Reader, by now you must be wondering how James and Della became homeless. It could have been one or more of the following reasons:

The Great Recession

Pain pills

Meth

Booze

Eviction

Illness

Mental breakdown

Death of a loved one

Incarceration and probation

An unspeakable incident of violence perpetrated upon them

Bad luck

One bad decision

Ronald Reagan’s two terms as President

The shattering effects of American culture

For the purposes of this tale, we need not delve nor digress into their back stories. What concerns us now is Christmas Eve and the writer of this tale believes sharing a story like this can inspire others to act in service to the homeless (and shelter animals, too).

As a rule, James and Della never purchased gifts for each other; they made them. But for some time, however, each knew they wanted to break with tradition and spend a significant (for them) amount of money for a very special Christmas gift.

Ever since she became homeless, Della had managed to lose or have stolen, every sacred possession from her younger self—except one—two shoe boxes of 8-track tapes that were given to her by a beloved uncle on his death bed. They were classic country from the 70s: Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Della’s favorite singer, Johnny Paycheck. She also inherited her uncle’s 8-track player, but it had crapped out a long time ago and Della always longed to hear the tapes again, but never got around to finding another player. Then homelessness set in, and she hit the road in the sedan but hung on to the shoe boxes, hoping one day a portable 8-track player might appear in a thrift store for dirt cheap.

One never had.

James knew this story well and was determined that Della would have a portable 8-track player for Christmas. He’d looked online at the library and saw one for sale on e-bay, a bitchin’ blue Panasonic Dynamite player for $249.99! James arranged for the kindly proprietor of the bookstore to buy it for him and ship it there. He would pay her cash. The proprietor was thrilled to help and loved the story of the purchase. It was pure love and country music. too! It was in fact, a country song!

Now he had to come up with the $249.99. He couldn’t tap their emergency fund since Della would know.

Ever since he became homeless, James had managed to lose or have stolen, every sacred possession from his younger self—except one—two shoe boxes of Atari 2600 game cartridges that were given to him by a beloved aunt on her death bed. They were classic games from the 80s: Missile Command, Pac Man, Frogger and Asteroids, James’ favorite. He also inherited her aunt’s game console, but it had crapped out a long time ago and James always longed to play the games again, but never got around to finding another console. Then homelessness set in, and he hit the road in the sedan but hung on to the shoe boxes, hoping one day a console might appear in a thrift store for dirt cheap.

One never had.

Della knew this story well and was determined that James would have a console for Christmas. She’d looked online at the library and saw one for sale on e-bay, an Atari 2600 Game Console with one joystick for $139.99! Della arranged for the kindly proprietor of the bookstore to buy it for her and ship it there. She would pay her cash. The proprietor was thrilled to help and loved the story of the purchase. It was pure love and right out of a schmaltz Hallmark Christmas movie! It was, in fact, a real Hallmark Christmas movie (there are such stories out there).

Now she had to come up with the $139.99. She couldn’t tap their emergency fund since James would know.

One of James and Della’s handyman clients sold all manner of weird curiosities on e-bay. Each one of them approached him privately on a yard work gig a month before Christmas, shared their stories, and asked if he could sell the tapes and games for them and not tell the other.

The man was positively delighted to help a homeless couple in love. (This writer knows the feeling because he once helped out a homeless couple in love.)

He said he would get right on it. James and Della stashed the tapes and games in his garage while the other was working out of sight.

A week later, the man was surreptitiously handing over $250 to James and $150 to Della. They visited the bookstore that afternoon and surreptitiously handed over the cash to the proprietor. She made the purchase then and there and delivery was guaranteed a few days before Christmas.

On Christmas Eve day, they visited the bookstore and each got a furtive wink from the proprietor. James and Della cooked up separate ruses so they could load the gift into their trailers and hide them.

The ruses worked.

Imagine the giddy faces of James and Della as they bicycled eight miles back to the Nomad before dark with the old sound of the ocean as a kind of sleigh bells on bobtail run.

Christmas Eve came and the night was foggy but dry. Della had strung keyhole limpets and hairy triton shells in small cedar tree outside the Nomad. James tied on a dozen colorful floats harvested from crab rings washed ashore. Their only conventional decoration was a demonic-looking three-foot elf rescued from a dumpster that Della mounted on a hunk of myrtlewood. Every time they saw him, they chuckled. An elf on a log can do that.

James got a roaring fire going in the pit and they prepared a wonderful feast: a canned ham, baked potatoes, miner’s lettuce gathered from the woods, and a store bought lemon meringue pie. They’d splurged on booze, meaning a pint of EJ peach brandy.

That night, they brought the radio outside and tuned into Radio Free Europe and a stoned DJ was spinning obscure soul Christmas tracks from the 60s and 70s. (The Ohio Players’ Happy Holidays anyone!)

They ate, they drank, they listened to music. The fire popped, sparked and crackled. The marten put in an appearance. They named him Marty.

It was time to give their presents. Each had wrapped and hidden them underneath the trailer when the other was using the outhouse for a lengthy constitutional (something you will definitely not see in a Hallmark Christmas movie).

They each held the gift in their laps and agreed to open them simultaneously. They shredded the wrapping paper and beheld their gifts. They stared at each other wordlessly for a moment…then…

I sold the tapes.

I sold the games.

They said it at precisely the same time. They began laughing and then glugged a shot of brandy. They didn’t say they loved each other.

Issac Hayes’ “The Mistletoe and Me” came on the radio. It was only the sexiest Christmas song of all time.

Issac Hayes crooned:

Looking in your eyes
Cause they’re bright and shining
With the glow
Of a distance star
Fate is Santa Claus
And Cupid’s his helper
I’m so grateful because
they brought us together
And together we are
And we will always be
Just you
The mistletoe and me

Right on!

They gave away one of sedans and moved into the other. They were exploring a rutted logging road one afternoon, dodging potholes, searching for a place to bivouac, away from the frequent chaos that attends homelessness, when James spotted a spur road with a gravel berm blocking the path. Something white-colored and certainly irregular nestled back in the trees caught his eye. He stopped the sedan and they decided to investigate.

It was the Nomad, marooned for almost four decades, surrounded on four sides by thin alders and thin hemlocks. It was almost if nature had erected a fort around it, with palisades to boot!

James and Della bushwhacked around the trailer. Somehow it miraculously was intact from the outside. Not a single broken window. The tires were flat but that hardly mattered. The rig was never moving again.

He opened the door and a blast of mold filled their nostrils. They stepped inside. Not too bad. Minimal interior damage from water. The cabinets remained sturdy. Kitchenware? Check. Plates, glasses and cutlery? Check. Cleaning supplies? Check. Not a single rodent dropping. The propane stove and burners didn’t sport a trace of rust.

James turned on a burner knowing it would never fire. He heard a hiss…then found a box of matches…and…behold! Della clapped. She said it was sign of good luck.

The Nomad needed a significant refit but was livable right then and now. A good union team from the Midwest had built her solid, but never in a million years would they have imagined homeless people would one day make these trailers their domiciles, instead of weekend shelter for Grandpa’s annual drunk hunting excursion. America had a lot more promise back then.

They moved in that very night.

It took three months of labor to restore the Nomad but James and Della loved the work. It was called homesteading.

They replaced all the flooring and then covered it with carpet remnants. They replaced all the curtains and cushions. They caulked every window and coated the roof. They spread multiples tarps over the trailer in tepee-like fashion to better repel the rain.

James built an outhouse that could be moved every month or so; a catchment system from a nearby rivulet that piped water into the rig. He improvised with a second propane tank and car batteries to provide heating and lighting. He built an outdoor fire pit. In due course, James and Della scavenged windfall, stacked the equivalent of 20 cords, and laid wood planking around the Nomad. They spent a lot of time around the pit in the evenings and often said nothing to each other because the forest was talking for them, to them. And the forest’s words made much more sense than the gobbledygook uttered by garden variety therapists stuck inside antiseptic offices.

Virtually everything they needed for restoring the Nomad was gathered at the county dump for free. Whatever else they needed, they found in Gold Beach’s three tiny thrift stores for dollars and sometimes pennies.

At one point, they decided to ditch the sedan and traded it for mountain bikes. James rigged up tiny trailers for them and they began their new new life in the woods.

Their routine, weather permitting, went like this:

Monday: church food bank, library to charge Della’s phone, track her Oregon Trail Card (SNAP) benefits, and communicate with her daughter.

Wednesday: searching for and redeeming cans and bottles, a grocery store run, hit the thrift stores, peruse the book store for $1 Westerns and bodice rippers.

Friday: two beers at Turkey’s Tavern on the Rogue River and five dollars played on the slots.

Saturday: salmon fishing in the afternoon at the North Jetty of the Rogue River.

Sunday: perch fishing in the morning on Nesika Beach and panning for gold at the secret beach at Otter Point.

Every day: foraging in the woods for edible plants and…

Della became an accomplished mushroom hound and during the season, sold lobsters and chantrelles to two local fine restaurants. She earned over a thousand bucks a year this way and saved her mushroom money for an emergency they both surely knew was coming one day.

They kept the magic mushrooms for themselves and dosed every other month, always on the beach, always with a bonfire raging. It wasn’t really their thing. Alcohol was, vodka, a lot of vodka.

James and Della’s routine was sometimes interrupted by the demands of their own handyman business in Gold Beach. When they started bicycling around, they met people, homeowners, mostly senior citizens who had trouble maintaining their decaying residences. James and Della were voluble people in town, and the more curious homeowners took a shine to them, and wanted to help. James and Della cleaned gutters, mowed yards, hacked blackberries, strung Christmas lights, split firewood and walked dogs. They earned cold hard cash and often with a big fat tip. These grateful folks also frequently gifted James and Della with cookies, tools, clothes, DVDs and venison steaks.

What did they do in the evenings in the Nomad? Besides drinking? They read books and played board games and cards. They watched VHS and DVD movies on an ancient dual player. They listened to a radio that somehow captured the signal from the greatest station on the West Coast, Radio Free Humboldt out of Arcata, California. They always went to bed early and rose at first light, hungover or not, usually not.

James and Della did not regularly interact with other homeless people around Gold Beach. Most were benign, some were dangerous or insane. They helped out other homeless when the opportunity arose, and of course, it did all the time. They never revealed where they lived. They didn’t want visitors, at least the human kind. Wildlife was always welcome, especially the American marten who showed up weekly. Della adopted him as her spirit animal. James was partial to the mystic charms of elk.

It was important to them to live lightly on the land. They hauled out their garbage. They didn’t burn what shouldn’t be burned. They knew one day a timber cruiser would come along and probably blow the whistle on their trespassing, and a young man had shown up one afternoon. James and Della befriended him and gifted him with a pound of magic mushrooms and smoked salmon. He never peeped a word. There are still plenty of Americans out there like this.

James and Della lived in the Oregon woods. To be precise, they lived in a Nomad (brand name) travel trailer a logging outfit abandoned in the 80s after clearcutting the living hell out of the hills above a remote stretch of beach on the Southern Oregon Coast. To be precise, that beach was called Nesika after a long vanished Native American tribe.

As to what owned this plantation of private Douglas fir forestland where the Nomad forever surrendered its identity as a nomad, take your pick of private equity firms with headquarters in far flung metropolises run by factotums who had never stepped foot in a forest their entire lives but nonetheless liquidated them with nothing more than a tap on a phone.

In other words, James and Della were squatters and technically homeless, but one look inside the Nomad and you would see they had made a simple, warm, cheerful and utterly ingenious home for themselves from everything discarded by people who had everything except simplicity, warmth, cheer and ingenuity.

One decade from now, a crew of robots would lay waste to the plantation or, before then, a wildfire would incinerate the watershed, but James and Della would be long gone by then although we have no idea how their fate would unfold. Let us believe it turned out well because they had each other and trusted their love and the kindness of Oregonians.

Never underestimate the kindness of Oregonians when it comes to the homeless. This writer could write a book about this.

Let’s keep this tale in the present day: Christmas Eve has arrived and now let us visit their domicile and its appointments and surroundings this magical time of year; let us glimpse the life James and Della had forged in the midst of Oregon’s and America’s crises of homelessness.

James and Della were in their late 30s or 40s and met in the parking lot of a Brookings ecumenical church that served a hot meal to the homeless every weekday. That is until the Brookings City Council shut it down declaring human compassion violated a city ordnance. At the time of their meeting, James and Della were living out of their dilapidated, duct taped sedans from the 90s and cruising up and down Highway 101 on the Southern Oregon Coast, hanging on, keeping to themselves, parrying desperation, waiting for fortune to turn.

It did in the parking lot.

For James, Della was a special woman who embodied a line from an Isak Dinesen tale in Seven Gothic Tales: “I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.”

Della had been up on broomstick many times, even upside down, but that ended the moment she met James.

As for what James sparked in Della, a line from a James Cain novel says it all: “A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back.”

She saw his smile sitting across from him in the church basement while eating road kill elk and a green bean casserole and she was never going back.