A Museum of Natural Wonders: Betty Reid Soskin

West Virginia is a mythical place wildly misunderstood and often overlooked, chock full of natural resources and endless stunning vistas, despite having been ravaged by extractive industries and left to pick up the pieces of the energy transition in real-time. My family comes from West Virginia; from Sicily and Scotland, they settled in the hills of Appalachia, which may have looked a little like the Highlands, a little like Mount Etna. They came for the coal, or the promise of a gainful employment. My grandfather worked in the mines until he worked his way out of them, landing a more sustainable job driving truck. He died of cancer when he was 35. Although I never met him, I looked for him every summer in those misty mountains, winding our way back to Coalton with the windows down, my mom singing along to John Denver. Almost Heaven, West Virginia isn’t just coal mines and country roads. Called the Birthplace of Rivers, the state sits on the Eastern Continental Divide, where 40 rivers and 56,000 miles of streams provide drinking water for millions of people from the Chesapeake Bay out to the Gulf of Mexico.

I met Alan Graham on the other side of a Google search  for sustainable homes for the homeless. I had heard of communities working on innovative housing solutions, like Seattle where people are building tiny homes in their backyards with the help of groups like the The Block Project . But then I stumbled upon Community First! Villag e, an enclave of 400+ chronically homeless residents now living in permanent homes alongside neighbors and friends. I had so many questions. How do you even begin to develop a place like this? How do you manage the ever-evolving needs of a population accustomed to being underserved, disregarded, unwanted? How do you organize systems to support the only approach that could work, a full-scale holistic overhaul of what it means to serve the homeless, and to live in community with one another. Our understanding of homelessness in America varies based on geography, privilege, and personal experience. Even the way we talk about homelessness is fraught with preconceived notions and misconceptions. Do we call people “homeless,” or are they “unhoused?” How many times do we give cash to the guy on the corner before it makes a difference? Do we give him anything at all? If I stop and listen to this person in the parking lot, will they just spin me a story? Are they dangerous? Why are people in the richest country in the world living without shelter? Who is responsible for fixing this? Who decides? I asked all of these questions and then I met Shirley. I'm drinking coffee on a gray winter's morning in Nashville, and from my apartment window I can see the line of traffic on Hermitage Ave spilling into downtown. But today on the sidewalk, there’s a woman in a colorful dress with several bags slung over her shoulders. She’s bending down in the tiny space between the chain link fence and the sidewalk picking up something off the ground, over and over, like she’s harvesting flowers. But nothing grows there. More out of curiosity than generosity, metered with my usual social anxiety, I leave my apartment and cross the street with a cup of coffee and a muffin. I’m not sure if she’s homeless, and I don’t want to offend her, but nobody hangs out on that tiny stretch of sidewalk and it is breakfast time. I introduce myself and we get to talking. Her name is Shirley. She’s just a few years younger than me. She's on the run from a bad relationship in Georgia, but she's had to leave her kids behind and she needs to get them back. I offer to buy her breakfast at the diner next door and she declines, but we agree to meet the next day and talk some more. Oh, and she was collecting tiny leaves to make into paper. I am determined to get her some help. Surely in a town as resourced as Nashville, with a well-connected advocate, it will be simple enough. I start making calls. Nobody can take her in. She isn’t on drugs. She doesn’t have a disability. She isn’t mentally ill. She isn’t an addict. She isn’t a resident of Tennessee, and she might not be an American citizen. Her plan to start a business selling stationery, well that’s the best thing we’ve got. We come to this conclusion over breakfast at McDonalds inside Walmart where we're picking up toiletries and other basics. All her belongings are now temporarily stored in the trunk of my Honda Civic. She asks me to take her to a suburb outside of Nashville. She thinks she might have a lead there, someone who knows where her kids are. We drive for twenty minutes and stop at a library just off the interstate. I help her sign up for an email address. It requires a backup phone number and I enter mine. Is that dangerous? I wonder. Who knows. She struggles to log in on her own and I worry that my messages to her will just sit there, unread, locked behind a password neither of us can remember. And that is what appears to have happened. When we part ways that day she says, "I’ll be back in Nashville soon,” and I say, “Don’t forget to check your email, so we can find each other.” I do see her again, a few days later walking down Hermitage Ave, but I’m late for work and traffic is moving fast. I wave as I drive by, but she doesn’t see me. The next day I buy a cell phone, a pay-by-the-month deal. I want to give it to Shirley so she can call me, or call for help, or maybe even call her kids if she can get their number. I wait by my window but she doesn’t show up. I send email after email. I walk down by the river, under bridges, where people without houses build fires to cook dinner. She’s not there. Then, a huge storm hits Nashville. The river swells. They say a handful of people died down there, homeless people caught in the flood and the high winds. I have no way of knowing where Shirley is. Or if she is still alive. A month goes by and I cancel the cell phone. I hope and pray that she’s made it to Georgia and is living with her kids today. My first direct encounter with homelessness left me feeling helpless. And the helplessness I felt was nothing compared with what Shirley faced daily. I had considered inviting her to stay with me in my tiny studio apartment, but in talking with some friends in social services I was advised against it. I had no idea how hard it is to get up off the streets once you find yourself living there. In the United States, the odds that you or someone you know will end up homeless are as slim as 1 percent of 1 percent. But the chances that you will move from chronic homelessness to a permanently housed situation can seem just as dire.