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Heather and Leslee are also no longer homeless. But as we sat around the fire pit at Nickelsville, bullshitting and enjoying a lovely autumn day in a place that looked weirdly like summer camp, Heather said, "Holy shit, I missed this." She seemed pretty surprised herself, and insisted that it wasn't life in the tent city itself she missed but that sense of community. And when you drive past a place like this, a field of tents or tarps or plywood, that's what you're seeing -- a bunch of scared castoffs coming together, relying on each other.

We're not trying to romanticize it; some of them are criminals and addicts, and many of them probably smell just terrible. But we don't need to romanticize it. They're people. That should be enough.

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Robert Evans runs the Cracked Personal Experience article team, and he has a Twitter.

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It doesn't take much to end up homeless. Find out how easy it is to get there in 7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless. Or check out 5 Ways Your Life Changes When You're (Voluntarily) Homeless to get Adam Tod Brown's insight into the situation.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to check out the sad maybe true story of the first transient in Stuff That Must Have Happened: The Invention of Homelessness, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

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