Editor’s Note: This is part 2 of a two-part series on youth homelessness in Greater Bangor.
“Streetlight! Hello! Streetlight!”
Dan Fleming, an outreach worker for Shaw House, shouts into the cavernous space underneath a local bridge, his voice competing with the water rushing underneath it. It’s a cold day in early December.
His exclamations are met with the silence.
Cars pass overhead, belching exhaust on the bridge that is often someone’s shelter.
Fleming always announces himself before entering a space where the homeless take refuge so others know who he is, and that he’s there to help. His job is to canvass the streets of Greater Bangor in search of homeless youth.
“People drive over this all day long and there’s people living under here constantly,” Fleming said as he looked around the makeshift living space.
There are two mattresses lying on the cold ground and a tattered blanket. Some trash is scattered about. A pack of cigarettes is stashed on a small ledge, protected by the bridge above.
“I will find all these remnants of their life and start to piece things together,” Fleming said. “I’m a reader. I want to know people’s stories. I piece together an idea of who this person could be.”
Fleming has never met the person who lives under this bridge. But if he did he would introduce himself. He would tell them what he does as an outreach worker for Shaw House. He would offer him or her food and mittens to stay warm.
Every so often he’ll leave a business card. Just in case.
“I’m guessing this is probably an adult, but you never know,” he said as he made his way back up the steep embankment and to the van he drives around Greater Bangor.
As an outreach worker for Shaw House on Union Street in Bangor, there’s no such thing as an average day. Fleming could spend an entire eight hours exploring all the places where homeless youth tend to congregate. He carries around a backpack filled with things: Pop-Tarts, hats, socks and shampoo. He gives it to those who need it. And nudges them toward coming to Shaw House — a warm place with a good meal.
Fleming visits different places every day. He pulls into the driveways of abandoned houses. He walks down barely visible paths of trodden grass that lead to areas littered with empty beer cans and torn blue tarps.
He knows about Bangor’s invisible youth. He knows about Bangor’s invisible places.
And there are things he has seen that some can’t stomach.
“We had one intern who asked to be switched off [to shadow a different position] the first day. I took her to this one place and I told her ‘there was this person and we thought he was dead one time we were out here.’”
For the most part, when Fleming encounters the homeless, they just want to be left alone. He doesn’t just find homeless youth. He also deals with adults at times.
But some are confrontational. Some have pulled knives.
“Usually, it’s not a big deal,” he said. “They’re just putting it up for show.”
He pulls his van into the driveway of a house with boarded up windows. The storm cellar entrance has been pried open, likely by homeless people desperate for a place to keep warm.
“Usually, they keep toward the basement because there’s less windows, so people can’t see them. They can make fires to stay warm … it’s incredibly dangerous,” Fleming said. “[There was] a kid who was in New Hampshire and actually died that way. He started a fire to keep warm and the whole house burned down while he was sleeping.”
Fleming goes out to these places by himself for the most part. He’s had partners in the past, but the job gets to people.
“It’s not for everybody,” he said.
In the wintertime, it’s rare to see homeless youth out and about.
“This time of year they’re usually in people’s apartments more or less,” Fleming said.
But some don’t have friends with apartments to stay in. Some have to find other ways to stay warm.
For those, the bleak situation can lead to them giving up their bodies in exchange for shelter, a practice known as survival sex.
According to Fleming, Shaw House recently had a couple girls come back who had been participating in survival sex. In need of a place to stay warm and food to eat, they’d traded sex for basic human needs while on the street.
Fleming was talking with one of the girls recently.
“I’m like ‘what’s this guy’s name that you’ve been staying with?’” Fleming said, recounting the conversation.
“‘I have no idea what his name is,’” she answered, Fleming recalled.
“That’s an awful thing to hear from a kid. This guy’s like 45 and she’s like ‘well, he’s nice enough.’ If you’re saying that, that means I’m going to think he’s the worst human possible,” Fleming said.
“It’s just awful to hear how normal it becomes … For many of them it becomes no big deal anymore.”
The Clothesline Project
At Shaw House in a room filled with tools for learning, the door is wide open. The silence that accompanies studying is punctuated by the “tick tick tick” of fingertips on keyboards.
Inside, a number of young people sit at work, waiting for one particular person undertaking one particular project to come in from his preparations outside.
Carleton Project educator Christopher Betts strums a ukulele happily as he wanders around the room, peering over the shoulders of his students every so often.
A young man named Gage enters the room and everyone looks up.
“Should be all set,” he said, moving to a table piled high with T-shirts for his senior project.
Eventually, he and the others move outside where a clothesline awaits, facing the road. He and the others start pinning up T-shirts, one at a time, with clothespins. Cars pass by and begin to slow down to get a look.
The Clothesline Project began in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and addresses violence against women, who express their emotions by decorating a shirt. Many of the T-shirts were decorated by residents of Shaw House, who participated in Gage’s undertaking and helped to make it a reality.
Each T-shirt color has a special meaning. White represents those who’ve died because of violence, yellow and beige represents those who’ve been battered or assaulted, red, pink and orange are for survivors of rape and sexual assault, and the list goes on. Incest and sexual abuse, those attacked because of their sexual orientation or for political reasons — they’re all represented on the clothesline. Each T-shirt is a testament to those who have suffered at the hands of another.
Gage wanted his senior project, which he worked on for two months, to hold some kind of importance.
“I saw it as an opportunity to make people more aware,” he said.
Though he said he hasn’t had personal experiences with domestic violence, it isn’t far removed from his life.
“I have friends who have gone through it,” he said.
Each shirt has something written on it. One in particular caught his eye as he pinned them up for others to see.
It said: “I’ve lost my job, house, friends, vehicle, money, children, strength, faith, joy, life. All because I loved you.”
The woods became his home
For kids like Alex, a young man with shaggy, dark hair and kind eyes, Shaw House was a refuge when life turned ugly.
When he was 14, Alex was kicked out because his father’s significant other didn’t want him there.
“She didn’t want me in the house. I don’t know why … I was traded off for whatever reason,” he said.
So Alex, a soft-spoken young man, went to live in the woods, trapping and hunting squirrels for food and stealing whatever else he needed. He used a local beach to bathe.
“I really had nowhere to go,” he said.
But it’s been years since those days in the woods. Now Alex is in foster care and working toward living independently.
Alex has experienced a lot in his short lifetime. He spent time in a juvenile detention center for joyriding in someone’s else’s truck. He has served probation. He eventually was brought to Shaw House, but so many details of his journey have faded. He doesn’t talk about it much, and he’s been in so many places he has trouble putting the entire story together sometimes.
Throughout his journey he hasn’t taken much with him, just a few important items. He’s hauled around a bag full of clothes, knick knacks and keepsakes — things that help him remember who he is and where he has been.
Shaw House provided a safe place for Alex when he needed it.
“I would always think I was a little kid playing pretend,” he said quietly, thinking back to the days when he was homeless and living alone in the woods.
But he struggles to explain Shaw House’s importance in his life.
“I don’t think I’ll know what Shaw House means to me until the day I never come back,” he said.
For information about Shaw House, visit theshawhouse.org.
