Steven Stiles is a bit of a loner. For the past three years, he has spent four months of each year camping out alone in the National Forest. When he’s up there, he doesn’t have access to a car or a phone, but will hitch rides down the canyon to get water and use electricity. He’s also a big proponent of “pack out what you pack in,” and said he feels the same way about use of public spaces in Boulder. Stiles, as he’s usually called, was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1979. His mom was 18 when she had him. When he was 18, he worked for a hot dog business, “Wonda’ Dog,” selling hot dogs outside a local comedy club. By 2003, he was working gigs as a comedian himself, mostly in bars, but sometimes in a comedy club. He did this for 12 years, couch surfing and traveling throughout the Midwest. He spent much of his time in metropolitan areas, and self-identified as someone who has chosen to be transient for most of his adult life. He told me how he watched his 20s and then his 30s pass, as most of his friends married, or got involved in long-term relationships, and then began to have families. Stiles has spent a lot of time in the Front Range, and lived for a while in a house off Iris and Broadway, working at Snarfs and River and Woods. When asked how he lost those jobs and his housing, he said it was due to his own irresponsibility. The past few years have been particularly hard. It has taken him six years to get an ID in Colorado, and he said a “whole lot of strife comes from not having an ID.” It seems like such a small thing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how dependent most of us are on that little card in our wallet, or on having a passport. When we lose an ID, it is relatively simple for most of us to replace it. The problem, as Stiles explained to me, arises when you have no proof of residence. He ended up relying on his arrest record (he’s spent time in jail for low level possession of marijuana, but never done prison time), and a medical record. Ultimately, he had to bring a court clerk into the DMV to get his ID. Stiles said the experience was demoralizing, and he actually cried. Stiles is pretty forthright about his own part in the circumstances of his life. And, at the same time, as he said, “when you shipwreck your life into nothing, the system doesn’t do much to help you.” Stiles does not use hard drugs (but admitted to trying them a handful of times). He definitely uses alcohol and weed, and called alcohol a “drug of convenience.” I was struck by him saying that, and it made me think of the politics behind where liquor stores are so often placed in the US:  in lower-income minority neighborhoods, but very adjacent to higher-income, majority white neighborhoods. There seems to be an intentionality to that, and studies show that people with the highest incomes have the highest rates of using alcohol. Thinking of alcohol as a “drug of convenience” makes you aware of how alcoholism does not discriminate between the rich or the poor, or the housed or the unhoused.

Since I interviewed Stiles on voting day (he’d voted, and was also in the midst of completing a long multi-page RTD questionnaire when I met with him), I asked him what his thoughts were about the current state of America. Stiles said he was “scared of conspiratorial Republicans,” and feared that “we’re going to be in an autocracy.” Stiles said “it’s a scary time to be an American” and “things are weirder now.” He also said he thinks we’re moving in the direction of some “civil war shit.” With full transparency, I must say that I completely agreed with his take on the current political situation.

 I also spoke with Stiles about safety issues he has encountered. He said he has not had negative interactions with what he called “civlians” (i.e., housed people), but told me a pretty horrific story of being attacked at the “beginning of the plague” (all quotes by Stiles) by another unhoused person. That night, Stiles had been sleeping on his own in Eben G. Fine park, and went to the public bathroom to get paper to dry his dishes (he used to carry a stove and cook his own food). He said a man clearly on meth attacked him with a hatchet. Fearing for his life, Stiles called the police, which he said was a difficult decision for him to make, since there is an unspoken code amongst the unhoused that they don’t call the police on each other. The police took the man away and told Stiles he’d get email alerts about the criminal process. This event happened around 9 pm. The next night, at around the same time, Stiles was sleeping outside again, in 8-degree weather, when someone doused him with buckets of water and threw stones at him. Stiles grabbed all his stuff, now soaked, and his bear mace, and thought he would have to beg the staff at Foot of the Mountain Hotel for assistance so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Luckily, he ran into the people who cleaned the public bathroom, and they called the police for him. The end result was that Stiles had to prosecute the man who’d originally attacked him (he is now in prison). He said it was the first time he’d ever had to give evidence against someone.

 Stiles and I also got to talking about books. Since my own passions are reading and writing, I was curious if he thought any of the unhoused would appreciate if I brought some books with me to the “Tuesdays in the Park” event. He suggested I put them in the small library by Lolita’s. I asked what his favorite book was, and he said Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth. I wasn’t familiar with that one, but after listening to him talk about it, I’ve since looked it up. From what I could glean from our conversation and what I’ve found online, it was published posthumously, and is a sarcastic interpretation of history and religion, sometimes in the voice of Satan. I found this one quote cited, that speaks relevantly to how I felt after my conversation with Stiles: “Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.”

Steven Stiles has recently been approved for housing, but has not yet gotten a voucher. Now that it’s gotten colder, he is sleeping at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. When I asked Stiles what “home” meant to him, he said “home is where you rest your head.”