about what the unofficial residence is like in summer.)
She said she became homeless four years ago after entering treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, but she’d rather live outside — even in winter — than go into a shelter with a lot of other people.
“Then I don’t have to answer to anybody,” she said. “I can get up, go to work, go home, see the caseworker, give people that I know out there what they need.”
Her work is selling the Register at the corner of Ella Grasso Boulevard and Columbus Avenue. The caseworker is from Columbus House, assigned to outreach to the “unsheltered” homeless. A Columbus House administrator described that job as providing “blankets and heaters and fire wood, cell phones, sleeping bags.” Mary said that she and the others receive less than that, and that’s a big problem in extreme winter weather.
She accepted an offer from this reporter to warm up at the Dunkin Donuts down the street from her regular spot. She hesitated to get into the car, saying her boots were wet and she didn’t want to get the floor mat wet. Once inside, she asked if she could put the window down a little, saying she didn’t like it too warm. (The heat wasn’t on; the temperature outside was in the mid-30s.) She declined anything to eat or drink, but said she’d accept a coffee for her friend who was covering her newspaper sales. Just before leaving asked shyly, “Can I have an orange juice?
“When there’s real bad weather like this,” she explained, “we have to try and figure out how to get new tents, new supplies — food, wood, propane, blankets. Everything gets soaking wet — boots, shoes, clothes.”
And the tents? “They cave in because of the weight of the snow. So no matter how many pallets you put down or how many poles you put up, it’s still going to cave in if you don’t wake up every hour and a half to get the snow off the lid.” She said that must be done from outside the tent, not inside.
Mary, who’s 40, said she suffers from pancreatitis, seizures and other serious and potentially life-threatening ailments. She said she’d still rather rough it that stay in a shelter. She was asked how she and the others can even get to their tents in the woods with such deep snow,. “There’s paths we know how to get through the woods,” she said, “and we shovel it out.”
She said her newspaper customers often provide a lifeline. “Sometimes they bring you food, they bring you coffee, because you’ve been out there so long you got a personal relationship with them. Once you get to know them, customers are really nice to you.”
She summed up her lifestyle this way: “It’s hard. It’s like living in Alaska in the dark days, but it’s better than nothin’.”
Mary Boyd (pictured), who’s 53, said her life fell apart nine months ago when her boyfriend died and she was evicted from their apartment. After burying him and two family members within a month, she confronted major depression and checked into Yale Psychiatric Institute. “I was discharged in April and I’ve been here ever since,” she said on Thursday afternoon as she told her story in the second-floor conference room of the shelter on the Boulevard by the West Haven city line.
Normally those staying at the shelter come in at 4 p.m. and leave around 7:30 the next morning. They’re not allowed to stay during the day. Most of them have substance abuse or mental health programs to attend in any case.
Boyd normally attends Village of Power in Dixwell, which provides counseling and training for women dealing with substance abuse and/or mental health challenges. She said she got a certificate in jewelry-making, but for her the program is mainly about the relationships she’s developed there. Which is why she hated to miss it Thursday.
“I just miss getting out, getting fresh air, being with my sisters,” she said. She said she gets along with people at the shelterand counts some of them her friends. But she didn’t disagree with another resident’s exclamation that he was going “stir-crazy” being cooped up at the shelter. (Almost 100 additional homeless men spent the day inside at the overflow shelter on Cedar Street.)
However, she added, “I’m just happy to be in a warm place, and my heart goes out to anybody who doesn’t have no place to go.”