× Expand Nicole McLain, 48.

Nicole McLain, 48, used to be a carefree traveler, she used to drive from state to state with her truck and camper. “It was always my dream to see the rest of the 50 states,” she confesses. Now, her world is six feet wide and long, within the confines of a single tent.

Since she was diagnosed with interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, Nicole cannot walk far—or at all. “I can't walk up the hill. Not more than three blocks,” she says. “I have complications of heart failure and organ problems because my body doesn't get enough oxygen.” There’s no cure.

Homelessness fell on her unexpectedly while she was in traveling through Wisconsin; her truck, which was as much her vehicle as her home, was totaled. “So... we got stuck here,” she concludes with a defeated sigh. To get by, Nicole can rely on her partner, Ricky, who just found a job; “but he won’t get his first paycheck for like two more weeks,” she laments. “He's always scared to leave me during the day, because he went up to get dinner one night and I fell out while I was alone and I had a seizure. I can't remember it, but he told me I had been shaking on the ground.”

Nicole has little hope for the near future. She has been living under the interstate “about seven weeks,” and she hopes to get a more permanent living situation by the beginning of winter. “We have been trying hard to get out, but it's hard to get anything when you have nothing. It’s hard to get an apartment because we don't have a rental history, and Ricky will have to work at least six more weeks for us to be able to afford to move into a place.”

“I didn't come from money or anything like that, so I worked hard. I was sort of a workaholic,” she reminisces. “I was a petroleum landman. I negotiated oil and gas contracts for oil companies. I traveled around the country, I worked in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas. I had some savings, but I first got sick and my step-father had cancer—that's kind of where all my savings went to. I was married at the time. And that didn't go well after I lost my income. I was a major breadwinner of the house. So that ended terribly.”

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Nicole’s story from that point on continues through a hospital in Mexico, where she received a grim diagnosis and gained the desire to enjoy life more, to see whatever she hadn’t seen yet. She explains how she rescued a dog, an old pit bull named Cleo, and she wanted to travel to Colorado and Utah, but she first wanted to sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon; so she did, but she was found by a ranger who thought she was going to kill herself. She was brought to a hospital and Cleo was taken from her, and she couldn’t pay the impounding fee. Her retelling is fragmented, with several pauses to cry. Her only saving grace, she says, is meeting Ricky, her current companion, soon after.

The Struggle of Homelessness

Like many homeless people, Nicole has to tolerate the preconceived ideas of people who never experienced what she is going through. “I read that article where they said it was easy to be homeless,” she says. “I didn't ask to get sick. I didn’t ask for any of this! It's not easy being homeless. If anyone thinks that having one bottle of water per day and somebody bringing you a sandwich three days a week makes life easy, if anyone thinks we want this life, they’re crazy."

“You always got dirt in your eyes,” is how she describes the gritty reality of homelessness. Feeling uncomfortable, feeling dirty—especially since she cannot walk far and thus cannot reach publicly available showers—as if unable to scratch a persistent itch that never vanishes.

“I’ve lived in a camper a lot, and this”—Nicole gestures to the tent around her—”is so much worse. It’s not like the forest. It is not quiet. You hear this terrible noise over your head all the time. The constant heat gives you a headache and you need the wind, but then the dirt gets in your eyes. And you just want to claw them out.” She takes a moment to regain her composure.

“We don’t feel safe here,” she continues. “That’s one thing about the forest, you don’t have to be afraid and keep everything hidden. We try to stay away from the others, and we try to keep it clean and nice here, but it is still bad. We don’t have any privacy here. I have to move my bedding to try to clean myself under my clothes in the tent. And Ricky's got to work and leave me by myself… When we had a truck and a camper, we could go wherever we wanted, we didn’t have to be under the interstate with the cram and the fear and the dirt.”

Nicole and Ricky’s tent is out of the way from the bigger tent city, which is crowded and can feel oppressive to people who are new to homelessness—81 tents were gathered at the core of the tent city, as of Wednesday, July 24. But the rest of the tent city is where most of the help and resources end up, making them inaccessible to Nicole, as her tent is too far for her to walk the distance alone. “We saw the Street Angels sometimes,” Nicole says, “and we asked them to stop for us because of my health condition. But now they won't do that anymore. They'll stop way down there, so now everybody has to walk down there to catch up."

“To be honest, it's the charity that hurts me most, because I'm not used to that. I used to be the one. The one that could help, the one my family called when there was an emergency or someone needed money,” she says, although she insists she is grateful for StreetLife and all the others who help regularly. “A lot of my self-worth, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in what I did, and how good I was at it, how hard I worked and what I could do for others. And to have all that taken away… It's been the hardest thing.

“I have crazy nightmares since we are here. Even this morning, I had nightmares about people coming up to the tent in the night, just extremely frightening. It’s not a place that anybody wants to live in.” Nicole’s tone turns wistful, as she reminisces about her time at the Grand Canyon and her brief time with Cleo. “I can’t believe I’m afraid now, I traveled all the way through the National Forest by myself with a dog. But I always felt safe with her. While I traveled from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon with Cleo, I let her out of the truck and the first thing she would do was to make a little circle around the truck, and then make a little bigger circle and then a little bigger circle while I was setting up camp.”

“I wish I had that dog now.”

Read about Carol, another woman who lives "Under the Overpass," here.