This blog contains a new story and two new writing workshops offered in 2025.( scroll to the bottom for Deb’s Best Ever Memoir WinterWriting workshop(s).
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January 2025.
The night is cold and clear as I stand in the backyard of the Airbnb I am staying at. The dog and I had just come down from Toronto. I watched as Burt went around in what seemed like endless circles looking for the perfect patch of frozen grass to do his business. Encouraging him to ‘hurry up’ only seemed to make him take longer. So I took a deep breath in and looked up at the sky to witness a multitude of stars dot the black sky and the moonlight bouncing off the red barn in front of me, creating a red swatch across the fast-moving moving-river that was in a hurry to go somewhere else.
This is the same river I spent years soaking up the sun on the flat rocks. As a child, Grandpa would take us swimming after finishing haying and we’d sit under the water letting the fast water wash over us thinking we were in Niagara Falls. I took my kids, nieces and nephews here and had the same experience.
My walk down memory lane is suddenly interrupted when, from out of nowhere, a person in a Ski-doo suit appears about a hundred feet away. They are waving a phone above their head, trying to get a signal. There is never a signal in this gully. I move my head a few inches to the left and watch as the person disappears into a white tent covered in orange tarps. From inside their phone lights up the silhouette of two others.
“Hell and damnation. I can’t believe those people are still here in that god-damn tent.” As I silently scream, Burt decides on the perfect place to lift his leg while the people in the tent pass a bong, looking like shadow puppets.
——— November 2024——
Two months earlier I had been in that same backyard, at the same Airbnb, on the same river.
I lived here once. The place looks like any other Eastern Ontario village, you’d go through on a Sunday drive. It’s a mixture of working-class people with big trucks and cute houses. There are a couple of yahoos everybody bitches about, a corner store with every kind of junk food and booze you could want. The best supply of M&M products you’ve ever seen. It’s mixed in with expats from the city who came to retire in restored century homes. There is a park next to the Airbnb, I stay with old swing sets and a huge sign, that says, ‘Pick up your garbage.” The park butts up against the parking lot of the New Methodist Church United Church whose white church sign says.
JESUS CHRIST. GET TO KNOW HIM BEFORE HE COMES BACK. All caps. It reads as more of a threat, than a comfort.
On that day in November, I saw two teenagers raking leaves as two others ran across the yard laughing. They greeted a woman with green hair, a woman around 35, hardly old enough to be their mother. They yelled, “Mom, I can’t believe you are here.” A strange family reunion. A man appeared from behind a bush (he was the same guy as the one in the snowmobile suit I saw in January two months later) He unrolled not one but two tents and began hammering in stakes. It had been a mild fall but it was a bone-chilling day. -12. Not one that even the most intrepid camper would want to camp in this weather.
I thought it was an odd scenario but I was doing a show that night and didn’t give it another thought until I came back around 10 pm. I realized they were staying out there for the night. The wind was up so the cold went right through you.
I promptly emailed the landlady and asked if she knew people were camping in her backyard. She said, yes, and that the woman was an old neighbour and had been evicted because she couldn’t afford rent. She had asked if she and her partner could camp in the back until things turned around.
It’s nothing to see encampments in cities. After COVID even small towns have them now, but having a tent in the backyard unnerved me. It brought up the stark contrast between my reality and theirs. I was in a gorgeous three-bedroom Airbnb. The owner of the Airbnb’s house was empty and those two were in the backyard. And they were out there. There was no bathroom, no place to wash ( except for possibly the river.) No stove, any sort of camping equipment, and no sign they had built a fire in the bonfire pit. From what I saw in the afternoon they were wearing very light clothing. Was there a heater inside the tent? They were going to freeze to death. All night long I made plans. I had some donations from a sock fund I did and well I could donate items from that. Go to the outfitting store down the road and buy overalls that farmers and hunters often wore. I fell asleep making a vow to ask the owner what they needed.
When I wrote to her the next morning she said, she appreciated me wanting to help but, “This woman has a long history of drug use” and ‘Better stay out of it because trouble wherever she goes.”
Why would you let someone stay in your yard if she was ‘so much trouble’?
Before I could get that thought out she said, “She has lived in the village for years and was nice to my daughter when she was little.” So those teenage kids helping pitch the tent were hers. She didn’t look old enough. But maybe this was a vain attempt at being a good mother. I am right next door kids- knock on my tent flap any time of the day or night.”
I did want to know which house. I know she could have been from any walk of life. Drug addiction visits at all levels of economic security and has no respect for good parenting. But all I could think of was that she came from the place on the corner. That place looked like where escaped prisoners would go to hideout from the law. A house with mix-and-match construction and no windows which I could see. A dive. Every old piece of discarded furniture makes up the lawn. There are car seats and a broken car in the front yard, and also a big trailer sits next to the house, which is covered in black smoky patches; maybe the volunteer fire department had done training exercises with it.
There was a one-eyed dog tied up to a chain in the yard, that barks and runs to the end of the chain every time we walk by, hoping this day he will be able to charge. His teeth are bared, and a man who might be forty or seventy, hard to tell, comes to the door with a bloated belly and skinny legs like he was on an Oxfam commercial. He whistles and says, “Hey Patch, settle down girl.”
I reasoned if that was her home originally, the tent might be a step up.
After I spoke to the Airbnb owner, I emailed my cousin a social worker in the area to see if anybody would come out to pay a visit. Maybe someone could provide some help for them; food, sleeping bags or camping gear. Even a church group could help with temporary solutions. Jen explained that rural poverty was challenging as it looks different than urban poverty While urban homelessness involves shelters and encampments, often in rural communities people live rough in trailers, are holed up in outbuildings on a farm, and live in lean-tos in the woods outside of town. Some people couch surf at the mercy of whoever their latest host is. Undr-employed and under-sheltered means shelter is precarious at all times.
That is why people that work in that community ask we don’t call people, homeless. ( or The Homeless as you often hear. The Homeless sounds like it’s a sector of the society that you can’t escape from- some nationality. Or that everybody is painted with the same brush.
It’s better to refer to people as experiencing homelessness or as being under-sheltered. This is not just a matter of semantics or political correctness. People often have shelter and then lose it for a myriad of reasons. It’s a vicious cycle.
In November, I saw the tent and left the next day. I was at the end of a comedy show tour and I went straight into a fundraising drive. For many years every December, I organized a thing I called The Secret Santa Sock Fund. I collect money from friends (and FB family) to buy socks and sleeping bags. I give directly to organizations that do out-of-the-cold programs and city outreach. I am not afraid of talking to people on the street. I have learned so much. I’ve been sworn at, thanked. Some days I find my efforts futile and the next futile. Some days it feels like I am pissing on an oil fire. Other days I find it heartening to see the humanity in people who give and those who receive.
By the end of the month, it was particularly successful and I got a lot of accolades for being a ‘good person’.” One friend called me an angel. “A Christmas angel.” Pshaw I said. But inside I was chuffed and mainlining compliments.
Now it was January and I was back at the Airbnb. I came here tired. I wanted time off. I was exhausted both physically and mentally. I needed a break to do nothing, to have no daily to-do list. I didn’t want to make New Year’s resolutions or improve upon myself in any way. I planned to walk the trail, go to lunch with family and catch up on the gossip. It had been a busy news week. Incoming President FrumyDeBrump insisted Canada would become the 51st state, Justin stepped down as Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter’s funeral happened, which seemed to mark the end of decency, and I felt the world was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. So when I rebooked the place didn’t occur to me to ask if the backyard dwellers would still be there in that God-damn tent. ( in weather that was now -19 C)
I tried to shame myself. Lots of people camp. Would I judge them if they were in a trailer? Or a tiny house? Down the road, someone on Airbnb rented an upscale Yurt. When I looked at the pictures, on the site I remember thinking it looked gorgeous. The ad said it was off the grid a perfect respite from the rest of the world. Why could I think that’s what ‘my tent people were doing? Maybe they were having a respite from reality. But my tent people weren’t off the grid. ( yes I called them my tent people.) They had cell phones and were connected to the Aibrnb’s Wifi. Likely they have a data plan to contact the drug dealer If you are a heroin addict you need a drug dealer. Is there a guy in the village or do they order in? I Google where small-town people get their heroin.
A.I. said that small-town dealers will Uber your stash to you. You have to take your garbage to the dump but you can get Door Dash your drugs.
Addiction always triggers me. I am a recovered alcoholic so I am prone to becoming obsessed with others addictions. There is something about someone taking shit that can kill them that undoes me mentally. And no, I don’t hate the addict but I hate what addiction does to them. It makes people feral. It hurts the people that try to help them. Especially I hate what it does to the family who loves them. I have so many people I know who offered endless compassion and cash and seem to endure years of abuse and heartbreak.
What kind of drug addicts are they? Heroin or Fentanyl.
Hey Siri, how can you tell if someone uses heroin or fentanyl??
A.I. says: Fentanyl addicts twitch and heroin addicts nod off.
That makes sense. That’s why it’s called, the nod. The heroin addicts inject and then halfway through a thought they nod out, just like Aunt Helen who had narcolepsy, used to do.
They never leave the tent so I decide it’s heroin.
Siri says, “Nodding out is the first step toward falling asleep and never waking up again.”
Well, they better not die…
I wish I had left that thought there. I would have looked like a kind person.
But I added….not while I am here.
The owner told me an ambulance has been called once already since they first set up.
She also says that the green-haired woman had kidney stones and she had to take her to the hospital.
“Deb it’s terrible to be sick with kidney stones when you live in a tent.”
Do you know what helps with kidney stones, though? Heroin!
Then I wondered what they ate. If they ate. I didn’t see them cook anything even with the late-night campfires they had begun to have.
They have to eat. It wouldn’t be endorsing anything if I could cook them something. I could leave it by their tent door. But what? Salty or sweet? If they were pot smokers, I’d know either would work. They could use a good breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.
“Siri, what do heroin addicts eat for breakfast?”
God almighty what am I doing? I am supposed to be on vacation. I don’t want to think about their breakfast choices.
This was followed by guilt, more guilt followed by white privilege ( they were white too so, is that WHITE privilege?)
“Kimmett I guess you don’t mind helping the poor. You don’t want them in your backyard.
I then called my friend Celia who works in this kind of community and when told her the whole story I said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well maybe you don’t have to do anything for them, maybe you could just walk beside them and help if they ask.”
The thing was they were not asking me for anything. Most days I didn’t see them come out of the tent. They were quiet. They were not doing anything wrong. At all.
Over the next few days, I pretended they were just like any other neighbours. When friends and family, visited me they’d look out my big picture window. “What is that tent for?” And I’d say, ‘Oh that. Well, those are my neighbours who live in the tent.” As if it was a special feature of my Airbnb. ‘Along with the view of the beautiful river, you got to experience rural poverty up close and personal for all for one low price.’ I took my kids on a Farm Vacation once. Where we got to watch farmers milk cows, and make cheese. Maybe Airbnb could do the same.
Yes, I made jokes.
I wrote down ideas for a story. Maybe the universe brought this idea for me to explore my own ambivalence more fully.
Maybe I could write a movie or a TV show.
I was imagining different versions of how the story could play out.
In the TV version, I’d invite them in for dinner. Over a delicious casserole, they’d tell me their story. A story of abuse, neglect, syndromes and spectrums. We’d cry and connect. And in the closing shot, they’d go back to their tent and I’d leave the Airbnb with a newfound understanding of humanity.
What happened was far less noble. In reality, I cut my vacation short. early. One day I woke up in a terrible mood and screamed out “I can’t take it anymore,” I packed in a fury.
I emailed the owner. I reprimanded her for not letting me know the tent people would be there. She wrote back, “I thought you were sympathetic.”
I am. I am sympathetic. I am a God damn angel.
But I couldn’t escape from the reality of what is going on in our communities.
As I drove westbound on the 401, the 6 a.m. news on CBC radio reported that poverty had increased by 400 percent in rural communities in Ontario since 2020.
To add more fuel to the pending insanity, the LA fires had people on the run.
How long before many more of us will be climate refugees?
I turned off the radio. I deactivated Facebook at the next OnRoute. As I drove along I realized that I was confused by my emotions. So often today I am being asked to hold two uncomfortable and opposing truths. One the village is beautiful and in nature and two there is a drug problem. And even though I understand some of the reasons There was a compassion gap inside of me. I had a hard time with this drug use. I knew it was addiction and I hated the addiction simultaneously. I was compassionate sometimes and sometimes I wanted to tune it out and have it all go away.
That is normal I guess.
Some days I can tune in and help. And other days I have to walk away.
I do feel this gap is where we are challenged to exist.
Maybe I will get better at it in the next year, but I have stopped holding out hope for any massive improvement on my part.
I pulled off at my exit, for Kingston Road. Finally, I was back in the city. In ‘the beaches’.
Home, sweet home, where the tents are not in my backyard, because I live in an apartment building.
There are tents down at the beach. I don’t mind ‘my beach tent people’, I can walk by and think that’s too bad then I can go to the shoreline and bury my head in the sand.
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