A place to call home

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/11/2014 (4007 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Home, sweet home couldn’t be sweeter.

Two weeks ago today, a man walking his dogs in a suburban forest stopped to talk to a homeless young man who he learned was preparing to live out the winter sleeping in a tent among the trees.

Friday, 20-year-old Austin Saunders was standing high above the trees.

Welcoming his visiting mother to his sixth-floor, one-bedroom apartment overlooking Polo Park.

Living with a supportive “safety net” where he will be guided to the care of a psychiatrist he needs to manage his Asperger syndrome, a family physician to address other health needs and a dentist to make him even happier when he smiles.

“Might as well give you the tour, Mum,” Austin said soon after his mother, Tammy, arrived.

“Austin,” she said, “I hope you’re very thankful.”

“I am.”

Almost as thankful as Tammy.

“This is amazing,” she said.

“Yeah, I never thought I would be able to live somewhere like this. Never thought that.”

Neither did Tammy.

How did it happen so quickly?

Or even at all.

Well, it started with 60-year-old Remax realtor Pat Werestiuk finding the mysterious camper behind the Winnipeg Humane Society that Saturday morning. A newspaper column followed with a photo of Austin standing beside his tent in the forest, wearing a suit and tie to differentiate himself from the other homeless people.

That got the attention of an agency that assists people on the autism spectrum. And the agency — which requested anonymity — reached out to Austin with an offer to find him an apartment, hook him up with social assistance and other supports.

Austin had been grateful even when Werestiuk moved him from the forest to a transitional motel bed with a soft mattress.

And Austin wasn’t the only one resting more comfortably.

“I’ve slept so much better this week,” Tammy had said when her son was still at the Airport Motor Hotel and she was on the phone from her home in New Bothwell.

Austin had encouraged me to call his mother because people had been making assumptions and judging her after his story appeared.

“I don’t care what they think,” Tammy said over the phone. “He knows I’ve been there for him and I’ve done my best.”

So does Austin.

“She means the world to me,” he said when he was giving me her cell number. “I had my chances there.”

As a young adult, he had tried to return home to his mother and stepfather.

“And I blew it. I don’t blame them for any of it.”

Obviously, Austin doesn’t judge his mother for surrendering him into foster care eight years ago when he was 12 and violently out of control.

The people who do judge her don’t know the backstory, or understand what it’s like to have a child with a high IQ and a low tolerance for others, or anything that triggers their rage.

They don’t know about Tammy’s previous home in a Manitoba Housing project in south St. Vital, when Austin was two and already needing specialized care.

“I used to take eight buses a day to get to special-needs daycare. With four kids under the age of six. Eight buses a day and there was no help.”

She had felt helpless even earlier when her son phoned her last spring from his first homeless camp near The Forks; and even more helpless as winter approached and he was in the forest.

But then she had felt helpless since he was 18 months, and suddenly her normally developing child stopped saying “Mamma” and “Daddy” and regressed to one word.

“Tree, tree.” He’d sit there and just say it.

Which, two decades later, brings us back to her son’s rescue from the forest.

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” Tammy said last week. “To you. To everyone else who has helped. Not knowing where to go, what to do. I can’t say thank you enough.”

She was near tears when she said that.

But she was angry when she added this on Friday.

“Why did it take this long to get him help? “Why would it take someone to find him in the forest? Why did it take someone to finally question him? How many other people walked by? Why did it take somebody with a heart to stop to talk to him and find out what his situation was? And then to call you. Why did it take that?”

I don’t have an answer, only another question. What about all the others who are looking for a way out of the forest?

Who is helping them find the path out, the way Pat Werestiuk did for the strange stranger he came to treat like a son.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca