A Meditation on Migration in My Backyard

A tangled-haired woman carrying a bulging plastic shopping bag approached me on the street on a chilly mid-winter morning.  “Do you want to buy a blanket?” she asked, pointing to the crumpled fleece in the bag. It was difficult to understand the malformed words that came from her bruised mouth, and it took me a moment to realize she was panhandling.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” I said as I dug in my purse for a five-dollar bill. She told me she had been living on the streets for two weeks after fleeing a violent relationship that left her with broken bones in her face. On this particular morning, she was in the city’s craft district, trying to sell a cheap blanket to buy a meal. She hadn’t stayed in any of the city’s emergency shelters; instead, she spent her time in the skywalk system when she needed a warm place to sleep. She found it frustrating. “I can’t get any rest. The cops come by every hour and wake you up,” she complained. She pocketed the money I gave her in a dirty puffer coat and shuffled off to a nearby restaurant.

*****

Duluth, Minnesota, a picturesque city perched on a steep hillside overlooking the cold waters of Lake Superior, is an internationally-known destination to witness the wonder of migration. Every fall, an estimated 20,000 birders flock to the twisting Skyline Parkway that traverses Hawk Ridge and train their binoculars on the more than 260,000 birds riding the winds that funnel them down the long shoreline on their way to warmer climes.

Other group flights occur in Duluth, but this regular movement of bodies doesn’t receive the attention of cheerful news reporters.  This migration is the seasonal movement of homeless persons from winter emergency shelters into tents and cars tucked away in the city’s gritty industrial areas or its forested interior. It’s the daily shuffle of the down-on-their-luck from a meal site to a panhandling spot. This type of migration is not celebrated; it doesn’t inspire tourists or invite scientific study.

Migrating birds are heroic and admired. Birds show forethought. They plan to marshal their resources for the coming challenge. They are gluttons, but that’s okay because their hyperphagic overindulging prepares them for future needs. Their bodies undergo miraculous physiological changes, withering in some areas, growing in others. In some species, the liver, kidneys, and digestive tract shrink while the size and strength of the heart and pectoral muscles increase.

People living in tents and cars are criticized for their bird-brained way of preparing for life. They don’t eat healthy food. They waste money on booze and drugs. They have no savings, no bank of stored-up financial fat. They just quickly use up whatever is given to them. Their bodies are beaten, cut, punctured, raped, ravaged; bodies that wear out before their time from the weight of an itinerant lifestyle.

The birds’ flight is a hero’s journey. These brave travelers battle the demons of weather, habitat loss, predators, wind turbines, light pollution. A break in one link in the chain of migration, such as an oil spill in an important coastal resting spot, exposes the vulnerability of these intrepid travelers. One bad break can result in a hard landing, a dangerous plummet from which there is no rescue, and we all grieve.

I can’t recall reading the obituary of a homeless person.

*****

It’s not easy being without a warm, indoor perch in Duluth in the winter. The city is one of the coldest cities in the nation; its maximum daily temperature remains below freezing for 106 days a year. The city’s emergency overnight shelters are open from November to April, and every year when the spring equinox arrives, many people who rely on shelters to escape the bitter cold have already moved outdoors full-time. They have taken flight to a place of their own.

The unusually snowy winter of 2022-23 that produced eleven and a half feet of snow in Duluth slowed the migration of unhoused persons who felt spring fever urging them to leave the confines of over-crowded shelters. Three extra feet of snow that persisted into April threw a wrench in their seasonal plan to shift to outdoor living spaces in encampments under a canopy of trees or overpasses and in nooks and crannies between rocky ledges. Instead, they huddled in the city’s library or skywalks, loitering in coffee shops, flocking to unwelcoming places they didn’t want to be.

The unusually mild and brown weather this winter allowed some unhoused persons to remain hidden in the woods and avoid the everyday shuffle from daytime resting places to a nighttime roost in the emergency shelter downtown. Paradoxically, some of the needy became more visible because the mild winter allowed panhandlers to populate city street corners that are normally vacant during bitterly cold weather. It’s difficult to ignore the presence of the down and out as I run my errands, and I notice most busy shoppers play Minnesota Nice and pretend not to see the beggars. Others are more forceful.

“Get a job!” a motorist yells to a man begging next to a grocery store driveway. Similar sentiments are posted on a Facebook page where someone in Duluth likes to take photos of panhandlers and post them online. I wonder if the person putting up the posts is starting a life list like birders do: Old Man with Black Coat, check; Family Begging Near Walmart, check.

The same morning the abused woman tried to sell me a blanket, I saw two young men loaded down with backpacks, bedding rolls, and duffel bags, standing at a busy intersection in Canal Park, the city’s most popular tourist destination, holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign asking for food and money.  By the afternoon, they were in the city’s main library, coats and gear piled on the floor around them, as they rested near a large window overlooking the harbor.

Advocates for the homeless have been working for decades to find the money, space, and community interest to help unhoused persons start the long-term migration from the streets to a home. It’s a task that’s not high on the list of worries for most Duluthians. The city’s ubiquitous potholes were the top concern in a survey asking residents to rank the city’s most pressing problems.

Fixing potholes is easy. Providing housing for residents at all income levels and fixing the problems that result in homelessness is a bigger hill to climb that requires changes in citizen priorities and changes in the person who is homeless. Expecting someone accustomed to the freedom and isolation of living outdoors to switch to living in a more civilized manner in an apartment or halfway house often fails, said Duluth’s Joel Kilgour, a leader with Stepping On Up, an organization attempting to help people on the lowest rung of life.  “I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know what happens, but after a year on the street, it’s nearly impossible. You can’t live outside for a year without developing some significant problems. Once people’s position becomes chronic, it’s really hard to undo.”

The “wilding” of humans is an old phenomenon and holds a place of fascination in the American narrative. Tales of European settlers captured by Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries became a popular genre, especially if the captive was a white woman. Some of these captives, forced into a way of living foreign to proper society, chose to remain in their new lives, even when allowed to migrate back to white civilization. Once they become wild, not all humans choose to return to an expected path. The same movement away from the expected can be true for animals.

I’m reminded of the popular movie about the process of teaching birds to migrate by having them follow an ultralight aircraft, and how the procedure was used to help reintroduce endangered whooping cranes to the wild. Operation Migration was abandoned in 2015 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that human interaction resulted in cranes that were inattentive parents that did not properly care for their chicks. Once humans intervene, it’s hard to rewild a bird.

*****

It’s easy to distinguish the “civilized” patrons checking out library materials from persons using the building for daytime living space. The homeless, mostly men, have a collapsed, tired look about them, are dressed in multiple layers of heavy clothing, and have small suitcases or backpacks beside them. They lean on tables, hunch over computers as they surf the internet, or sleep slumped in upholstered chairs.

As a voice comes over the public address system announcing that the library is closing, the scattered men, including the two young men who were on the Canal Park corner begging earlier in the day, load up their gear and join a ragged flock leaving the library. Many move eastward in the end-of-the-day migration toward the CHUM emergency overnight shelter, five blocks away.

In contrast, my daily travels are short and easy. I move from the comfort of my bedroom to the bathroom, to the kitchen where there’s fresh food in the refrigerator. It is so simple, but is such a luxury compared to those whose daily migratory patterns involve moving from a tent in the woods or other temporary shelter, to a place for a hot meal, to finding a bathroom, to their “job” of asking for money.

I remember how close I flew to the edge as a young woman when I relied on government assistance to buy formula to feed my baby and get his pediatric immunizations. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this wasn’t the first time my survival and comfort were tenuous. My family was chronically perched on the edge of poverty during my childhood, but my parents were able to hide the signs. We didn’t go hungry because we were lucky enough to live in the country. Like foraging birds, we consumed the bounty of pastures and gardens. Our nutritional status could have been precarious if we had to rely on cash for meat and fresh vegetables.

Years after I graduated from college, my mother told me the university always questioned the monetary amounts she listed on the federal financial aid form. No one in the aid office could believe a family could survive on so little money, but the numbers were real and the resulting Pell Grants allowed me to fly above my parents’ station in life. Am I to be admired because I kept pulling on my bootstraps, or is my value as a human diminished because I took a handout?

Surviving and succeeding on one’s own – the Self-Made Man – is a popular American success myth. We admire the rags-to-riches storyline in movies, sports, business, and popular culture. We love hearing about people who survive against the odds, as long as those lives eventually fit into our preconceived notions of success: a home, a job, self-sufficiency. We don’t admire people who don’t seem to be trying, who aren’t independent.

Birds live on their own without government help, but do they? Would we enjoy watching the thousands that pass by us every year without laws that prohibit the killing of raptors, songbirds, and non-game migratory birds? What would happen if the tracts of land set aside for protected nesting sites and migratory resting stops were razed for human development? Does anyone, even the independent avian traveler, really do it all on their own? Maybe we should admire the homeless as they conduct their daily and seasonal migrations while managing to stay alive, to do it all over again.