NEWS

Frostbite ends man's five years in 'tent city'

Beth Miller
The News Journal

Robert Joy has come out of those Christiana woods – his home for the past five years or so – a few times before, but never for very long.

Sometimes it was heavy snow, two feet of it in one Nor'easter back in 2010, that drove him out of the woods. Sometimes it was heavy rain, like the deluge Hurricane Sandy brought in 2012.

This time it was his feet, especially his left foot, and the frostbite that was gaining on them as winter storms dumped more and more ice and snow on his tent and campsite.

"I had shoes that weren't worth having and my feet just froze up one night," he says. "I came out of the woods barely walking. Trench foot, they called it."

Robert Joy lived in the homeless encampment off of Rt. 273 near University Plaza for five years. After losing a toe due to frostbite this past winter, he now stays at the Rick VanStory Resource Center.

That was late December 2013. It happened a second time and he wound up in the hospital.

The third time, later in January he thinks, he could barely bend his knees as he hobbled out of the woods, up the hill and through the opening in the chain-link perimeter of University Plaza Shopping Center. Someone helped him get an ambulance.

Doctors said he had no circulation in the big toe of his left foot. It had to go, he says with a shrug.

Until the frostbite, Joy, 55, had lived for about five years in the sprawling "Tent City" he and others built in the low-lying wooded area next to the shopping center off Del. 273.

Now, after several weeks of recuperating from the amputation, he is staying in the shelter at the Rick vanStory Resource Center in Wilmington, seeing doctors and counselors, getting medicine, regular meals, and a bit of financial help. Recovery Innovations is helping him find his way in the city.

Joy can't go back to those woods now. New Castle County workers arrived Friday to dismantle the remnants of the Christiana encampment that Joy says had a peak population of about nine homeless people last summer.

The last few tarps will be hauled away. The sofa, the chairs, the mattresses, the boards and crates and other assorted collections, the county is clearing it all out.

New Castle County crews work to clear out a homeless encampment off Del. 273 near the University Plaza shopping center Friday. Crews began cleanup about 7 a.m. Friday morning.

Losing track of time

Joy wound up in those woods for a string of reasons that started when his wife left him in Illinois almost 10 years ago. His two kids went with her. He fell into a depression, he said, lost his construction job and his house and drank to relieve the pain.

"My mind went to putz," he said, "and little by little I couldn't work, couldn't sell the jobs or even look for work."

He came East around 2008, he thinks, to stay with a relative and try to find work here. He hasn't kept careful track of time, but he's pretty sure it was late summer 2009 when he and his relative had a falling out and he took refuge in those Christiana woods.

His relative had been trying to get him into a rehab center.

"I don't need rehab," Joy says. "I need a job. Yeah, I was drinking a 12-pack of beer a day, but mainly out of boredom."

He had been scoping out the woods for a while before he made his move. He left with no money, just a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and his sneakers. The first night, he slept on a wooden pallet, with nothing but a blanket and a piece of cardboard between him and the ground.

During the day he would collect plastic bottles or aluminum cans to recycle and make a few dollars.

But he soon realized that the longer he stayed in the woods, the worse his chances at finding new work became.

"When I became homeless, my clothes were constantly dirty and ripped. I looked like dirt and I smelled like fire."

He kept a fire going most of the time. And he lived there alone until last summer, relatively undisturbed in a series of tents he was given or "inherited" from someone who was moving to another place. He drew on the kindness of strangers, his own wits, and often scrounged his meals out of nearby dumpsters and trash cans.

People, many with kind hearts, he said, started to get to know him. He doesn't know most of their names, but he knows what they have done.

There was the woman at the dialysis center, where he sometimes would thaw out for a few minutes. She gave him a tent, a cot, candles and some gloves.

There was the man who brought his mother for dialysis treatments three times a week. Joy asked him for a cigarette once and the man gave him five, along with a five-dollar bill. After that, the man would meet him several times a week, often giving him cash.

There were the fast food restaurant workers who loaded Joy up with leftovers at the end of the day, and the car wash employee who let him warm up or sleep in the wash bay and make a few bucks taking out the trash.

And there were the "church people," as he calls them, who hiked down the hill and back into the woods to bring sandwiches, blankets and other gifts.

His encampment was no secret to anyone, he said. It was easy to see from 273, especially in the winter when the leaves were off the trees. Sometimes people left things along the fence for him, jackets and other items they thought he might be able to use.

Battling elements

Not everyone was keen on this guy in the woods, though. A few security guards "stalked me," Joy said, one brought a dog after him. They called the police on him, he was escorted off the shopping center's property several times, and he got a few tickets for "loitering and/or prowling in a suspicious manner," he said.

"I wanted it all to be temporary," he said. "But I didn't know how to get out of it. I couldn't get out of it looking like this."

And he wasn't scared of what might happen to him out there.

"If somebody killed me in my sleep, oh well," he said. "I believe God would take care of me."

The camp went downhill last summer, he said, when more people arrived. A man who worked at one of the nearby businesses had a falling out with his son, Joy said, and moved into the woods, setting up a "large monstrosity," with a generator and other amenities. Another guy set up a "smaller monstrosity," Joy said.

Yet another man came with his wife, only to find out his wife was "messing around with everybody but me," Joy said. Another guy came with his wife, too, and they eventually split up, Joy said, when that wife started messing around with somebody in the camp, too.

"It was 'As The Woods Turn,'" Joy said with a grin, the camp's answer to the old TV soap opera "As The World Turns."

The growing population complicated Joy's simple ways in the woods. It was getting more noticeable, too.

One day, several police rode up on four-wheelers. The camp was coming down and they were giving notice.

"The people are still homeless," Joy said, "but they'll find another place to go."

Joy is learning the ropes at the Rick vanStory Center, where he'll have time to get his feet on the ground. The shelter there does not have a time limit, said director Allen Conover, and some have come through its doors and found new callings for their lives.

Joy has been there for more than two months since the frostbite forced him out of the woods. Both of his feet are still numb down the middle, he said, but he is able to walk more now. He is keeping appointments.

Robert Joy takes out a cot as he prepares for bed at the Rick VanStory Resource Center in Wilmington Thursday. Joy lived in the homeless encampment off Del. 273 near University Plaza for five years.

A caseworker took him to the camp Thursday to let him pick up whatever property he wanted before the site was cleared out. He found little that was salvageable, he said.

But it was definitely familiar territory.

"I miss the open air sometimes," he said, "and I'm sure I'll go camping again."

He thinks the frostbite may have forced him down a new and more promising path.

"I need a little money to get started again," he said. "I need housing. A lot of people just need a start."

With that, he thinks he could make a new life.

"I'm a survivor," he said.

Field-tested.

Contact Beth Miller at (302) 324-2784 or bmiller@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @BMiller57.