OPINION | Nurturing is Max's superpower; he's focused on keeping his wife warm outside
The reason I made this design is my wife lost a half a foot and a third of a leg two years ago to frostbite,” Max told me, holding up a pale purple leg warmer cut from sweatpants.
“She developed sores, and she couldn’t use her prosthetic. She needed something to keep her ‘stubs,’ as she calls them, warm.”
Max married Deanna at the Street Roots office last spring, a joyful morning in the trying early days of the pandemic. Max wore his signature fedora adorned with a feather. Deanna, sitting in her wheelchair, wore a dress in her favorite color, purple, clutching lilacs. The need for a wheelchair is common among unhoused Portlanders; more than 70% report disabilities of some kind.
Max knows I like to sew, so he approached me with his design, but when he first described this to me, I could not picture it. I have not lost my limbs, and I have never survived a winter in a tent.
So he took a Sharpie and marked up the sweat pants, showing me where to sew channels for drawstrings on the top and bottom of each leg and where to create pockets between the fleece and the outer sweat area, so that hand warmers could be inserted.
“That provides heat to her stumps and prevents them from getting overly cold,” Max explained. Sores, he said, won’t heal during cold, wet weather.
“And then gangrene sets in, like it originally did on her legs,” he said, “and they end up having to go in and cut more off.”
It’s going to be a hard winter. Already a man died from the cold in Bend. David Melvin Savory, like Deanna, had each leg amputated. He died in his wheelchair in front of a Rite Aid.
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I think of Max’s nurturing as his superpower. But his inventiveness is more norm than exception among people living outside — people who are endlessly creative, full of passions and aptitudes and skills.
It’s too easy to overlook this vibrant humanity. Last week, I was speaking with a housed man in the community. As we chatted back and forth, I began to realize we were having two entirely different conversations. While we were talking about visible homelessness, I realized he was not talking about the people who were struggling; he was talking about the tents and the visibility of camps as objects on the landscape. And when he was talking about the people, it was more about his fear of what he didn’t know.
Fear can come from a place of the unknown, of uncertainty. Living through a global pandemic, many of us have to recalibrate our relationships to uncertainty. Fear can be overwhelming, and we are challenged to make peace with this uncertainty.
An alternative approach to uncertainty is curiosity. By curiosity I don’t mean nosiness — we each have to resolve ourselves to the humility that we can never actually know the mystery of another person. But curiosity as a form of openness, love.
The person who is struggling to live in a pandemic with no home and no legs and, perhaps, a dependence on substances to medicate through these experiences should not be viewed as an adversary to the person who lives in a house and who has their own quiet struggles. Our fates are dependent on each other.
The winter before us will be difficult — the pandemic, the cold, the poverty. Although we cannot know the lives of every person, we can know that each camp, each tent, is an uneasy shelter for people who have hopes and loves.
Max is in one of them, and he is laser-focused on taking care of Deanna.
“I don’t want them cutting on her anymore,” Max told me.
I thought back to a tender moment in their wedding, when Max leaned over Deanna and sang John Legend’s lyrics: “Give your all to me, I’ll give my all to you.” No holding back, full on love.
Ways you can help
To ensure social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among Portland’s houseless communities, the Joint Office of Homeless Services needs access to large spaces – and more volunteers than ever. Visit multco.us/winter-weather to find ways to support severe winter weather shelters.
• Street Roots distributes large quantities of HotHands hand warmers that Max and hundreds of other people rely on outside. To ship some to our office, please visit our Amazon wish list, or make a direct donation to Street Roots to help us with our winter response.
• If you or someone you know is in need of help this winter, you can find a comprehensive list of resources across the tri-county area in the digital version of Street Roots’ Rose City Resource guide. Physical copies are available at our office in Old Town at 211 NW Davis St.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
Street Roots is an award-winning, weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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