In Search of Home

Traveling A Path of Chances

I was driving the other day and noticed a young man sitting on a busy corner of a business amid the activity hub of people going home for the workday. The man looked to be about the age of my son who just graduated from college. He sat with a backpack and little else, his eyes were shaded with sunglasses. Upon closer examination, I could tell he was adrift, cast out into the life of the streets.

We see them every day, all ages of people from all places, some in altered states, ragged clothes walking the streets, cycling, or living out of vehicles. All these people seemingly headed into the abyss of desperation.

The statistics tell us that a variety of conditions lead to homelessness. This includes mental illness, chemical dependencies, lack of familial support, and the incredible elephant in the room — poverty.

There was also an older man who once roamed by neighborhood. He wore full-on cowboy gear including a big hat and boots. He rode a bicycle instead of a horse and in the middle of August, he also wore an overcoat. His skin, bleached by the sun, turned into a form of yellow-beige leather. The cowboy cyclist wheeled down the streets of my town for a few years, at times riding his bike off the sidewalk and blocking the right lane of the street while casually disregarding the horns of infuriated drivers.

The cowboy cyclist disappeared a short while after biting a cop who came to patrol the abandoned house he camped out in. Soon after that, he…