“When I moved to Portland, I didn’t know anyone,” Stacey Heath, Street Roots board chair, told me.
Then she met Bruce Heino. It was 2009.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. This column represents her views.
At first, she was simply buying newspapers from him when she picked up groceries at New Seasons. If she started to buy the same paper twice, he would remind her. During one conversation, she mentioned her sister was visiting. Bruce followed up the next time, asking about her sister.
She realized he was paying attention, and she felt seen.
“It was just this whole kind of process where he became the person who asked about my life,” Stacey said.
Bruce, who grew up in a fishing town on the Olympic Peninsula, cheered on the Seattle Mariners — so they’d chat about baseball. Stacey was cooking a lot, so she began cooking extra portions for him.
“If I was making ratatouille, I would make extra for him,” Stacey said.
At Street Roots, we value relation: it’s important we know each other across differences. Most encounters between a Street Roots vendor and a customer are brief, but they add up. These relationships can, at times, transform how we know ourselves.
“Even though I certainly had my hard times in my life, I had pushed them out of my mind,” Stacey said of moving into more stability than she had early in life. “I had convinced myself I had somehow done it all by myself.”
Through her relationship with Bruce, she began to see himself in her and herself in him. As she put it, “His story was my story.”
“The mirror is there,” Stacey explained of coming to recognize one’s self in others. “They are you, and you are them.”
It was through Bruce that Stacey began volunteering at Street Roots. Later, she joined the board, and was elected board chair in 2019. Her commitment and understanding of change have helped us navigate these turbulent times, and her leadership is informed by how she navigates the city as if among friends. Whether or not she knows people sleeping in tents, the city is familiar. It is full of people with whom to be in relation; the little mirrors are everywhere.
In 2014, Bruce was diagnosed with stomach cancer. At that point, he was living with Art Garcia, the late Street Roots vendor, columnist and vendor program manager. Art took him to early appointments but developed his own heart struggles, and Stacey stepped in, driving Bruce to chemotherapy. Bruce died in 2015. Stacey continued her friendship with Art, dog sitting for his beloved chihuahua and driving him to doctor’s appointments. Art died in 2021.
Many readers have relationships with vendors that span grief and celebration. The Street Roots office phone rings with calls when people haven’t seen a vendor for a while. We get concerned emails when a vendor’s dog is ill. In the art and poetry zine Street Roots vendors produced last November, Dumpsta D recounts the moment he learned a customer revealed she had survived breast cancer.
These individual relationships inform how one views systems and policy.
“It wasn’t until I got to be friends with Bruce and saw myself in Bruce and Bruce in me that I really understood solidarity,” Stacey said. “And deep solidarity in a way that I really hadn't before. That is something that's available for anybody who wants to take that opportunity.”
By coming to understand aspects of other people’s lives, we are more able to recognize when a policy will cause harm.
If we know someone who sleeps in the day in order to stay vigilant to thwart violence at night, we might think differently about policies that outlaw camping during the daylight hours.
If we know someone waits six hours to get a shower, or struggles with sleep deprivation, or has lost every cherished item through sweeps and theft, or lost their teeth because that’s the cheapest option for tooth pain, we might better understand how demanding mere survival is.
If we witness someone’s love for their dog, or share jokes, or feel seen when someone remembers our name, we can connect and fight for their humanity.
There are so many stories that we never hear at the office, and by sharing them, we can better trace the way our roots wind and tendril around the city, connecting us all.
Please share your stories — the small details, fleeting moments. For while the city grows brittle with fear and anger, it is replenished and grows healthier through your encounters across housing status and social class, and I thank you for that, Street Roots readers.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. 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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