TENT LIFE No.1

I regularly count things as a calming practice. I count things like cans of tuna, folded wash cloths, dogs on a leash, protest signs, and cybertrucks. It’s easy to count things in a check-out line at the grocery store, a stop-light, or waiting for a burger, but it’s hard to count when you’re behind the wheel of a car, paying attention to traffic. Not long ago, an important errand had me driving from my mom’s home in National City, California, to a location on 6^th Avenue, downtown, San Diego. This uneventful sixteen-mile round trip was on California Interstate-5, exit 10 to 16B and back, viva la map nerds. I took my wife along for the ride and asked her to count as many “homeless” freeway encampments as she could see from her car window. I asked for help with this count not for calming, but because I want to know how many of my neighbors are living on this part of the 151 “city” miles of the nearly four hundred thousand state highway miles. I wonder about this a lot, especially while driving.

During that trip, my wife documented 26 northbound and 19 southbound encampments, respectively, calculating 45 sites visible from travel lanes. She reported each location consisted of one to three or more tents, and all were mixtures of blue, brown and silver tarps, pop-up and pitch tents, flat pieces of cardboard, various scraps of wood, miscellaneous umbrellas and large pieces of heavy mil plastic. I wondered how many more encampments were outside her line of site.  I’d like to know because she and I also live in a tent, but ours is set up on a concrete patio in my mother’s back yard, several blocks from the freeway.

If there are actual, real-time counts of beating hearts living on interstate locations like the landscape surrounding on and off ramps, overpasses or under bridges, I haven’t seen it. I’d sure like to know how many grandparents, military vets or disabled citizens sleep in tents set up in swales, catchment areas, or erosion control slopes, cradled next to passing cars. There must have been at least one hundred persons represented in those 45 encampments. How many more beating hearts did we not see? How many people do not have a mom’s backyard to pitch a last-ditch effort to stave off homelessness? Sad emoji.

My wife and I, along with our two poorly behaved dogs, have lived in a 10’ x 12’ tent for a year now, starting a few days before my sixty-third birthday. For us, the move was the best (and only) solution to fend off “official homelessness” after the house we rented for seven years sold for cash, within hours of being put on the market. The goodie bag from that surprise party was a ninety-day notice to vacate the premise during which time we could not find one single afford-able home to rent for ourselves, our neurodiverse young adult son and our canine companions.

 By changing our housing status from sheltered renters to some of the 181,399 unhoused Californians, we have joined in laying claim to 28% of the nation’s total homeless population which I’m told is nearly a 40% increase from five years ago [Cal Matters, Marisa Kendall, January 26, 2024.] We know the number of un-housed beating hearts only because every other January, thousands of volunteers visit tents, knock on the doors of parked campers and cars and explore along creek beds and other public spaces with the goal of reckoning the state’s homeless population. This bi-annual calculation is a federal mandate for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development which in turn, conducts a “point-in-time” count of the country’s homeless to submit to the United States Congress. This number is used for things like problem solving, funding, and political commentary.  I used to work for non-profits that helped count persons unhoused. It’s weird to be considered on the other side of the tally.

The tent that shelters my wife and I is made of lightweight canvas held in place with inflatable ribs, creating a gable roof, like a peaked attic, which provides a narrow, 5’ 5” ceiling straight down the middle. This means the space can accommodate our 5’ 2” skeletons, but not our son’s 6’ 2” frame.  The nearest shelter that accommodates his height (along with an inflatable bed, small dresser, and PlayStation) is an  8’ x 10’ corner of my mother’s bonus room, twelve feet from our tent. Here is where our young adult child safely sleeps, which affords his moms a whopping measure relief.

Living inside a steeple shaped tent requires you to squat, kneel, crawl, bend and fold yourself into shapes that accommodate available space. If there is a standing zone in which you fit, you end up hitting your head on the ribbing as often as you are successfully vertical. My wife, has navigated tent life as fuck, thriving with an arthritic knee, treatment resistant depression, assorted sleeping disorders and a highly introverted personality. And yet, we flourish because we live within the bounds of radical hospitality. We have a safe place to lay our heads and are with the ones we love. The world burns and yet we do not have to live in fear of suffering an abatement sweep because my mother is kick-ass good trouble, and our tent is safe.

The dumpster fires of the world burn brightly and yet, inside the tent, it is never dark, nor is it ever quiet. Any given night you wake up to the sound of a street drag race, the hydraulics of low-riders, sirens, train-whistles, black-market fire-works, helicopters, barking dogs and howling coyotes or the steady, quiet, drip from condensation on the tent roof. Busy nights have all of these and more going on. There is no “good night sleep” with tent life, but there are moments of sound rest. I can’t imagine the noise of sleeping on a freeway embankment. Perhaps it becomes an overwhelming barrage of white noise, like a sound machine set to ocean waves, playing too loud.

Tent life is one without doors, walls, an actual ceiling, running water, plumbing or a bed. Life unfolds in a 120 Sq. Ft. footprint, where we sleep on cots, lay awake in never darkness, eat our meals, argue, laugh, review our calendar, pay bills, strategize our parenting, change our clothes, and catch up on the news of the day. It’s true that our household is set up under a veil of vulnerability, (it’s a tent you know) but it is also true that my wife and I are not relentlessly exposed to the elements like homeless senior citizens, sitting on the shadeless edge of an empty parking lot. Our life is situated private like, behind an old, vine covered fence, on a fancy slab of concrete at an equal distance between California’s I-5 and I-805.

My personal preference is to spend my life outside of buildings and I am damn lucky to be protected by the designation of making that life happen on non-public property. When I can sleep, I am safely tent ensconced. Unlike other families that have been pushed into tent life, we are hosted by a kindhearted woman, listed in doctor notes as “pleasant.” My mother not only happily provides equal measures of good trouble, wi-fi and an extension cord, along with kitchen and bathroom privileges, a washer and dryer, but most importantly, she has provided the corner of a spare room where our kid can lay his head. Mom is all about this, because, at eighty-three years old, she does not take shit from anyone and does what she wants. She also has a deep understanding of what tent life would be like for an autistic young adult who lacks the sensory skill management or stamina required for such a task. Plus, she is fully stocked in the door, wall, ceiling, running water, plumbing and bed departments. The gratitude I have for our son’s safety and comfort is the profound header of my daily asset column. In comparison, the liability column looks ridiculously lean; tent life is often damp, cold, usually dirty, and always noisy. Of course it is. It’s a frickin’ tent.

Before this writing, it was not common knowledge that I lived in a tent. When most people learn the house my family rented was sold out from under us last year, I am met with a facial flood of concern, surprise, doubt, and judgement spilling forth with any number of standard responses. This vocal tapestry ranges from the embarrassing, “Jesus, Suzette, I had no idea…,” to the unexpected, “My cousin lived on the side of a freeway,” which gives a vastly different vibe than the expected hip response, “Glamping? How cool is that?” It is probably not legal to be living in a tent in my mother’s backyard, and I sometimes have to coach myself to remain calm when the helicopters make night runs over our neighborhood. Then I remember not to worry because my mom does not take shit from anyone and does what she wants.

From our tent’s longitude and latitude, we see whirlybirds half a dozen times a day, seven days a week. They also see us. Sometimes I wave. Sometimes I give them the middle finger. Mostly I go on about my business and hope they are not watching us. Depending on the color and shape of the helicopter, our daytime airspace is frequented by the United States Coast Guard (orange), USN (white), generic military or fire fighter (grey), local police department (blue), Life Flight (red, white, and blue), news & traffic (red) and other, unmarked vehicles (black). At night, one can only assume. The other evening, we were served a good thirty minutes of tight circling and chanting from five hundred feet above our heads “…if you do not…(electronic static)…dog…(electronic static) …will bite you….” We were amazed at how clearly these words glided downward when usually it is more like “SCREECH … long, black … SCREECH … wtf? … glasses … huh? … SCREECH … jacket … 911 … SCREECH.”

Sometimes I wonder if helicopters will be used to round up herds of people in the middle of the night like an all too plausible studio release disaster genre. I hear them, in the hours after midnight, choppers rumbling low, gliding over the inked-out landscape. I wonder how many of my neighbors know about these terrifying, wee hour flights. Can they be heard through a brick-and-mortar wall or just through the side of a canvas tent? I wonder if these regular witching hour tours are part of a larger strategy of practice runs, testing flight plans for herding people. I wonder if a zombie apocalypse does drop, how long will the current stores of jet fuel last to operate the birds? I prove to myself, yet again, I have a blackbelt in rumination. I look around the dark for something inside the tent to count, to calm myself.

When the helicopters pass over at 3am, I am left awake in their wake, so naturally, I begin to wonder how many mothers pray they can keep their sons and daughters from being “disappeared” by an increasingly evil empire. I feel the need to orient myself. What year is this? Who is the pre$idont? I surprise myself with this self-inflicted gut punch. What would I myself do if they came to the door for my son or my sister or wife or mother? Or me. Could I use my elbows and feet to physically stop them, like scolding a helicopter out of the sky? There is nothing to count but fingers and interdigits as these intrusive thoughts spread like an oil slick. After an hour of these terrifying thoughts, I do the heavy lifting of changing mental focus.

I wonder what Pedro Pascal smells like. I bet he smells like rain. I have not listened to You Look Like Rain by Morphine for years. There was a time in my life that song was on repeat four-evah. I close my eyes and see Pedro’s smiling face. I wonder if I will ever sleep inside four walls again. Before I stopped working, I wondered about how to best champion clean and sober teen moms, or the safest way to connect sex workers or undocumented minors with emergency food and shelter. I wondered if parents were ready to learn about mental health conditions and I wondered why so few doctors understood the importance of teaching reproductive health to teenagers in psychiatric hospitals. Today, my retired ass sometimes wonders why I wondered any of that, because it does not seem to have made a difference. At all.

Copyright 2025 Suzette Partido

Work in process