One caveat for this piece: I have been a substitute teacher in Lincoln County going on a year, spending many days teaching all manner of classes and special education at elementary and high schools in Toledo.
I’ve taught at all 11 public schools in Lincoln County and at one charter school. I’ve taught in several districts in Clark, Spokane and King counties in Washington, and in the El Paso School District decades ago when I was a college faculty.
Ground-truthing is what it’s called. I want education reform, big time, so what better way to advocate for change than by being in the trenches.
Before meeting a homeless advocate on a sunny May morning in Toledo, a small town just East of Newport on the Oregon Coast, I pass through various doors of synesthesia. Lay of the land — carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrogen sulfide and mercaptans waft in the air. The color green of forests flash. Salmon squirming on my hook early morning fishing. Huge backyard gardens. Elderly people with Scottish and English accents sipping tea. Japanese farmers showing me how to make noodles.
My mother was born in Powell River, British Columbia. The paper mill, once the largest newspaper print mill in the world, ran the town — from the garden club to the ladies’ groups, from the churches to civil life and politics. My grandfather worked there.
I was in Powell River many times as a child visiting grandparents. Those odors stripped paint off automobiles, wilted rose bushes and seeded into the bronchiole of people. My mom lived with emphysema after endless bouts bronchitis as a child. She died of COPD, never a smoker.
Getting the lay of the land was one of the first things taught to me when I was a journalism student in Tucson, Ariz.
Air pollutants by no other name
Fast forward 43 years, and I am still learning the lay of the land. I’m in this Oregon mill town of Toledo, population 3,500, with colliding memories. Those bad air days coating children of Toledo during P.E. and walks home, another image fresh on my mind.
Betty Kamikawa and I talk about that reality — the stench of a paper mill is more than olfactory distress.
She shows a genuine caring on her face, lets loose of an infectious laugh and frequently smiles a lot.
She describes Toledo as beautiful — but warns to think twice about moving here unless you have a wad of cash. “It is expensive. Housing is hard to come by and it will cost you,” she said. “Your medical needs will not necessarily be met.”
I ran into her months ago (before the pandemic lockdown) at a meeting of the Homeless Taskforce in Newport. She is a prominent member of the taskforce and is lobbying for better services for people experiencing homelessness. She also sits on the Toledo City Council.
We quickly hit it off, and she invited me to rendezvous with her at Grace Wins Haven, for which she has been the board president for more than a year. She is proud of the place. She introduced me to the director, Tracy Flowers, who was generous with her time.
“Before the coronavirus, we were serving 20 or 25 meals a day. Now, we are serving 40 or 50 breakfasts and lunches,” Betty said during our most recent meet-up.
Showers, a laundry room, hands on assistance like job leads, sometimes free bus tickets, support and respect — that’s how Betty describes Grace Wins Haven.
“We’ve paid for DMV tags, bus passes. We hand out tents and backpacks.”
I ended up asking her the $64,000 question: How do we get the average person living on the Oregon Coast — in a second home or retired well off — to understand how entrenched the homeless issue is in our society?
“People need to pay attention by meeting these individuals. To understand they are human beings,” she said.
That out of sight, out of mind attitude has engendered a breakdown in services, she stated. No substance abuse rehabilitation services exist in this county. No real mental health services for the unhoused.
She ramifies how unfeeling the systems can be: Betty tells me the county ordered Grace Wins Haven to go to the county fairgrounds and pick up mattresses, carts and containers from when the nonprofit was running the county’s warming shelter there. During the so-called COVID-19 lockdown.
Both Newport’s farmers’ market and the warming shelter have lost that county property as a location for their two services.
We talked about the big changes Betty has seen during her run as a Girl Scout leader for almost 20 years, having testified against a few parents for abuse.
“I bet I’ve gotten to know more than 300 girls. And their families,” she said. “Now some are grown adults with their own children.”
She told me the most prominent shift she’s noticed has been to grandparents, aunts and uncles raising the children. She has seen an increase in the number of houseless youth still enrolled in school.
“Drugs and alcohol. Toledo, like thousands of cities and towns,” she said, “has a tremendous alcohol and drug problem.”
As we talked outside Cobblestone Pizza, a youngish couple pulling a large backpack on a set of wheels and additional backpacks loose on their shoulders walked by. “Dallas and Michelle,” the man said.
He pointed to his spouse at the corner. “She’s my wife, and I have a duty to look out for her,” Dallas, 35, told me.
He asked where the grocery store was in Toledo, and Betty quickly started jotting down names, phone numbers and addresses to help the couple to get back to Newport (7 miles West) in order to hook into Grace Wins Haven services and resources for Dallas to get a job.
It was a teachable and illustrative moment.
I asked Dallas a lot of questions:
Where did you two come from?
“We were in Yuma, Ariz. We were normal there. Everything was okay, but then I lost my job because of the virus (COVID-19).”
He told us they actually received no rides from Yuma to Portland, to Newport and Toledo.
“We walked. We have our tent. We try and camp off the main roads.”
I asked him where he grew up and some of his life’s circumstances.
“I was born in Watts, Ark., and then my family ended up in Kansas. A little place, Baxter Springs. Where all the cattle drives used to come in.”
Michelle was gesticulating and squirming, standing at the edge of road, nervously watching over their backpack and looking at her husband talking to Betty and me. She was visibly agitated. Betty and I have talked and worked with people like Michelle and Dallas.
They have been in Oregon six weeks, looking for jobs. Dallas told us he’s done plumbing, electrical work, carpet laying, landscaping, bussing and customer service. “I have a multitude of skills,” he said.
He told me that he dropped out of school in ninth grade.
“I had some bad things happen in my family. There’s a history of violence … sexual abuse. … In my family.”
Anxiety, PTSD and three years clean and sober, Michelle and Dallas are missing most their teeth. Both are thin as rails.
Betty also gave them the address of Newport Steak and Seafood, where she saw a few jobs posted.
“Look, this is not a choice. He needs a phone, a place to get a shower. Obviously, he cares about his wife. She needs mental health support. If he can convince Michelle to go to Grace Wins, they might get some help,” Betty tells me as they walk off.
The significant, emotional event that broke them — pushed them over the proverbial cliff — was the death of a family member, which then precipitated them attempting to get to the funeral. The car broke down on their way back. Six years later, Dallas said, the couple has been continuously homeless. “I worked in Yuma, and it was a normal job, but we were living in a campground in our tent.”
Betty sees Michelle as a kid. “When you suffer trauma, you can get stuck mentally at the age of the trauma. Michelle — like many of the kids in her age group (in their 30s) — are in need of specialized care. They have gone from feeling like no one cares or being abused, to self-medicating and addiction. They have many things happening at the same time. You cannot just treat one issue and think the rest will go away. They need long term help. You cannot lock them away and pretend they don't exist. They need family and friends.”
And Dallas? “Do not judge a person by their appearance,” Betty said. “You have to talk to them to find out who they really are. Dallas is quick thinking, loyal to his wife, caring and compassionate. He is responsible for the two of them. Having observed these things, if given the chance, he might work well as a team member and possibly a team lead in the future. He speaks clearly and understands what you are saying to him. You need to meet people where they are at and ask them what their goals are. Once you have that information, you can understand their needs and how to best help them.”
Trucker father, music teacher mother, siblings
Of all the places in the world for a Chicago girl to have ended up, Toledo is where Betty’s been since 1995. The town was “founded” by John Graham in 1866, under the land theft program called the Homestead Act.
We have a wide-ranging talk about her life, her children’s lives and her passion for science.
Betty has been a Toledo City Council member since the winter of 2018. As we sit outside the pizza joint, we talk about her life, from before she was born in Chicago, up to now, as she continues to press for solutions to our housing shortage, lack of a warming shelter and the horrible conditions homeless people face in her town and county.
She’s 59, of French and English heritage and married to Daniel Kamikawa, who is part Japanese and Polish. His own narrative is as interesting as hers.
Betty tells me about Daniel’s family.
His father, Paul, was in the 442nd Regiment, an almost entirely second generation Japanese-American infantry combat unit fighting in Italy and other parts of Europe.
However, Daniel’s uncles and aunts ended up incarcerated at Tule Lake War Relocation Center, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes in 1942.
Betty and Daniel met at Aurora University when they were undergraduates in 1979. They transferred to the University of Illinois. She went into soil conversation, he studied fisheries biology.
Dan’s transfer into groundfish research for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Hatfield Marine Sciences Center in Newport precipitated the couple’s move to nearby Toledo.
In 1995, they purchased the house they still live in, and then Betty got pregnant with her daughter Hanna.
“She was 13 years in the making,” Betty said. “We weren’t going to have kids until we were all together.”
Betty worked for Walmart in Newport for a stretch, and then she fell into a data-entry position. She’s out of the soil and agronomy field but got lab work with Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission conducting groundfish (Dover soul, flounder, cod) aging research and data crunching.
“I look through a microscope and count the rings on a cross section of the ear bone. They are like tree rings,” she said.
She does this from home now, under lockdown, and we talk about how some groundfish live past a century — a yellow mouth she has aged at 130 years. We could spend hours talking about fisheries sciences, conservation, marine reserves and the plight of ocean species.
The Chosen One, The Replacement, Bio Daughter
Our conversation took place two weeks after Betty failed to make the general election for Lincoln County commissioner.
“I want to be someone who promotes change. Just like Dallas and Michelle there, I want them to realize their potentials. Be something other than these people on the street,” she said.
She heard Dallas’ answer when I asked him what he was striving for as a kid growing up: “I really wanted to go into astronomy. You know, there is so much we don’t know about the universe … so many of the answers aren’t answers,” he had answered.
She was clear her run at county commissioner and in her role as council member, she doesn’t want to be labeled a politician.
“This was not a choice,” she stated, watching Dallas and his wife move along the road back toward Newport, Grace Wins Haven. “I truly believe that government is set up so people in charge don’t have to deal with the citizens. To keep us in the dark. To keep us uneducated about everything.”
She was pointing to the couple as they got smaller and smaller in our frame of view as they walked west back to Newport.
Her own tutelage about the struggles of people goes back to a brother who was 45 when he died of a cocaine overdose in Chicago. She lost her twin sister, too, at a young age. She died when she was 48 years old from complications of diabetes.
Betty pointed out that her daughter Hanna is smart, needed better elementary schooling than Toledo could offer, so she ended up going to Eddyville for the first few years.
When I met Daniel at their Toledo home, he was adamant that he had not been a great role model for Hanna and the other two other girls who ended up in their fold.
“I have missed holidays and birthdays. One year, I was gone 280 days out to sea. Betty did all the work,” he said.
But it was a team effort. They thought about foster parenting, but after the Oregon Department of Human Services told them all the bad things kids who are fostered could potentially bring to the family, Betty said, “Dan got really worried about messing up our own child, Hanna.”
One of Hanna’s friends — she calls herself The Chosen One — was having problems at home. Annabell was facing huge stresses growing up with an alcoholic father. She moved in, but she was messed up with heroin and cocaine. Betty and Daniel worked to get her into De Paul’s detox program. But first Annabell had to finish high school.
An attempted suicide (she often cut herself before that incident) got Annabell into both Betty’s and Dan’s charge.
“We didn’t want her to be by herself at home while we both worked,” Betty said. Since they both were located at Hatfield, Annabell ended up working in Betty’s lab and took the ocean safety course Daniel taught fisheries biology students.
She later finished a degree in psychology at Portland State University. She is now a homeless advocate at ColumbiaCare, working with people to get housing and keep it.
Now enter Tristan, called “The Replacement.” The three girls came up with their nicknames, as Hanna took the moniker, Bio Daughter, for obvious reasons.
The Replacement was one of Betty’s Girl Scouts, and she was having issues at home. The colluding issues of one parent being bi-polar and the other with alcohol problems.
So, The Replacement, Tristan, has had her bouts with being homeless, and much of her spiraling down is connected to the boyfriend she had lived with who used meth.
“Tristan’s been homeless in Albany. Her mom lived in the back of her truck,” Betty said.
Lone ‘no’ vote Betty
The lay of the land here is all about Georgia-Pacific. The Yaquina River runs through the town and acts as a water source for the big industry.
Today, wood chips are the main source of fiber for Georgia-Pacific’s fiberboard operation. Koch Industries (think Koch brothers Charles and David) bought out the company in 2005.
Toledo’s mill used to process logs, but in 1951 Georgia-Pacific acquired the operation and retrofitted it into a pulp mill.
Big bales of used cardboard, known as OCC, for old corrugated containers, come in by truck and rail from all over the West. The daily average of 2,000 tons of wood chips and 1,300 tons of OCC feed the hungry production line.
Betty’s rumbling in the political arena on housing is emblematic at this Lincoln County Spring 2018 housing committee meeting.
“We had it at the Newport City council chambers,” Betty said. “It was packed. The County Commission housing group had not had a meeting in 18 months. I stood up. Told them I would be running for county commissioner. I said, ‘I am shocked it’s been 18 months since the last meeting. You are 10 years behind in housing.’”
She told me that at the meeting, she proposed that a bus stop be sited at every new housing development.
“People don’t have cars. A lot of people can’t afford one. It was a no-brainer. They were pleased to hear this as if it was some newfangled idea,” she told me.
She’s also a member of Save our Siletz River, helping stop biosolids from being dumped into the river. As one of three city councilors, she voted against a tax-free proviso for Georgia-Pacific. “I told them yes, GP had done some positive things addressing pollution,” she said, “but I also told them I don’t work for Georgia-Pacific.”
Many times voting against tax loopholes is a way to push a company like Koch Industries’ Georgia-Pacific to be a part of the communities it works in — and not just a multinational tax sheltering operation, Kamikawa inferred.
Betty said if she had $2 million, she would use it to build a homeless community.
“We would need to use the money to leverage more donations so we could keep building the place where Dallas and Michelle can live together with others, but have their own space to go to when they need to be just them,” she said. “Everyone needs space of their own and community. We need to provide care, yet give them the chance to learn to care for themselves.”
I asked her why is it, in a county with empty buildings, that we don't even have a warming shelter in the offing for next fall and winter?
“Money and grace,” she replied. “It takes money and a willingness to help everyone. As long as we see the unhoused as less than us, they will not be helped. As long as we think they all want to take advantage of the system and are just lazy, we will not help. Until we know that they are the families, kids our children go to school with, the person at Walmart that stocks the shelves, we will not help them. A few need serious care, but the ones you don't see are the ones that are raising the next generation.”
Paul Haeder has been a journalist since he was 17. He crisscrossed Latin America, Europe and Vietnam. He eventually landed in the Pacific Northwest, now residing on Oregon's Central Coast. He is a social worker for veterans, foster youths, adults with developmental disabilities and those in homeless circumstances, and others battling addiction and recently released from prison. Haeder is a prolific writer of poetry, short fiction, memoir and environmental polemics. He is also the site director in Lincoln and Jefferson counties for an anti-poverty initiative through Family Independence Initiative. His latest book, "Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam," is a collection of intertwined short fiction based on his own work in Vietnam 25 years ago.