Homeless students share their secrets and experiences
Walking from the library to your car can be chilly, but what if you had nowhere to go when the lights went out?
Ben Abbott, Sarah Wagstaff and Eric Woolley have all been homeless during their time as students.
Woolley, a student in Latin and forestry, wound up homeless through a “combination of bad planning and curiosity.” Meanwhile Abbott, a watershed science major, moved out to overcome his fear of aliens and being alone in the woods. For Abbott and the other students, the freedom of homelessness was appealing.
“It really is a good feeling to go anywhere,” Abbottt said.
“Some people are limited. They say, ‘I can’t go there.’ I don’t have a house,” said Wagstaff, a double major in Spanish and forestry.
She saw a homeless person for the first time when she was 17 and said she really wanted to know what that was like.
“I thought about other people’s reaction to homeless people, but maybe that person likes being homeless or they can’t find a job,” she said. So, she decided to try it for herself. But when Wagstaff told her mom, “she freaked out and tried to talk me out of it, and made me get a cell phone.”
Some people may think that being homeless is limiting or wonder why a person would choose such a lifestyle. For Abbott, the choice was simple. He said, “Those things which we consider luxuries become responsibilities.”
Woolley said, “I was just talking about my house and how we had 34 places to sit and a projector, but none of those things make me any happier. But they do help pass the time.”
Their lives are not the everyday camping experience. Logan gets cold, and each of these students pushed the limits on how much cold they could tolerate.
Most nights Abbott, Wagstaff and Woolley stay in the library or the computer lab until they close and then go find a place to camp.
“What’s the point of going out any earlier? You aren’t sleeping. It’s so cold, so why would you leave the warmth?” Woolley said.
When Abbott first started to live homeless, he lugged around a tent and a huge, yellow Army-surplus sleeping bag, but after a while, he ditched the tent and used only a tarp to keep dry. Abbott said he when it got really cold outside, he could tell if he had eaten high calorie foods that day to help keep warm through the night.
Sometimes to keep warm, Wagstaff would do push-ups until she could fall back asleep. At first, Wagstaff had an old tent from youth camp that she would carry around, but she started to realize that she did not get any warmth from it. The first time she was going to camp without her tent, she had met Abbott, and they were going to camp next to each other.
When she saw Abbott had a tarp, she remembered thinking that would be a good idea, and she just laid out her sleeping bag right to next him. That night it snowed.
She said, “I remembered waking up and thinking this was kinda nice and heavy and wet. But I was so mad, my first night sleeping without a tent and it snowed.”
Wagstaff lived outside for seven months and carried everything in a big backpack. The hardest thing about homelessness is the absences of social interaction, she said.
These students go to school, to work and then do homework in the library, so they saw people. But without roommates, Wagstaff said it was hard to interact with others very much.
“I used to always skip anything I had to do for school if I was invited to anything social,” Wagstaff said.
One good thing about living outside is never having to worry about an alarm clock because of the sun, Abbott said, and he believes the best form of sleep is outside rather than indoors.
“Caves with lights, no wonder we feel cut off from nature,” Abbott said.
Abbot said the wildlife has begun adapt to him. He said every night a little fox waits for him at the rock slide just up Logan Canyon and it walks with him to his campsite.
Many things that most consider mundane were missed by these students who refuse to pay rent.
Abbott uses many resources on campus to help stay clean and warm his food.
“Just the other day I was using the microwave, and I felt a special affinity for the microwave in the TSC,” Abbott said.
“I missed carpet, doorknobs and a toaster,” Wagstaff said.
“And I really missed having some place to get dry,” Wolley said, “because once your stuff gets wet, it is wet for like a week.”
Abbott added, “One time my sleeping bag mildewed, and it smelled like blood and dog poop.”
-skjohnson@cc.usu.edu