“I like the world. I’m just not one for the world.”
That’s what Wulf told documentary filmmaker Paul Crane, early in their friendship. The informal mayor of Sparta, one of three tent encampments along the Mississippi River, Wulf was kind and conscientious, but he knew he needed to live free, unencumbered by bills and chores and an airless indoor existence. So he scrounged, found free food, patched together a life in one of the tent cities.
Sparta, Hopeville, and Dignity Harbor were dismantled in 2012, their residents plunked down in free housing for a year.
A few made a go of it; the others wentback on the streets.
Crane started his documentary, Living in Tents, in 2011. The year before, he’d discovered one of the tent cities and begun visiting. That wasn’t enough, so he moved in. And as Wulf introduced him to neighbors and showed him the ropes, they forged a friendship that’s still strong.
The documentary, which premiered earlier this year, just won a Best Direction in a Documentary Film award from the Colorado International Activism Film Festivaland will be shown in the St. Louis International Film Festival this fall.
Living in Tents includes interviews with Bill Siedhoff, then the city’s human services directorand well known for his sincerity and hard work on behalf of people who are homeless. He sounds a little tense at the beginning: “We have never endorsed the idea of having encampments or tent cities.” When the city set out to shut down the Rev. Larry Rice’s shelter, he urged people to set up tents at the end of Mullanphy Street as a way to get media and raise money, Siedhoff is convinced.
For all their efforts, he and other policymakers come off as bureaucratic, detached from gritty realities.Crane says he didn't intend that; maybe it’s just the juxtaposition with the blunt candor of the residents. “Or the way they came at it,” Crane says, “just trying to get people out of there and separate them and put them in apartments. Giving people free apartments, you’ve gotta give the city credit for good intentions. But they don’t necessarily know the people who are down there and what they really want.”
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Photo courtesy of Paul Crane
Dave and Bonnie fixing a meal at camp
The idea of free rent for a year was that people would be “transitioned into full-time employment.” Very few meet that deadline. Mental illness, addictions, a past riddled with trauma, not a lot of concrete help or guidance… Even Wulf, who’s been steady for years, no sign of drug addiction or psychosis, finds a conventional life so claustrophobic thathe falls apart.
The “success” story depicted in the film, if you define success as being warm and dry and cozy (and it’s hard not to, when you see the tents weighted by snow and icicles and imagine how cold it was next to the river) is Jeff, an older man with a dog. Jeffbegins receiving a disability check, and that makes a hugedifference. His newapartmentis immediately homey, neat, and clean.
Wulf’s looks like he’s camping in one corner.
Crane watches his friend growheavy, inert, and depressed. Bonnie, who explored her new apartment's clean, empty roomswith a tentative wonder, winds up back on the street with her partner, Dave, saying bitterly that no one came to offer any help.
“It’s interesting to see this gift turn into a source of stress,” one of the volunteers, Stephanie, says wryly. She and her husband were sheltered suburbanites when they started making the long drive east on 40 to help out at the encampments. They wind up enjoying the time they spent hanging out there—and quasi-adopting a middle-aged guy,Blake, who’sbeen homeless for most of his life.
“They’re like a mom and dad,” Blake says. “That sounds weird for a 50-year-old going on 20, but it’s like having a mom and dad, for real.” Later, after he stays awhile with them and jokes about not wanting to admit he drinks a beer now and then, he tells Crane, “That’s love, the choking arms around someone’s neck!”
It’s an ambivalent moment, one Crane isglad to capture. “How do you help someone and try to change their life without taking over?” he asks. “That’s why this is so complicated. How do you help someone without taking away who they are?” How do you parent an adult who didn’t get enough parenting without sounding as smug as that sentence sounds? How do you respond to untreated mental illness without forcing medication?
“I used to give money a lot, because I wanted to feel like a big person, and I rarely do that now,” Crane says. “The most important relationships and moments had nothing to do with something I brought them or money I gave them. It was just conversation, spending time... But I could neversay, ‘Just don’t help them.’”
The brilliance of thisdocumentary is that it doesn’t romanticize. You see tempers flash, hear about drugs and violence and physical misery. And yet, by the time the filmends, you understand why people evicted from that tent city miss it.
Wulf’s back outside now. “There’s a light in his eyes,” Crane says. “He just belongs outside. I’ll see him a couple times a month, help him go get groceries, and he’ll help me with something.” Wulf likes the solitude, the fresh air, the impossibility of getting lazy or lonely, the freedom from money and its burdens. Physical discomfort is, for him, a price worth paying.
“In Seattle and some other places, there are organized outdoor encampments with some security,” Crane notes. (Others are unofficial, always on the edge of being dismantled by authorities. But the concept is gaining support.)“It could be like tiny housing,”he continues eagerly. “I mean, I understand why a city would never want that…”
Because of the aesthetics? Or the difficulty of keeping people safe?
“Or, if you let that happen, it might be an admission that you are not trying to solve this,” Crane says. “And they receive all this government funding to solve it.”
Living in Tents will be shown at SLIFFthis November. It’s currently streaming on Amazon.
Jeannette Cooperman
SLM contributor Jeannette Cooperman is intrigued by people's lives, ideas, relationships, and struggles.
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