Carolyn Will is wearing navy slacks and a blouse, office attire, on her day off. Her long brown hair is streaked with gray, her voice low. She is reserved, reflective and articulate as she describes her journey into and out of homelessness.
Her story is a master class in managing the logistics of living in your car.
In 2004, after she and her husband parted ways in California, she moved to Arizona with her two children. She had been working for many years as an office manager for a heath care company when, in 2012, they offered her a job in Portland. It offered better prospects and, potentially, better insurance coverage for a hip replacement she needed and was saving for. Her son had recently gone into the military, so she, her teenage daughter and Pixel, the tortoiseshell cat, moved to Oregon.
They settled into an apartment in Gresham. But the new job proved not to be a fit. “Almost a year to the day after moving, the company let me go.”
She collected unemployment and enrolled at Anthem College to get certified as a pharmacy technician. She had one class left to complete when the college went belly-up. “In the meantime, I had lost my unemployment,” she says.
So she cashed out her 401(k)s, IRAs and student loans. Eventually, Carrington College picked up those students left in the lurch, and she graduated and got certification with the pharmacy board in February 2015.
One month later, she, her daughter and the cat were evicted.
They spent two months in a room in what she calls “the frat house” – noise, belligerence and all-night parties – before deciding that they could take it no longer.
They moved into her 1995 SUV, a Chevy Blazer with about 250,000 miles on it.
“It was a two-room car,” she says. “My daughter got the back; I got the back seat.” Pixel the cat soon adapted to living mobile.
“We moved around a whole lot,” she says, from parking lot to parking lot: Walmart, Shari’s, the library. Carolyn’s church gave her a letter saying she had permission to park in their lot overnight.
They were on nodding terms with other families on the parking lot circuit.
Someone told her about Planet Fitness, a nearby 24-hour gym that was running a special: $20 per month for one person plus a guest.
“I was the cleanest homeless person,” she says. She and her daughter showered there every day.
During the day, they spent lots of time at the library. Carolyn was a regular visitor to the local WorkSource office, a resource center for job seekers, and her daughter, who was finishing high school online, often spent the day at the Web Academy.
Carolyn got a three-month gig as a customer service rep, “but they didn’t extend,” she says.
She wavers, sometimes characterizing her series of experiences as losses and sometimes as adventures. Often she settles for describing, say, the long-ago departure of her husband or the loss of a job, with a small sigh, as “another character-building situation.”
Eight times a month, she went to the plasma center. The money she earned as a donor paid for the storage unit where all her family’s things were in boxes.
One upside of automobile living: “I lost weight because we were eating a lot of salads. We had one of those water coolers people have at football games. We had ice in there – milk, condiments, cold cuts, salads. Flip over the lid, and it’s a picnic table.”
She was going to AA meetings, sometimes three or four a day. By this time, she had come to realize that her drinking had become a problem.
“It had got to the point where I didn’t know what to do anymore,” she says.
She and her daughter lived in the car for six months. Then, a woman at AA who was about to have knee surgery offered Carolyn, her daughter and the cat a room in her house in exchange for help while she recuperated.
They spent six months there, during which time Carolyn, who, at times, she said, could barely walk, had her long-overdue hip replacement. A few weeks after she had the surgery, the woman gave them a no-cause eviction.
At this point, Carolyn’s daughter was 18.
“We decided for both of us to survive, it was best to split up,” Carolyn says.
Carolyn’s church had connected her with Northwest Pilot Project, where she was working with a housing specialist to improve her rentability.
She was on waitlists for housing, but there was nothing available. She couldn’t go to a shelter because she was still recuperating from surgery, and she wasn’t able to climb onto a bunk bed or use a toilet without a raised seat.
“Another character-building situation,” she says, and smiles.
NWPP secured her a room in a motel for a month, and from there, a bed in a long-term shelter – Pixel came too.
In August 2016, a studio apartment downtown, where she was waitlisted, became available. She moved in a month later.
At 57, it’s the first time in her life she’s lived alone – aside from Pixel, of course. “It’s been an adjustment,” she says, smiling.
With help from the Easter Seals, she got a full-time job as a pharmacy technician in North Portland. She takes the MAX train to and from work, working various shifts, often getting home late at night.
“I really like living downtown,” she says. “The buses and MAX are spectacular. I help out at a church nearby. I go to the library.”
She’s cooking again. “I make hot fudge sauce and cookies.”
Her daughter, “my backbone, my support through all of this,” is doing fine, living in a small apartment with her boyfriend.
Her son, on leave from the Navy, stayed at her apartment for a few days and fell in love with downtown Portland.
Carolyn is sorting through boxes from her storage unit right now.
“It brings up memories that I don’t want.” She gazes into the distance. “There’s still a lot of loss.”
But, says Carolyn Will, making a joke about her last name: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” She sighs, smiles slightly and says, “I had to have that perspective.”