In the pre-dawn of a wet October morning, they come out of the darkness like soggy, chilled moths. They are the homeless of Victoria and they are drawn to the bright light of a man, a most indomitable and irreverent Reverend named Allen Tysick; everyone knows him as Reverend Al.
The Reverend, in his Dandelion Society van, carries coffee and comfort to downtown doorways on the streets of Victoria every morning starting at 5 am. Six of us wait for him at the first stop, escaping the worst of the drizzle huddling together under the relative shelter of an Ellis Point business awning.
I’ve been invited by the Reverend to shadow him on his rounds this morning. Failing completely at fitting in, I attempt a bit of small talk and try not to feel like the intruder I am. For the next few hours, I duck sideways glances; in the language of the street, I am known as a “citizen,” someone to be wary of and pitied for what is viewed as my sad, two-dimensional existence. In a sobering and surprising reversal of roles (I’d come expecting to pity them), I am the “other.”
I meet people with names; I meet people with stories.
Elizabeth, a nurse at the Royal Jubilee for 35 years, her nurse’s face clear to me in the yellow glow of a streetlight. Little Karen, who cheers us with her wonderful sense of humour and has to figure out how to manage once she goes in to have her leg removed. Two men who help Reverend Al regularly accompany us: gentle Levi, who opens my door for me, and Dave, who interprets what I am seeing in heavy tones.
In one doorway off of Douglas Street I linger, petting a lovely dog and talking to a young girl. Yesterday, I bought half a dozen toques to hand out; I give her the last three. The two boys with her, who are about the same age as my two sons, lie mummified in their blankets. I notice one hand of each is exposed, their fingers curled around a sticky donut Levi pressed on them. One boy grunts. An eye opens and looks up at me, then down at the gooey thing.
“Do you want me to take that?” I ask.
Grunt. A nod. The girl feels the need to apologize.
“It’s just a little early for them,” she says.
I shiver. It’s cold.
Notes from the other side
My notes fill with impressions: Reverend Al bending over to examine a woman who is too cold to sit up; the sounds of traffic starting up as the sky lightens; the clang and beep, beep, beep of a BFI garbage collection truck.
And the subdued voices asking without hope, but still hopeful:
“Any water?” No, sorry.
“Any blankets?” Yes, here, which one would you like?
“Any gloves?” No, sorry… Wait, yes, take mine.
“Any coats?” No, sorry.
At 6:45 am we run out of coffee. Not able to put something as simple as a coffee into someone’s cold hand, I break. I ask if we can stop at the 7Đ11 so I can buy the last few people a hot drink. Reverend Al glances at me and pulls over to the curb. I sense I have it wrong.
“This is not about the coffee,” he says.
“It’s not?”
“You told me you wanted to understand what we’re doin’ here.”
I can’t look at him, overwhelmed as I am by my warm-bed guilt.
“The run is not about the coffee.” He pauses, rubs his tired eyes, and continues. “It’s about finding out if anyone’s missing, or if they need to go into hospital. We say, like, where can we help in your life?”
I think it over.
“So, if they know we give a shit they can go on?”
“Exactly.” He beams at me as if I’ve just said the cleverest thing in the world.
“I still wish we hadn’t run out of coffee.”
Snorting good-naturedly, he puts the van into gear, and I begin to see the light the moths dry their wings on.
From the past, the future
After two hours of visiting close to eighty sodden but spunky people, Reverend Al’s energy momentarily sags along with his shoulders. He notices, gives himself a mental shake, lifts his chin and sings out, “If I had the wings of a-a-an a-a-angel!” Our spirits rise on those wings, and hope is restored.
As the man goes through his day serving his flock it’s easy to wonder where his fortitude comes from. As the story goes, his dad, who struggled with alcoholism, collapsed on a street in Ottawa. Tysick was walking home and recognized the man lying prone on the sidewalk, just as a passerby stepped right over him. So it’s easy to see where the motivation to right a great wrong comes from.
He tells me he owes his faith convictions to his mother and, from his childhood, a nun named Sister Margo Power and a black woman evangelist whose name he didn’t share. Knowing how solid his beliefs are, I marvel at the stark irony of this man dispensing hope at the doors of tidy churches barricaded behind barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs.
Our morning ends, as too many do for him these days, with the Reverend officiating a funeral. It’s for a young homeless woman who hanged herself from a tree in Beacon Hill Park, a tree amongst those I love to paint in summer. Other local media is here, and it strikes me how unnatural it would have been for any of us to crash the funeral of a “citizen.”
The mourners take on the personality of sorrow in the beaten shoulders, sombre colours, and voices that crack and stumble through their tributes. The woman’s father sums up the mystery behind every suicide, and every family’s misplaced feeling of somehow having failed their loved one when he says that he “could never get her to love herself.”
No doubt the skeptics will mock me, saying I wanted to be there to help to salve my conscience. Perhaps. After all, no one wants to be seen as a shallow, Ray Bradburian obedient citizen. But I know what I’ve learned from one man in just a few hours on the streets of my city goes deeper than that.
The why of it is irrelevant once our youth end up sleeping on concrete, in the cold and rain, for days on end. Once there, how do we propose to get them back indoors? Even the best of us is thrown off after a three-day camping trip and no shower.
Whatever you believe about choices, what it was that landed them in that doorway, it’s hard to deny that it’s the social forces we impose on them that keep them there.
Comfort, hope, and kindness can be found in the most unlikely of places. And it helps this citizen sleep at night knowing there is a little van making its way through the predawn light of a desperate morning helping people find a little comfort, a little hope, and a little kindness.