Tolkkinen: Brainerd City Council should spend a night, or 30, sleeping outdoors

BRAINERD, MINN. - You might know Brainerd as Minnesota’s Playground, a place to go to boat or water-ski or pose with Paul Bunyan.

The people I hung out with on Thursday see a different side of Brainerd. They are the people the city doesn’t want. The people who have faced drug addiction or mental illness or rap sheets.

The people with no place to call home.

Some of them were abused as children, some of them chatter to themselves because their minds don’t work right, some of them knew they’d messed up but couldn’t understand why the Brainerd City Council had refused the overnight homeless shelter’s request to stay open all year, especially since it didn’t cost the city any money.

But the City Council decided, with only one dissenting vote, to close the shelter for summer. Worse, it decided to criminalize homeless encampments. So not only were these folks having to sleep outside, but if they got caught by the cops, it could cost them up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

It will cost taxpayers money, too, because jailing people costs money.

Thursday was their first day without nighttime shelter, and it was drizzling and cold. I wanted to see how their first night went, and I packed a change of dry clothes in case I ended up spending the night wherever they went. In a tunnel, under a bridge, or some out-of-the-way place where the police wouldn’t see a tent.

One man, Isaiah Washburn, said even a board would do. He didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag or even a blanket. He was passing through Brainerd on his way to Monticello but didn’t have firm travel plans. He allowed me to tag along for a few hours. He didn’t have protection from the rain, so I left my poncho in the car. I wanted to experience what he experienced, so we walked along the city streets, past the worms curling in sidewalk puddles. Tires hissed on the wet asphalt.

As we walked, Washburn told me about himself. He had worked in construction as a framer until one day he broke down and couldn’t do it anymore. He hears voices, he said, but says it’s not because he’s mentally ill; he believes that a cochlear implant was embedded in his skull without his knowledge.

Our society wasn’t built for people like Washburn, who hasn’t been able to work for years and says he has been kicked out of countless shelters and hotels and churches. He is tormented by electronic vibrations, he says, and so as he walks, he listens to gospel music on his headphones, because music quietens the voices.

When you walk in the rain because you have nowhere to go, it marks you. Your clothes soak through in a way they don’t for people dashing from car to store. Rain beads up on your glasses. And as night falls and the temperature drops, the wind picks up and bites through your clothes.

With no money or options, Washburn went into a restaurant across from the library, where the workers gave him a glass of water. He started yawning and glanced over at the library, where an overhang protected the entrance. Armed with three plastic garbage bags from a nearby gas station, that’s where he ended up. He tore a hole in one bag for his head and pulled the rest of the bag down over his body.

If Washburn kept walking, that would be legal. But Brainerd has chosen to criminalize sleep, because that’s what public camping is. It means sleeping in public. Something none of us can live without turns you into a petty criminal if you have no home.

I left Washburn lying on the concrete. A few blocks away, at Veterans Memorial Park, two guys with bikes and tents but no home watched police cruisers pass by. The temperature was dropping, an icy wind was mounting. One of them had a cough. He’d been clean of meth for 1½ years, but he kept thinking about using again, especially now. He had a job, but an eviction on his record soured landlords. When he was a kid, he lived in a farmhouse with cows and horses and farm chores. He never expected to be living on the streets.

One of the men was optimistic. If necessary, he’d stay awake all night and sleep the next day at the day shelter that remains open all summer. The man with the cough seemed near despair.

I asked him what would help.

“Give us a spot,” he pleaded. “Give us something. We’re humans and not dogs.”

As the clock ticked and they tried to figure out where to go, the wind lashed my wet clothes. My hands were red with cold and I longed for a good night’s sleep. I headed to my car and cranked the heat. It was a miserable night to be without shelter.