Railroads, bicycles & hand sanitizer: Jesse Wescott’s resilient NoPo camp life
The city of Portland’s city council declared a “state of emergency” on housing and homelessness in October 2015.
No one knows more about this emergency than the several thousand Portlanders living on the streets.
North Portlander Jesse Wescott’s tale is, in a sense, as much a story of conservative self-reliance — solo heroism, if you like— as the mutual aid and collective mentality found in SE Portland’s Springwater Corridor.
Forty years old, affable and easygoing, “cardio fit and pretty toned” due to the 30 miles of bicycling he does each day, he’s fighting a “blown” knee he needs surgery for, he says.
Also a methamphetamine habit.
As luck would have it, a reporter happened to interview Jesse, he said, on the very day he and his girlfriend of three years had just broken up. He had been building a shower in his camp, near the railroad tracks along N Columbia Blvd. for her, he said, using a hose and sun-heated water, but now that project is on hold. Before that three-year relationship, he said, he was married 18 years.
Wescott says his divorce led in part to his homelessness, though he also cites his alcoholism, drinking 18 beers a day. His current drug of choice, he says, is meth.
“I been alcoholic my whole life,” Wescott said. “I do meth now, it’s the only way to survive.” He says he broke up with his now ex-girlfriend because he found out she was doing “H,” or heroin.
“Meth ain’t nothing like heroin,” he said, shaking his head, looking down.
Wescott’s is a life bookended by railroads: he lives in a camp on railroad property along Union Pacific railroad tracks and he worked building MAX railroad tracks for 17 years. He grew up in a house along railroad tracks less than a mile away near Columbia Boulevard.
“I was born and raised on the railroad tracks,” Wescott says.
The morning a reporter approached him, he was spraying some brand-new high-top sneakers with silicone spray — a present for a female friend, he said. He said he found those shoes, the Nike Air Jordans he was wearing, and many more in good condition, dumpster diving in “the Villa.”
That would be New Columbia, the largest low income housing community in the state of Oregon, visible from his campsite.
Jesse says he needs surgery on his knee, which hurts to walk on, but the injury doesn’t stop him from bicycling 30 miles or more a day to collect cans. He declined an offer from staff at Legacy Emmanuel to put him in a hotel room for two weeks after his needed surgery because, he says, the recovery time is way longer than that.
“Who’s going to provide for me for the next six weeks [after those two weeks]?” Wescott asked.
His pride in his bicycle — his trusty steed — is palpable. “This is the baddest f**king Schwinn out there,” Wescott says. He knows many locals in St. Johns, and people often recognize him due to the child’s playpen he has rigged to his bicycle trailer.
“The playpen is what gets people,” he laughs, showing more mirth than at any other time during our hour-long conversation.
The tinkering-oriented creativity and resilience shown by Wescott in his approach to survival camping on the streets is reminiscent of 1980s TV show MacGyver. The playpen is one thing; Wescott’s use of hand sanitizer may be the most creative of all.
Wescott says you can basically use hand sanitizer for everything.
“People don’t know.” he says. “Being homeless, the number one thing is hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer will save your life.”
“You can burn it inside your tent; it’s burning alcohol, it’s not making smoke.” Wescott says he uses it for fuel for stoves, as a fire starter for wood or charcoal — the camp grill was still smoking a few feet behind him as we spoke on an early Saturday afternoon — and for heat and cleanliness.
Wescott says he used to make $32 an hour building the MAX lines for Stacy and Whitbeck, Inc. but has been homeless about three years, and at his current camp with a veteran named Vern since November.
What’s Wescott’s plan?
“This girl thing has been the What To,” Wescott says. The first thing he mentioned when asked about how he came to be living in a camp was his divorce three years ago.
Of course, today’s breakup has changed his situation. “I been kind of waiting on her. She’s going to jail or treatment.”
When Wescott described himself as “probably in the best physical shape I’ve been in, at least since high school,” a reporter asked if he didn’t think the meth was doing bad things to him.
“I’m sure it is,” he said, “but I’m cardio-vascular fit, pretty toned.”
Wescott says Union Pacific “has got to be” aware of his campsite; the path to his camp features a sign warning it’s railroad property. How do they know, considering the spot is well-concealed along an embankment inside twenty or thirty feet of thick temperate jungle?
“Because all these idiots threw all that stuff over the side,” Wescott says, referring to a bunch of other campers he says he and Vern “kicked out” after they tossed garbage down the embankment leading to the railroad tracks. Wescott notes that he periodically takes loads of trash out of the camp to the dumpsters at the “Villa,” but that “crazy people” sometimes come through and sift through it, leaving it strewn all over the place.
Noticing a graphic and disturbing painted, broken mannequin, a reporter asked about it.
“That was a f**ked-up night,” Wescott says, laughing.
His words, and their vision of a pecking order amongst homeless camps in Portland forests, were reminiscent of the 2008 novel “My Abandonment,” by Peter Rock, a fictional tale about a father and daughter who are homeless and living in Forest Park. Told through the eyes of the daughter, the book details at times disturbing images of “shredded paper people” and “Skeletons,” who pose a threat to her and her father, himself a veteran.
“What’s got me stuck right now is I’ve got a warrant out for my arrest for [not making] child support [payments],” Wescott says.
How much does he owe? “Under $10,000.”
Wescott says he’s not too concerned about being locked up for it, since police will “just book and release me,” but he mourns the suspension of his driver’s license and “they took my hunting and fishing license.”
Self-reliance, for Wescott, seems to be more than just his day-to-day survival; it’s his life philosophy. It’s a philosophy reflected in his amazing camp, with its surprising amenities, as well as in his relationships, in how he spends his days, and the freedom he enjoys.
“I got tents that are bigger than some people’s apartments,” he says — a highly ironic statement given while standing in a homeless camp that sits in view of New Columbia, the state’s largest low income housing complex. (Full disclosure: the writer is a former social worker at Home Forward, the county’s housing authority, which owns New Columbia.)
There’s no question Wescott has pride in his spot, though his voice also suggests a loneliness that might reflect the recent breakup, or missing his son or daughter. He says he sees his son, now 20, whom he proudly notes is a high school graduate, “around,” though his family hasn’t come to his camp.
“I run into him, but he’s never been here,” Wescott says. He takes a reporter across Columbia Blvd. to another group of homeless campsites in the woods along the Columbia Slough, and notes that he once saw his daughter’s name and love for Spongebob Squarepants scrawled on a sign in front of one of the paths—which inspired a fatherly phone call to the sophomore in high school, he notes, with a stern expression.
Whether the fresh breakup, the bum knee, or perhaps a growing weariness with three years camping in Portland’s liminal spaces, Wescott seems to be heading towards a change, or a reckoning. Of course, the steps to access the city’s overwhelmed housing and social services can at times be highly challenging as well.
Though he grew up in the neighborhood and now lives a stone’s throw from a public housing complex, the idea of trying to access housing programs or services somehow never seems to enter Wescott’s mind — except he sees “the Villa” as a great place to dumpster dive for sneakers, apparently.
“I’m not doing this my whole life,” Wescott says. “I’m just about fed up with it.
“I call this ‘I’m on vacation.’ When I go back to the real world, there’s going to be a lot of things travel with me.” As an example, he mentions that he would never again pay good money for shampoo or conditioner when it’s so easy to find those items in the trash.
Even as he contends with a challenging, even traumatic current reality, his mind is already on what comes next, what happens after he’s done living on these mean streets, or railroad tracks. Perhaps that is as good an indicator of Wescott’s resilience as the myriad uses he’s found for hand sanitizer.
