Street roots., April 21, 2017, Page 8, Image 8

Page 8
News
Street Roots • April 21-27, 2017
P H O T O BY JOE G L O D E
Carolyn Will has her own apartm ent in downtown Portland. She uses public transit to get to her pharmacy tech job in North Portland.
'Where there’s a will, there's a way’
BY REBECCA KOFFMAN
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
arolyn Will is wearing navy slacks and
a blouse, office attire, on her day off.
Her long brown hair is streaked with
gray, her voice low. She is reserved,
reflective and articulate as she describes
her journey into and out of homelessness.
Her story is a master
class in managing the
logistics of living in your
car.
In 2004, after she and
her husband parted ways
in California, she moved
to Arizona with her two
children. She had been
working for many years as
an office manager for a
heath care company when,
in 2012, they offered her a
job in Portland. It offered
better prospects and,
potentially, better
insurance coverage for a
hip replacement she needed and was saving
for. Her son had recently gone into the
military, so she, her teenage daughter and
Pixel, the tortoiseshell cat, moved to
Oregon.
They settled into an apartment in
Gresham. But the new job proved not to be
a fit. “Almost a year to the day after moving,
the company let me go.”
She collected unemployment and enrolled
at Anthem College to get certified as a
pharmacy technician. She had one class left
to complete when the college went belly-up.
C
CAROLYN WILL
She spent years
managing the logistics
of homelessness. Today,
she has an apartment
in Portland and a job
as a pharmacy tech.
A series o f stories about
people who have
experienced homelessness,
and found their way home
“In the meantime, I had lost my
unemployment,” she says.
So she cashed out her 401(k)s, IRAs and
student loans. Eventually, Carrington
College picked up those students left in the
lurch, and she graduated and got
certification with the pharmacy board in
February 2015.
One month later, she, her daughter and
the cat were evicted.
They spent two months in a room in what
she calls “the frat house” - noise,
belligerence and all-night parties - before
deciding that they could take it no longer.
They moved into her 1995 SUV, a Chevy
Blazer with about 250,000 miles on it.
“It was a two-room car,” she says. “My
daughter got the back; I got the back seat.”
Pixel the cat soon adapted to living mobile.
“We moved around a whole lot,” she says,
from parking lot to parking lot: Walmart,
Shari’s, the library. Carolyn’s church gave
her a letter saying she had permission to
park in their lot overnight.
They were on nodding terms with other
families on the parking lot circuit.
Someone told her about Planet Fitness, a
nearby 24-hour gym that was running a
special: $20 per month for one person plus
a guest.
“I was the cleanest homeless person,”
she says. She and her daughter showered
there every day.
During the day, they spent lots of time at
the library. Carolyn was a regular visitor to
the local WorkSource office, a resource
center for job seekers, and her daughter,
who was finishing high school online, often
spent the day at the Web Academy.
Carolyn got a three-month gig as a
customer service rep, “but they didn’t
extend,” she says.
She wavers, sometimes characterizing
her series of experiences as losses and
sometimes as adventures. Often she settles
for describing, say, the long-ago departure
of her husband or the loss of a job, with a
small sigh, as “another character-building
situation.”
Eight times a month, she went to the
plasma center. The money she earned as a
donor paid for the storage unit where all her
family’s things were in boxes.
One upside of automobile living: “I lost