ISOTROPIC IS A thousand-dollar word that refers to something being identical in every direction. Astronomers invented the term. In the starkness of space, there is no up or down, east or west. Everything is stars, darkness and the whirl of cosmic activity. It’s a directionless void, savage in its eternal beauty. Here on the frozen platter of the lake, with the mountains hulked up around me, I get a sense of that. Spring’s coming, and the dog and I have ventured out while the ice still holds, to see it all from the middle. White. Unbroken. The sky above us is grey, tufted with cloud. Turning, with my arms spread out and my head thrown back, the world is the same in all directions. It’s a heady and unsettling feeling.
A life can be isotropic, too. We’ve discovered that, Deb and I, in the years since she bought the rooming house. There’s room for fourteen people to live there, and we’ve seen many folks come and go, most of them unable to adapt to a routine, predictable life. A parade of the invisible.
Before Deb invested in the place, the rooming house had been allowed to decay. The structure was sound enough, but the building had atrophied from a decided lack of care. There was a glumness to it, a sad ambience that spoke of lives left to decompose. The yard was full of broken bicycles, discarded shopping carts, old clothing and glass from broken windows.
Deb was shocked when she saw the inside of the building for the first time. People were living in Third World conditions. Some had nothing to cook on; their stoves had fallen into disrepair, along with their small refrigerators. The place hadn’t been painted in decades, and the thick yellow layer of nicotine cast everything in a hazy kind of light. The floors were filthy, and the bare concrete floor of the central hallway was thick with mould and mud. Some of the tenants were drug addicts. Without any custodial management, they’d grown used to treating their homes as disrespectfully as they did their bodies. Garbage was strewn everywhere, and the front and back doors of the house were left open every night. The place had become a flophouse. People regularly crawled in and out of the first-floor windows, and the address was a regular stop for ambulances and the police.
Some tenants were wrestling with mental health issues. In their obfuscated world, these living conditions were par for the course. They’d grown so used to not having a voice that the idea of complaining, pressing for even the most basic things, was foreign to them. Their battle was for daily survival. They’d been cast adrift by the agencies and institutions that might have helped them. If they were on medication, there was no one around to ensure they actually took it.
Even though I had spent parts of my life on the street, in dire poverty and under the lash of horrific substance abuse, this situation appalled me. I worried that the project was too daunting, too big, might be too draining. But Debra is an amazingly resolute and compassionate person. She set to work to change things: to provide essential services, to clean the place up, to renovate it and to offer her tenants a human presence in the wasteland of their existence.
When she first started showing up there, everybody kept their doors shut like sad, hermetic shutaways. Since it was December when Debra bought the place, she offered every-body a big Christmas dinner that first month. She stuck invitations under everyone’s door and prepared Santa bags for each person. The tenants who did show up for the meal ate quickly, silently for the most part, then retreated back to the safety of their rooms. None of them was comfortable being in company, having their back to an open room, having someone care about them. But gradually, as rooms were cleared of the violent and the actively addicted, as cleanliness and order became the rule, people’s doors opened.
We worked hard at cleaning the place up. We washed walls and painted, scrubbed floors and hung curtains, fixed stoves and plumbing, carpeted hallways and secured the outside doors. Deb screened prospective tenants carefully, looking for people who wanted a way out of their harsh lives. She enforced strict rules of behaviour and decorum and brooked no breaches. Word soon got around that the rooming house was now a lousy place to drink or fix.
But the most important thing she brought to her house was humanity.
No one had spoken to these people in a meaningful way for a long time. They’d grown used to remaining mute, shrugging their shoulders in silent surrender. Debra took the time to sit with them in their rooms and listen to what they had to say, no matter how garbled or outright loony it may have been. She really looked at them. She saw those people, and they responded as best they could. There was no miraculous transformation. People continued to get drunk, to fight with each other, to isolate themselves. Some had to be evicted. But over time the house settled. The first year, eighty people came and went in those fourteen rooms. We saw hope flare briefly in some and then die just as quickly, when their desire for change was overpowered by hurt and drugs and booze. But a handful reached out for what we offered. They began to embrace rules and order, to care about a place they could call home, many for the first time. They started to care about themselves.
We’ve learned a lot from this experience. Life can pulverize your spirit. Personal pain, private horrors and agonies manifest themselves in the problems we shake our heads at when we see them from the safety of our cars. The concrete of the street cements in the soul, and it takes time and mercy to reverse the process.
Hopelessness is isotropic: the view in every direction is the same. That’s the nut of it. It’s hard to change when everything you see looks identical. It’s hard to expect more from the world when expectation is the most painful feeling of all. It’s hard to learn to trust when you’ve had to shoulder the weight alone for years and years. But healing happens. We’ve seen it. People stuck on the street are more than statistics or shaded areas of a pie chart. Their spirits ache for the same things ours do, in the comfort and security of our sometimes splendid homes. If we really listened to them, we’d learn that.
My people say that each of us is a story, part of the great, grand tale of humanity. In the end, the story of our time here is all we have. When you offer a tale in the Ojibway manner, you do so for the story’s sake. If we could honour each voice in that way and allow it to resonate, what a wonderful clamour that would be.