hvactec
VIP Member
Life under the bridge: Homeless and mentally ill in SLO County
Marilyn doesnt know where she was born exactly, although she believes it was in the desert near railroad tracks because she remembers men on a caboose waving to her as they rode by. Many of Marilyns 58 years of life and memories are indistinct, cloaked in haze.
I talked with Marilyn one recent morning, me buying her a coffee and she offering me a piece of cardboard on which to sit while we chatted. The front porch of her home was a crawl space under Prado Road bridge spanning San Luis Creek, a place where as many as two dozen people would shelter during the night.
Marilyns belongings multiple blankets, bags of clothing and sleeping bags given to her by those meaning well surrounded her. Im psychologically attached to this stuff, she said.
Although Marilyn may be a member of our communitys homeless population, she isnt necessarily dispossessed. While a bad knee, an ulcer and asthma as well as her attachment to her things had kept her under the bridge morning, noon and night, she had a network of friends who had been bringing her buttered toast and sweet rolls in the morning and Chef Boyardee in the evenings.
On this particular summer morning, the air had a faint smell of urine, and a rat brazenly scampered near Tribune photographer David Middlecamps shoes, staring him down from a bridge abutment.
When you live down here, Marilyn said in a high, childlike voice, you make things work.
Marilyn had been making it work under the bridge for eight months. She was only going to spend a night or two and then friends were going to take her to a campground in Grover Beach, but they never showed up.
As she sipped her coffee, she explained in almost a singsong rote that shed once gone to Pierce College to take real estate classes. Later, shed worked for 11 years as a midlevel manager at an electronics company in the San Fernando Valley.
As trucks rumbled over the bridge, releasing fine wisps of dust that landed on her shoulders and cap-topped head, Marilyn said shed loved the electronics job, but she had lost it when she went out on disability. When the company filed for bankruptcy, she signed up for Social Security insurance.
That safety net evaporated as Marilyn moved from campgrounds to motels to makeshift campsites next to creeks and in brushy areas, missing a Social Security recertification appointment in the process. By her reckoning, shes been homeless for 15 years.
Sadly, tragically, Marilyn isnt the only person who has made the banks of San Luis Creek a refuge.
On July 8, 54-year-old James Kristopher Wadsworth crawled into his tent next to the creek off South Higuera Street and Elks Lane and suffered fatal burns after a candle lit his tent on fire. One of the last acts of his life was to get a woman out of the tent before she, too, was burned.
read more Life under the bridge: Homeless and mentally ill in SLO County | The Tribune & SanLuisObispo.com
Marilyn doesnt know where she was born exactly, although she believes it was in the desert near railroad tracks because she remembers men on a caboose waving to her as they rode by. Many of Marilyns 58 years of life and memories are indistinct, cloaked in haze.
I talked with Marilyn one recent morning, me buying her a coffee and she offering me a piece of cardboard on which to sit while we chatted. The front porch of her home was a crawl space under Prado Road bridge spanning San Luis Creek, a place where as many as two dozen people would shelter during the night.
Marilyns belongings multiple blankets, bags of clothing and sleeping bags given to her by those meaning well surrounded her. Im psychologically attached to this stuff, she said.
Although Marilyn may be a member of our communitys homeless population, she isnt necessarily dispossessed. While a bad knee, an ulcer and asthma as well as her attachment to her things had kept her under the bridge morning, noon and night, she had a network of friends who had been bringing her buttered toast and sweet rolls in the morning and Chef Boyardee in the evenings.
On this particular summer morning, the air had a faint smell of urine, and a rat brazenly scampered near Tribune photographer David Middlecamps shoes, staring him down from a bridge abutment.
When you live down here, Marilyn said in a high, childlike voice, you make things work.
Marilyn had been making it work under the bridge for eight months. She was only going to spend a night or two and then friends were going to take her to a campground in Grover Beach, but they never showed up.
As she sipped her coffee, she explained in almost a singsong rote that shed once gone to Pierce College to take real estate classes. Later, shed worked for 11 years as a midlevel manager at an electronics company in the San Fernando Valley.
As trucks rumbled over the bridge, releasing fine wisps of dust that landed on her shoulders and cap-topped head, Marilyn said shed loved the electronics job, but she had lost it when she went out on disability. When the company filed for bankruptcy, she signed up for Social Security insurance.
That safety net evaporated as Marilyn moved from campgrounds to motels to makeshift campsites next to creeks and in brushy areas, missing a Social Security recertification appointment in the process. By her reckoning, shes been homeless for 15 years.
Sadly, tragically, Marilyn isnt the only person who has made the banks of San Luis Creek a refuge.
On July 8, 54-year-old James Kristopher Wadsworth crawled into his tent next to the creek off South Higuera Street and Elks Lane and suffered fatal burns after a candle lit his tent on fire. One of the last acts of his life was to get a woman out of the tent before she, too, was burned.
read more Life under the bridge: Homeless and mentally ill in SLO County | The Tribune & SanLuisObispo.com
