On the Street in the Cold Dead Heart of Winter

It was eleven degrees out on our first Sunday morning in the nation’s capital and the wind stung like salt in a papercut.

One of the ministers from my church, a dozen of our teens, and two of us chaperone-grownups had arrived the night before to spend the week working with the Youth Service Opportunities Project, committed to helping young people become part of the solution to societal problems by engaging them in direct service to those who are hungry and homeless.

It was 11:30 p.m. before we reached the 160-year-old Church of the Epiphany, where they billet groups like ours and the kids were weary, both with the seven-hour train ride and the shouldering of all their gear from bedding to shampoo bottles to the odd stuffed bear.

Because YSOP manages its D.C. efforts out of a few gabled rooms high under the eaves of the church itself, a staff member was right there at 5 a.m. to effect our speedy eviction from the single first-floor parlor where all 15 of us had passed the night.

We’d been told the church needed the room for a Bible Study. The kids knew they would have only minutes to wash up, eat and remove all trace of their belongings, but they were groaning just the same—that is until we swung wide the old church door and saw the line stretching clear around the corner of homeless men waiting quietly in the dark to come in and get warm.

We went out and got cold—in their place as it were—knowing we could not come back again until mid-afternoon when the church would be once again empty.

The very hairs inside our nostrils froze as we walked to the bus stop, heads bowed against the biting wind. There, just three blocks from the White House, there was not a single corner store or market to duck into.

We waited 10, 20, 30 minutes. About 40 minutes in, a man smelling strongly of drink approached us on the empty street to ask if we’d like to buy the morning paper, which in its plastic sleeve dangled from his fingerless gloves.

After some seven minutes of cheerful chat he came to see we were waiting for a bus.

"Well now, y’all are on the wrong corner. Move over to there!"

We began moving. He called after us then.

"And God bless ya now. If you’re hungry later, there’s a church right yonder, serves a nice hot breakfast."

We knew that church all right.  

When the bus finally came we rode it to the only place we knew to go as strangers on a freezing winter dawn: the train station we had arrived at not eight hours earlier, though nothing there was open yet either.

8:15 found us back at Epiphany to attend that early morning church service at the end of which almost 200 hungry men were called one by one to breakfast, using numbers assigned to them in that pre-dawn line. 

In the course of that week, we would have the chance to cook for these men and eat with them as well; to sort clothes, stock shelves in food pantries and hand bags of groceries out.

And one day I would like to tell more about what that was like.

But for me anyway nothing we experienced in that whole long week worked its way so deep in my being as the knowledge of what it feels like to be on the street, like so many hundreds and hundreds and of thousand Americans, exposed and unhoused, in the dead cold heart of winter.