Final Days of a Furlough
I spent the last couple of days of this furlough doing something similar to how I spent the last week and a half of the last long furlough, in 2013 — volunteering my time to a needed cause. Last time, the cause was hunger — I volunteered at a Food Bank in Manassas, Virginia, about 40 miles west of where I live. That brief stint of volunteering led to an every Sunday gig for the next year and a half, driving one of the food bank’s vans around to supermarkets in Manassas, Haymarket, Bristow and Gainesville, collecting food that would otherwise be thrown away, to bring back to the Food Bank, where it got distributed to families in need.
When I started out, I was netting 400–500 pounds of food each Sunday. By the end of the year and a half, the average was up to 1,000–1,500 pounds, and had increased the type of foods donated to include good meat and other deli and dairy items.
This time, the cause was homelessness. It just happened that the last two days of the furlough were the days they do what is called the PIT Count Survey (PIT= Point In Time) of the homeless, each year. I’d heard through my wife that they needed more people to help with that. It involved going out into the woods in and around Manassas, Haymarket and Gainesville, and through parking lots, food establishments and a mall, in search of homeless people to survey. The data from these surveys is used to support funding for programs that provide support to the homeless, as well as to try to establish counts of how many homeless there are, at a given point in time.
We started early, 6:30 a.m., both days, traipsing through the woods in a driving rain the one day, and in the bitter cold the next. We didn’t find many homeless folks in the usual spots, due to the weather conditions, but we did meet up with a number of them at a church in Manassas that provided delicious free lunches every Thursday. I also got to meet some incredible people who provide services to the homeless on a regular basis. Talk about people with hearts of gold. This activity really increased my sense of gratitude for the life that I have. It also gave me some needed perspective.
There was a time in my life when I lived on the streets. It wasn’t long, a total of about two months, but long enough to never forget what that was like. The unsettledness, the not knowing where your next meal was going to come from, where you would be able to sleep, how you would stay safe out there– these were all things you got used to dealing with on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.
In my case, at the time, I was kind of out there by choice, but I was 3,000 miles from home, and hiding from authorities, since I was AWOL from the Navy. I was determined to stay AWOL for 30 days, so I couldn’t be returned to my ship. I had good reason to not want to go back there. I didn’t want to involve anyone else, and get them implicated for sheltering a fugitive, so I chose to live on the streets.
I was about 650 miles from where I planned to turn myself in to authorities, once I had gotten 30 days under my belt. By that time, I had fallen into a pretty good gig, working in a restaurant where I was secretly sleeping at nights. I liked the work, and had just gotten so caught up in what I was doing, I lost track of the time. Honestly, during that period, I went a little insane, and lost track of more than just time. I was lucky I ever made it back from wherever I went during that period. I was somebody else, living a life that had very little resemblance to my own. There was something fresh and exciting about that, but it was also a tough, insane way to live.
What helped to jolt me out of it was some troubling news from back home that somehow made its way to me. I must have made a phone call to my friends in Connecticut to let them know I was okay, when my best friend’s girl friend let me know that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. Back then, such a diagnosis was a death sentence. They told him he could have anywhere from 5 to 10 years to live, but that was about it. As it turned out, he only made it for 2 more years. But that news was enough to shake me out of my temporary state of insanity and realize I needed to get back to being me. Two months had gone by since I went AWOL. I honestly don’t know how 30 days turned into 2 months.
It might have only been 650 miles I had to hitchhike down the west coast to San Francisco Bay, where I planned to turn myself in at Treasure Island, a Naval Separations base at the time, but it took me much further, and longer, to make it back to sanity. I’d gone around a bend that it’s not as easy as that to come back from. I had no idea what lay in store for me over the next months, and years, I spent trying to recover from what I realized was a deadly disease of my own.
Another key turning point for me was when my friend died from his disease. I had a real hard time reconciling why I made it, but he didn’t. I felt deeply that he was the more deserving one to have a long life. I would have welcomed death at the time, and almost did.
Interviewing a homeless fellow from my home town, Pittsburgh, and hearing his hopes of getting off the streets, and a decent job, brought the feelings back that I’d known so well, when I was out there. He had the same dogged survival attitude that I had when I was out there. He had family connections, like I’d had, but like me, then, he had good reasons not to bother them with his current plight.
Since I knew what it felt like, and could feel his struggle, I felt like the interview wasn’t a cold collection of data, and I hoped he felt that way, too. I think he did. He seemed to appreciate that I was willing to listen to his story, after I’d gathered the data they were looking for in the survey. I know I appreciated hearing it. I really hope he makes it back to a life off the streets. He’d been out there for two years, on this “episode of homelessness”, as they called it on the survey form. I really hope it was his final episode of it. It’s a tough life out there — and not all that easy to make it back from.
