Coming Up Close to Homelessness
The Man in the Dog Park offers the reader a rare window into homeless life. Spurred by a personal relationship with a homeless man who became her co-author, Cathy A. Small takes a compelling look at what it means and what it takes to be homeless. Interviews and encounters with dozens of homeless people lead us into a world that most have never seen. We travel as an intimate observer into the places that many homeless frequent, including a community shelter, a day labor agency, a panhandling corner, a pawn shop, and a HUD housing office.
The raw emotion of The Man in the Dog Park will forever change your appreciation for, and understanding of, a life so many deal with outside of the limelight of contemporary society.
Read on for an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.
It was 2008, we think. Ross doesn’t remember the details of the very first time we met, but I do. I had entered the dog park early, as I do every morning with my three dogs. It must have been getting toward winter, because the park just before 7 am was not yet fully light, and I was aware of the man already seated on a bench inside the park. I had not seen him before. He was in his fifties, with a solid build and a very full, thick graying beard. His army green jacket seemed soiled, and he kept his eyes lowered as I entered. I looked quickly around to see that he had come with a dog, and indeed a mixed chow was sniffing in the distance within the enclosed, treed, block-long rectangle that serves as a municipal dog park. I felt a bit more at ease seeing the dog, but still, I remember making sure, in my old New York way, that I was always closer to the one entrance gate than this other figure in the park.
My fear and discomfort then embarrass me a decade later, now that Ross, the man in the park, has become a friend. It is not that my city radar was fully off-kilter. Ross lived in the woods with his dog; he was also a former felon. It’s just that, like any of our labels, these do not really tell us much of true importance.
At the park, there were many more mornings when Ross and I observed each other before exchanging more than nods. I remember noticing how well Ross cared for his dog, and how much his dog cared for him. Regulars at the dog park quickly become its citizens, sometimes its nosy neighbors. Who cleans up and who doesn’t. Whose dogs are not controlled. Who fills the empty dog bowls with fresh water. Ross was just plain and simple a good citizen and, for me, even a hero. When, one morning, I became unwittingly embedded in a dogfight with five or more snarling, snipping dogs, it was Ross who came running to save me from an errant dog bite.
We exchanged first names, and then some superficial details of our lives, much later deeper words and addresses. Ross lived in the woods outside city limits, because sleeping inside the limits invited the police. He worked, on and off, at different jobs. He was, at points, a day laborer, taking sundry construction jobs. A trucking repair garage hired him after he performed well on a multiple day labor stint, but then the recession . . . and he was among the first to be laid off. At the time I had begun to know him better, he was working as a painter — hired onto a work crew for a multi-home project at the east end of town. When the project ended, so did his job. That was often how it went. Working and not working, with an occasional paycheck going toward a couple of nights at a motel, but mostly storing away some cash for food on the non-working days.
Ross told me that he was married, but his wife had a bed in her mother’s home, some fifty miles away, because she could not abide life in the forest. After three years, having never met the elusive wife, “Wendi,” I had my doubts. The process of friendship was not immediate for either of us.
Ross describes his early days at the park like this:
I came to [this town] looking for work and housing. I had little money and few prospects, a situation I have become accustomed to over the years. It was time to start again. I knew [this place] is blessed with a forest surrounding the city, which was ideal for camping out without being harassed by the police.
So here we are, my dog Cinders and I, working the labor pools during the day and living in the forest. We didn’t know anyone, so it took me a month or two to find my way around town. Finding the “bark park” was a blessing for Cinders. Coming to work with me every day, she just had to sit there, but the park allowed a safe spot for her to run while I could relax a little. It soon became a routine for us, a stop in the morning before work and then again in the late afternoon before heading out into the forest.
The morning stop in particular allowed me to start meeting people. Some people talked to me more than others. And one of those people turned out to be Cathy. It took time, but our conversations got past “hi” and the weather. After I wrote this, Cathy asked me why I said “some people talked to me more than others” rather than “I talked — or liked to talk — to some people more than others.” When I think about it, it’s because being homeless, and sometimes seeming homeless in my appearance or manners, it’s better to leave the approaching up to others. You know what I mean?
The longer I have known Ross, the more his integrity has impressed itself on me. In our conversations together, he shaded his history less than I did. He shared both his military service and his felony conviction; his childhood in Maryland along with his homelessness and his years in jail. The marriage turned out to be true, and when Ross was able to move out of the woods and into a subsidized room in a “welfare motel,” Wendi moved back in with him. As I type this, tomorrow is Christmas Day, and Ross and Wendi are coming to dinner.
