Handouts and Charity Were Not For Me

Shortly after arriving in Montana as a homeless 18-year-old I remedied that situation by getting a job that provided room and board.

After all, I had a skill.

I could cook.

I spent much of that first summer in the backcountry working for an outfitter who took clients on pack trips into the Beartooth Mountains and Yellowstone Park.

The wages were minimal, but enough that I could pay my own way. That’s how I had been raised.

Handouts and charity were for the less fortunate, not for me.

But that was a lifetime ago when homeless wasn’t yet a part of our vocabulary. We knew them as bums and hobos and street people. Now they’re the unhoused.

In Bozeman, where living on the street has become perfectly acceptable, tents, camp trailers and motor homes line the undeveloped area around Target and Costco. There’s a soup kitchen and shelter available.

It’s a classic example of build it and they will come.

When I first began working at the Bozeman Chronicle in 1987 I was seated near the police scanner. I well remember hearing the standard response to complaints of vagrants or transients in town: buy them a bus ticket and send them down the road. Bozeman, at that time had nothing to offer. Billings, Butte and Missoula did.

Hitchhiking across the country as a young man, I was also escorted out of a few towns, although I was never given a bus ticket.

In the recent KPAX television interview of an unhoused man in Missoula, he warned that it could happen to you.

“You never know when the carpet’s going to be pulled out from under you,” said the 74-year-old, who works corralling shopping carts in a parking lot.

Having sympathy for the unhoused at the same time businesses are cutting hours because of a lack of workers is difficult.

Moving shopping carts isn’t going to pay the rent. It never has.

Sometimes you just need to be sent on down the road.

It worked for me.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]