Rhode Frog

PROVIDENCE –– A homeless man was found dead under an overpass on Eddy Street yesterday morning after a night of bitter cold temperatures.
...Although the man’s name wasn’t released, pending notification of his relatives, the police said they knew him. So did some of the people coming into Crossroads Rhode Island on Broad Street yesterday, where the man is believed to have visited two years ago.
...The night before, 16 people slept in the overflow room, said Crossroads chief operating officer Michelle Wilcox. The women’s shelter was already packed with 61 women –– 40 with their own beds, and the rest sleeping in the living room on chairs. Ten women and 10 men were in beds in the assessment area. It wasn’t just the cold that was driving them inside. Some had lost their apartments when their landlords lost their properties to foreclosure. One man was there when his house was destroyed by a fire. Some had lost their jobs, beginning their slide into homelessness.
And some, such as the man whose body was found on the second day of the new year, have been homeless for a long time, driven by mental illness or substance abuse, or both.
...Across Rhode Island, those who work with the homeless have been seeing a steady increase in the number of people staying in shelters since September 2007, said Jim Rycek, the executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless.
...Despite the lure of hot showers, hot cocoa and a warm place to sleep, some refuse. Some are troubled. Some are afraid. Some try to hide their homelessness from their employers. Some would rather be alone outside than in a shelter surrounded by strangers, Wilcox said.
For one man, it took 28 years of living on the streets before he was ready to move into the shelter at Crossroads. He’s been there only a month and a half. The 63-year-old man, who asked that his name not be used, sleeps in his wheelchair in the glass-fronted lobby, where he can see outside and easily roll out for a smoke.
Before this, he’d also sought shelter under the overpass on Eddy Street, where the other man died. “You gotta have blankets and a sleeping bag, and some place where there’s an overhang, where you won’t get rain or snow,” he said, as he smoked a cigarette outside Crossroads, “or you’ll freeze to death. Other than that, you have to keep moving.”
In winters, he bundled in layers and wore thick gloves. “It’d be cold as heck,” he said. “You’d just keep moving. You go for a walk. You go to any place that’s open, even a gas station, and sit for a minute.”
The homeless learn the places that will take them in –– the churches that allow them to remain in the pews, the all-night restaurants where a dollar for a bottomless cup of coffee meant staying warm in the wee hours, and gas stations that would allow them to come inside for a moment. Some mornings were so cold, this man said, that he’d wake up with frozen sneakers and a water bottle of ice.
Sometimes, the man said, he wondered if he would freeze to death that night.

I used to wonder the same thing about my father, about 5 years ago, when I knew that, whichever city he was in, he was sleeping outside. On cold nights I still think about that. I wonder how many other people know that somewhere, someone they knew, someone they loved, was sleeping outside. Above all I wonder, how can no one else care?