The first time I volunteered with the delivery, it was early spring, and the streets were slick with ice. My boyfriend, Winn, had asked me to come with him without offering many details, texting something like, “Hey my brother can’t do the ROOTS delivery. Can you leave work early Thursday? I’ll buy sushi after.” I knew it was a volunteer gig that he and his brother did routinely. His family just does that type of thing.
We pulled up in the back of the Missoula Food Bank building and loaded up my car with heavy boxes of mostly non-perishable foods: peanut butter, oatmeal, farina wheat, canned peaches and the like. We got on I-90 eastbound, taking the exit for Turah. Winn referred to a printed list of a dozen or so names and addresses. We stopped outside each mobile home, cabin or RV and brought the boxes inside if someone answered the door. Some people greeted us and took the boxes back to their kitchen, some people seemed wary and confused. Winn is warm and friendly with everyone, even if they seem a little shady. I was better at saying hello to the animals we encountered, like the old yellow dog who barked loudly, but wagged her tail for pats on the head.
I learned later that the application for ROOTS requires recipients be over 60 and low-income, and is funded (in part) by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services’ Commodity Supplemental Food Program. Recipients can pick up their food or have it delivered once a month. I’m still not sure what ROOTS is supposed to stand for. (A call to a Food Bank staffer went unreturned; they also seem to be having trouble with their website and email.) Most of the clients on our list seem to have an assortment of family living with them.
The neighborhoods we visited for the food delivery felt weirdly familiar. These neighborhoods could be anywhere in Montana, on dirt roads and dead-end streets you wouldn’t drive through unless you got lost. Double-wide trailers with junk in the yard, broken-down vehicles and RVs, oxygen tanks piled on rotting porches. These neighborhoods remind me of what I saw on my elementary bus ride to school in rural Yellowstone County. Ugly little properties scattered among sagebrush and salt flats, and miles of high prairie beyond to the Bull Mountains.
In a word, I would describe these types of neighborhoods as the part of Montana that is poor. As a kid, the concept of poverty seemed abstract and distant, not something I connected with my classmates who lived in double-wide trailers with their grandmas. I remember church lessons accompanying illustrations of noble-looking people in drapey tunics being blessed by white Jesus, or full-color photos of skinny Haitian children, recipients of our church’s fundraiser. I’m not religious now but with some guilt, I also remember a Bible verse, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
As an adult, I’ve learned more about what poverty looks like. I encountered poverty often as a newspaper reporter in the course of covering topics on child abuse, drug addiction and domestic violence cases. I’ve interviewed program providers who try to do so much with so little funding or support, and I’ve talked to a lot of down-on-their luck people who had one calamity after another. I will never forget the time I observed a check-in at the Poverello Center at 10 p.m. for an article and was shocked by the dozens of well-dressed, average-looking people in line. I knew from statistics that most homeless people don’t “look” homeless, but it’s another thing to see it.
Sometimes I think our society might be more compassionate toward the poor if these stories were more widely broadcast, but maybe not. Nobody wants to be poor or think of themselves as poor. Not least of all me. I used to live across the street from a trailer park and my neighbor Larry thought I was snooty. Last year I was happy to move into my boyfriend’s house in a nicer part of town, where the streets are better maintained and there aren’t stray dogs getting in the yard all the time.
The ROOTS delivery reminded me that once your life gets comfortable enough, it’s pretty easy to avoid poverty and not think about it. Except the housing crisis we’re experiencing lately throughout Montana is making grinding poverty more unavoidable. I see upstanding citizens who complain about trash, crime and “urban camping,” but who fight against homeless shelters and vote against funding mental health crisis services. People who consider themselves “progressive” but call the cops on a homeless guy living in a tent. Letters to city council and Wall Street Journal articles alike are demanding: Make this go away so nice affluent people don’t have to see it.
I want to yell that the poor, the meek among us, might not seem like a picture on a church pamphlet. In fact, they may seem gross and unpleasant, not people you’d want to talk to. The least of Jesus’ brethren might be a suspicious man with track marks in a trailer house reeking of cigarette smoke. I don’t want to hang out with him, but I want him to have food and housing and education and access to health care. And I want more people, especially the types who complain to city council all the time, to see that in a state with a $29,000 median income, most of us are actually teetering on the edge, and that we share a struggle with the “urban campers” and the “lazy people living on handouts.” Someday any of us could be old and alone and discover that our underfunded social safety net can’t offer much more than a box of bland commodity foods dropped off on the doorstep, if we have one.
The ROOTS delivery didn’t seem like it could be enough to really help these clients in run-down homes, but after dropping off the boxes at the last house, I felt a little glow from doing a good deed nonetheless. Winn turns the car back toward the interstate and I look up places we could go get dinner. The icy gravel roads and ramshackle mobile homes disappear from view immediately.
