Homeless in RI: Imagine There’s No Bottom – Rev. Duane Clinker

by Rev. Duane Clinker, for RINewsToday

The freezing happens slowly at first. It is night and you have not been able to find a shelter.

Your tent and meager belongings were destroyed a few days ago by the authorities, so tonight you walk the now deserted streets alone.

Stores are already closed; buses have stopped running. A sense of deep loneliness grabs at you. You push it away. You will need to stay focused and keep moving to stay warm.

You’re already wearing everything you own, but the frigid gusts of wind lashes at you. The sharpness of it quickly cuts through your clothes. Your face, hands and feet are already stinging. As you round a corner the wind hits you full force and takes your breath. The cold pierces you.

You look in alleys for some escape. Your hands have long ago gone numb and can barely attempt to open the doors you always find locked. You repeat in your mind, “Don’t stop. Keep moving. Find shelter.â€

But, that dumpster is chained. The back of that parked truck is locked. The freezing wind finds you in every corner.

You must keep moving, but your walk has slowed. The freezing climbs – from numb feet up your legs.

You turn your body against the wind, but it blasts through your clothes to the center of your back, and penetrates up and down. Facing the wind it works down from numbing face, down through all the layers to your chest.

Then the shivering starts. Teeth chatter, and face and shoulder shake uncontrollably. The shaking moves to the whole body. You have lost control. You can’t stop it now.

Struggling, you sink down beside a couple of full garbage bags outside a locked dumpster and try to pull them over you. The wind pushes them away and then begins its final work.

A moment of terror and disorientation hits you. You are freezing. The shivering shaking soon slows. It seems as if the freezing blood penetrates the nerves themselves.

The mind itself begins to fade in what feels like comfort before the end.

Last year, the unhoused community counted 54 deaths among its own, related to the cold. Nobody really knows a count. No statistics are released by the state.

A man was found frozen at a bus stop a month ago. People had thought him sleeping. One froze on Washington St. a few weeks later. His last name was not known.

Last week an aged mother and her middle-aged son, having lost their housing drove to a local hospital, perhaps hoping for help. Instead, they were a day or so later found frozen in their car in the parking lot. The Governor made no statement of concern.

In fact, for over a year the Governor has refused to declare a requested state of emergency so that funds could be released to at least stop people from freezing on sidewalks, cars, and in the woods.

At the bottom the deaths begin, and at the top the hearts are frozen.

Hundreds of thousands of Rhode Island people are economically insecure, overwhelmed by rent increases, health care, food, and heat. Our so-called “public utilities†seek another increase which will warm the hearts of their investors no doubt, but make it worse still at the bottom.

And I wonder. . . If the poorest can freeze on the streets, or die for want of other necessities, and government won’t fund a solution, who exactly comes next?

Suppose there is no bottom below which any of us can fall?

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Rev. Duane Clinker is the former pastor of Open Table of Christ in South Providence, RI