Leave It Open Today

I enter a space that smells of dirty cat litter and cigarette smoke. The room goes dark when I shut the door behind me except for a tiny nightlight plugged into the wall.

A woman in her mid 50s lives here.

She is thin and has salt and pepper coloured hair. Her brown eyes are demarkated by black mascara and her face is worn from hard living, but I can still see traces of another time when she was young and lived on a ranch in the high desert.

Lets call her Taryn.

We’ve known each other for some time. She was one of the first “clients” I met when I started doing outreach work six years ago.

Taryn’s cabin was small and sat modestly along a forest lane. It was simple, heated with wood, and she owned it free and clear.

“This place is my stability,” she once said to me.

There are only a few small windows in her cabin. All are blacked out with tinfoil and dark curtains.

“The light hurts my eyes,” she answered, when I asked why she kept the place so dark, even on the most beautiful Spring days.

It’s silent in here. No music playing. The air is still and stale. Little exchange occurs between Taryn and the outside world except for a few doctors, grocery store clerks, and myself. The fentanyl she uses at least twice a day ensures that everything stays as it is - a place of attenuated pain within a self made sensory deprivation chamber.

Her pathway to this life traversed a landscape of psychological and physical trauma.

Taryn was raised in the rural by parents who were heavy drinkers. There was emotional neglect and physical abuse. She discovered marijuana and alcohol in her early teens after finding tribe with the rowdy crowd. Cocaine and pills came soon after - both of which made her feel “less sad.”

Opioids appeared in her life after having a car accident.

Oxycontin was prescribed for Taryn’s broken back. Like tens of thousands of people, she became desperately addicted to them. Heroin followed after she was cut off of oxy. When fentanyl became more widely available and cheaper than heroin, she switched to that drug.

Opioid addiction led Taryn to the streets.

She lived rough on the downtown east side of Vancouver, sleeping wherever she could and doing sex work to pay for drugs.

Without giving specific details, she indicated that some of the men who bought her were “terribly cruel.”

But those days are behind her. Now Taryn is living back in the mountain region she was born in, in housing paid for with an insurance settlement.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” she said. “If I didn’t have this place, I wouldn’t be able to make it out there in the world.”

I come here once or twice a month with food, water, and harm reduction supplies related to injection drug use, as well as to simply lend an ear.

After we discuss her needs and exchange various supplies, we talk casually. This is my favourite part of the job - just being human together. Without the client / outreach worker dynamic creating an unnatural hierarchy, we simply become two people discussing a subject we both are fascinated by - the world of wild animals.

Taryn wants to know what the bears on my side of the mountains (the temperate rainforest) are eating at this time in early Fall.

“They’ve switched from huckleberries to Kokanee salmon,” I answer.

“Must be nice,” Taryn remarks, “living off of what’s in season just like everybody did back in the olden days.”

“Yes,” I say.

I ask her about the ranch she grew up on. Does she ever think about it?

Taryn grins widely at the question, and speaks with fond memories of leading her mare down to the creek, reliving how she would sit on the bank and listen to the water tumble.

“When I was out there with my horse in nature, I had everything I wanted. Nothing else existed - nothing bad, anyway. Sometimes I just wish I could go back and never leave.”

When it’s time to say goodbye I let Taryn know that I will reach out again in a month’s time.

I open the door and the contrast between the darkness inside her cabin and the daylight outside is both beautiful and blinding. The air is so fresh and enlivening that I forget to close Taryn’s door behind me. Realizing this after a few steps, I turn back and reach for the knob to pull the door shut.

“No, no.” Taryn says from inside the cabin. “Leave it open today.”

As I transcribe this piece from an old journal, it’s early Fall and it has been nearly two years since I last saw Taryn. Her cabin caught fire and burned down later that Winter.

She didn’t have insurance.

For a short while Taryn moved to the nearby town, into a second floor efficiency apartment. The constant noise of cars on the highway outside her building rattled her nerves. Being such a private person it was hard for her to live downtown in the public eye, especially as an injection drug user.

Within a few months of losing her cabin, Taryn passed away.

Image and design by Stephanie Kellett