Helping Doug
At a tent encampment in Oregon, one man struggles to survive as medical volunteers try to bring a measure of light to dark, uncertain days
An early October morning in Oregon, the damp air tasting of winter. I stood with Bruce Murray, a physician at the Grants Pass Clinic, among small and large tents listing on the ground of an otherwise vacant J Street lot, zipped tight against a stiff, cold breeze. Trash stirred, and the wind carried the odor of mildew from heaps of discarded clothes. The occupants of the tents roused themselves, bumming smokes and rummaging through backpacks. We made our way toward a faded gray tent where a small 57-year-old man huddled in the entrance with his toothless 14-year-old beagle. The fabric of a torn folding chair flapped beside him, and murky rainwater filled a cast-iron pot slanted into a trench of cold-stiffened mud.
Good morning, Doug, Bruce said.
Doug squinted, his heavily bearded face strained with exhaustion. The dog, whom he had named Lil Juan but everyone called Lil One, released several hoarse barks before settling down.
Morning, Bruce.
Bruce glanced inside the tent. A rank odor settled over a havoc of dirty shirts and pants strewn across a faded army cot. More clothes spilled out of a black duffel bag. Cooking pans and a coffeepot lay overturned on the floor beside empty cans and a rusty can opener. Doug hoarded. He hadn’t lived in anything remotely resembling a home for 20 years.
Did you take your blood-pressure pills? Bruce asked.
Not yet, Doug said, a hint of exasperation in his voice.
Did you pick up your pills from the pharmacy?
No.
Bruce made a face and tipped his cap back, exposing strands of gray hair. He sighed. Adjusted his glasses, sighed again.
Okay, he said. I’ll take your blood pressure.
Doug rolled up his left sleeve. Bruce squatted beside him, removed a blood-pressure monitor from his shoulder pack, and wrapped the inflatable cuff around Doug’s bicep. He pumped the inflation bulb, slowly released air from the cuff, and took a reading from the pressure gauge: 200 over 100.
Haven’t taken my pills, I told you, Doug said with increased annoyance.
You’re going to have a stroke. Get on them, and I’ll see you again.
I can’t get my meds because I’ll have to leave my stuff. It’ll get stolen.
Would you get them if you knew your stuff would be protected?
Yes.
Doug began to weep. Bruce let out a breath. Doug cried at the slightest provocation. He complained constantly and needed endless amounts of reassurance.
Hang in there, Doug.
I wonder how surgery will go, or will things get screwed up. Where will I go after surgery?
We know where you’ll go after surgery, Bruce said. There’re a lot of parts moving in the right direction. Let’s focus on now. What three things can I help you with today?
I could use a hand with laundry.
Okay, I’ll see what can be done about that. I’m trying to help you, but you don’t help yourself.
I know.
Doug wiped his eyes. He reached down and lifted Lil One and held him against his chest. The dog arched his neck to lick Doug’s face. The dog loved him to a fault. Whenever Doug left the camp for one of his doctor’s appointments, he had to find someone to watch Lil One or the dog would chase after him.
Love yourself as much as Lil One loves you, Bruce said.
I do, Doug said.
No, you don’t.
I came to the city of Grants Pass to write about homeless people, the plight of the unhoused having concerned me for decades. Before I became a reporter, I worked for 14 years with homeless addicts and alcoholics in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, for the St. Vincent de Paul Society and later Central City Hospitality House.
Doug and many others like him were supporting characters in a tense political saga that had been roiling Grants Pass for years. The town had passed ordinances barring people from sleeping outside in public and imposed hefty fines or jail time on those who violated the law. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a 2023 decision finding that criminally punishing unhoused people violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment “if there are no other public areas or appropriate shelters where those individuals can sleep.” The following year, in a six-to-three ruling, the United States Supreme Court overturned the circuit court’s decision, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing that the Eighth Amendment did not authorize federal judges to determine the country’s homelessness policy.
In response, the Grants Pass City Council established two campsites, one downtown and the other on an acre of land on J Street, in the industrial section of town. Neither location offered shade, water, shelter, or any kind of supervision. If residents of the camp didn’t possess a tent, they slept on the ground with only their clothes for a blanket. The city referred to the camps as “resting sites,” a description, Bruce said, that was beyond Orwellian.
Bruce had spent many days in the J Street Camp. He volunteered with the Mobile Integrative Navigation Team, known as MINT, a nonprofit founded by Cassy Leach and Leah Swanson. MINT helps homeless people find housing and medical care and apply for jobs, Social Security disability, and retirement benefits, among other services.
Doug was not the kind of patient Bruce had expected to treat when he chose a medical career. He grew up in Miami, where his father worked as a teacher after retiring from the Navy in 1960. When Bruce was in high school, a friend told him about Tom Dooley, an American physician who worked in Southeast Asia at the outset of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. While serving as a doctor in the Navy and afterward, Dooley became known for his humanitarian and anticommunist activities. He died of cancer at 34. Bruce read three books by Dooley and thought, Wow. If I could ever do that. I’ll do everything by my mid-30s and die. Years later, he would learn that Dooley embellished many of the atrocities he had attributed to the North Vietnamese.
Bruce attended Dartmouth College and Miami Medical School. He completed his residency at the University of California San Francisco Medical School. He loved the laid-back, relaxed life of the West Coast. He married a family practice resident. They moved north, first to Davis, California, and then to Grants Pass, where he has specialized in internal medicine for nearly three decades.
He and Doug met in 2021. Doug had been released from a hospital for end-stage heart failure, which resulted from his use of meth and alcohol. He recovered and landed in a temporary emergency homeless shelter established during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bruce volunteered there. I’m going to stop using meth, Doug would say, only to reenter the hospital after he started using again a month or two later. Then he contracted Covid. Bruce waited at a pharmacy for three hours to get the drugs that saved Doug’s life. When the shelter closed, Doug returned to the streets.
He suffered a stroke in the summer of 2024, and if he couldn’t get his blood pressure down, he’d likely have another one. He had been good about reducing his use of meth and booze. But he needed to quit, period. He required surgery for a hernia that had grown so large, he had trouble walking. I can’t even feel my nut sack, he complained to Bruce.
His bad heart made any operation a risk, but Bruce believed that if Doug wanted to walk easily, he had no choice. And a surgeon had offered to perform the procedure for free. Bruce arranged to get Doug out of the camp and into temporary respite care at Rogue Retreat, a nonprofit housing and shelter program 30 miles away in Medford. For seven to 10 days before his surgery, Doug would be able to eat well, sleep, and avoid alcohol and drugs. The program also allowed pets. A Rogue Retreat administrator told Bruce that a room would open soon. Doug could even remain there after he was released from the hospital until he found permanent housing.
But Doug had to take his blood pressure meds. Otherwise, the housing and the surgery wouldn’t happen.
Bruce put the blood pressure monitor into his shoulder pack and reminded Doug to pick up his medications. He received Medicaid, so money wasn’t an issue. Motivation was.
Bruce left, but I stuck around. The fading sun layered the ground in red light. Tarps flapped over tents, and dogs trotted past in the narrow paths between. Shirtless men stood in the cold air and wiped their chests with rags. Puppies whined. Moths danced in the light cast by cell phones. A one-armed man worked on a bicycle tire.
I’ve reported from overseas, and both Bruce and I thought that the J Street site resembled a neglected refugee camp. Bruce had worked in the Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala, Uganda, for one month at the height of the AIDS crisis. For four weeks, doctors there had nothing with which to treat HIV. Patients with multiple infections, multiple diseases were brought in by friends and neighbors and abandoned. Bruce saw firsthand how poverty dictated quality of care and life expectancy. No money meant no blood test, no CAT scan, no blanket or meals. Nurses appeared more interested in the latest British clothing styles than in patient care.
Bruce thought the Covid pandemic in Oregon resembled the AIDS crisis in Uganda: health care based on income. In Grants Pass, he treated poor people in deplorable physical condition. Some of them had Covid; others had end-stage emphysema and couldn’t breathe without oxygen. One woman he treated, Debbie, lived on the street with her oxygen cylinder but had no place to refill it. She never smoked but had terrible emphysema. Staff members at a pulmonary clinic threw up their hands and said they couldn’t treat her—not unless she had a home, a place where she could refill her oxygen. Bruce worked with her for six months before she died. Cause of death: ran out of medication. What was the medication? Oxygen. Stunning, stunning beyond words, to call oxygen “medication.” Like Debbie, like the Ugandan patients Bruce encountered, Doug had no one. No family, no income, forsaken to no care.
The camp settled into darkness. Dim outlines of men and women walking, detached voices rising and falling. Doug rubbed Lil One’s belly, and noticed black goo in the dog’s hair. Rolled in tar, maybe? Doug will get shaving cream from someone, rub it in Lil One’s fur and comb out the gunk. A little trick he picked up.
He worked for the Oregon Department of Forestry decades ago. Two hundred fire crews, 20 people a crew. He learned by doing. There are a lot of things you can read in books, but you have to do things hands-on to really learn. He saw trees go up in flames in seconds. Once, he was cutting down a burning tree, and his hair caught fire, burned quick. Grabbed a bottle of water, doused his head.
Doug’s parents divorced when he was 11, and his mom remarried. His stepdad was his father. His biological father died in a nursing home in Newport, Oregon. Doug said goodbye to him, but he had said goodbye to him a long time before. Then Doug’s stepdad and his mom got sick. Cancer. Entered hospice. They didn’t want Doug to watch them die, but he did. How could he not? He lived in their garage. Love your parents while you can. They won’t be around forever. After they died, he moved with a friend to Wolf Creek, Oregon, and lived in a fifth-wheel trailer. He owned a wood chipper, a chainsaw, and a weed eater. Had a truck and a Ford station wagon. He worked doing this and that, whatever he could. Jack of all trades, master of none. But he held his own. Then, two friends in Wolf Creek overdosed on fentanyl. He got into meth and alcohol. The drugs may not have killed him, but they put him on the street.
The next day, it began raining about noon. Doug called Bruce. (His cell phone was paid for through a federal and state program called Oregon Lifeline.) I’m cold, and I’m getting wet, he said. Ask somebody to cover the hole in your tent with a tarp, Bruce told him. No one’s here, Doug said. Do it yourself. No, I need some help. Bruce said that Cassy Leach from MINT would be stopping by the camp in a little bit. He hung up. Such a shame to feel so helpless. Doug sounded funny, voice a little off. Maybe he had just woken up. Maybe he had started drinking and using meth again. His surgery would be delayed if he had. Doctors wouldn’t operate unless his blood pressure was under control.
Later in the week, Bruce planned to pick up some of Doug’s things and hold them for him. He had five boxes of Doug’s stuff already. The other afternoon, he went through it in his garage. Junk. Not even fit for a flea market. Maybe there was some sentimental value in the poorly made ashtray. Hoarding and meth were Doug’s biggest hindrances. It wouldn’t take a village to get him to unload his stuff. It would take an army. Everything was precious to him. His firefighting days were far behind him. He had no skills at this point. About a year ago, he cut down a branch from a tree in one of the city’s parks. What are you going to do with that? Bruce asked him. I’m going to make a bow and arrow. It’ll sell for $200. Do you have any woodworking tools? No. How long do you think it will take you? Oh, it will take a year or more. A year or more, Bruce repeated, and you may sell it for $200, and you don’t have the proper tools. Yes, Doug said. Bruce walked away. He just wanted to throttle him.
Later that afternoon, Cassy stopped by Doug’s tent. She stood about five-four, and her long red hair blew in the wind. Lil One held a paper bag in his mouth and shook his head.
So how about this? We set a goal, Cassy told Doug. Let’s have a plan in place for everything in your tent to be organized and packed up. Do you remember when we had bins for you? If we get you storage for your stuff, can we put things in bins?
I got one in here.
We’ll get you some more, Cassy said. This is the goal before surgery. Organize and store.
I have bags. Not sure I can fill them all up.
Okay, and we can go to the laundromat and wash your clothes.
Doug stared at his feet. Cassy waited for him to look at her. She had met him through Bruce and suspected he may have severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He couldn’t focus. His use of meth and alcohol didn’t help.
I don’t like sitting on the side of the road with my backpack and washed clothes and being told to move somewhere else. I want it to be where I can do laundry and stay until I get picked up. Little things like sitting on the side of the road irritate me.
You’re in survival mode, Cassy said. Everything irritates you. Here’s the thing: Focus on storage. If we get you better storage for your stuff, can we put things in bins? We’ll get you some more bins and clean your clothes. This is our goal before surgery.
Doug continued staring at his feet. Cassy waited.
She knew a couple that had struggled with substance abuse and bipolar disorder and ended up on the street. Homelessness became real then, really real, because Cassy had grown up with the woman, had attended school with her. She would take the woman coffee, clothes, and food. The boyfriend overdosed more than 20 times one year and rotated in and out of jail. Why am I doing this? Cassy wondered at the time. Helping them just seemed to be the right thing to do. Today, the woman has been clean and sober for eight months, has a place to live, and is receiving treatment for her bipolar disorder. Her boyfriend has been clean for seven and a half months. He works. She thought of them when she wanted to give up on Doug.
Cassy wondered, as she had many times before, how the contours of her life led her here. She was born and raised in Oregon. Her father was never around. Her mother had a boyfriend who drank and did drugs and was physically abusive. He was fine if all he did was drink; he was fine if all he did was coke. But when he drank and did coke or meth at the same time, he became violent. She and her mother left him when Cassy was in the eighth grade and moved to Grants Pass. They didn’t have a lovey-dovey relationship, but she and her mother were close. Cassy thought of them as trauma-bonded. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Cassy has always cared about people. At 18, she worked for a company that assisted disabled folks in their homes. When she graduated from high school, she worked in Ghana for six months helping nurses minister to AIDS patients and fell in love with the work. She became a nurse after she married in 2003 and moved with her husband to Missouri. They divorced five years later, and she returned to Grants Pass. She continued traveling overseas on medical missions, but when Covid broke out, she took notice of all the homeless people living in parks. She began working with Leah Swanson at the Josephine County Public Health Department to take them vaccines in a wagon. Then she added bottled water to her cart, then dog food and meals and Narcan. She met Bruce at the Covid emergency shelter, and he joined her park outreach and provided coffee. The owner of the Parker’s Bargain House furniture store approached Cassy one Saturday and told her he planned to retire and offered to rent her the building. By then, Cassy had a core group of volunteers and about six nonprofits working with her. She rented the building, and she and Leah came up with a name for their organization. MINT opened its doors in February 2022.
I’m seriously getting tired of changing my pants, Doug said. I can’t make it from here to the bathroom in time because of my hernia. I need my own place so I can get to the bathroom.
Cassy had never seen Doug as hopeless as he was now. Lil One might be the only thing keeping him alive. He wasn’t like this before J Street. The parks were his community. He had nothing then, but at J Street, he really had nothing. None of the camp’s inhabitants did. No water or shade, nothing but a parcel of land so hard, it didn’t absorb the rain.
I’ll have someone pick you up tomorrow, Cassy said. I know the people at the laundromat. It will be fine.
The next day, a MINT volunteer drove Doug to the E-Z Wash Laundromat and gave him a ziplock bag full of quarters. He lugged two large duffel bags of dirty clothes to two of the largest washing machines there.
He used to do laundry on weekends when he worked for the forestry department. After he quit, because his supervisor wouldn’t increase his pay, he joined three other guys to start a cedar salvage operation. They’d walk into a forest and estimate how much cedar was on the property and make a bid. From Aberdeen, Washington, west to northwest. Cedar trees grew all through there. When the crew had enough lumber in slings, a chopper hauled it away. The bird came in with a large hook hanging from a cable. The pilot would lower the hook and Doug would connect a rope to the hook and the pilot would tighten it and pull up the lumber, take it to the landing spot where it was loaded onto logging trucks. Doug made $1,000 every 11 days. Good money. He quit after a year to care for his parents. Such a long time ago.
He sat on a table and stared at the washing machines, the reflection of his face caught in the rhythmic turning of his clothes. He had taken a blood pressure pill this morning. He was doing his laundry. He was trying.
Bruce stopped by J Street the following day to help Doug clear his tent. He took a deep breath, dispensing with any form of greeting.
What can we take off your hands, Doug?
This nice toolbox, Doug said. He smiled. Bruce hadn’t seen a smile on Doug for he didn’t know how long.
He pointed to a metal container with hints of yellow but mostly marred with rust. It sat amid the clothes he had washed, now spilled at his feet. Lil One peered out from beneath a blanket and let loose a solitary bark before retreating beneath it again.
Take your blood pressure pills today?
Yep. One pill twice a day.
Bruce removed the blood pressure monitor from his shoulder pack. Doug extended his left arm. Bruce wrapped the cuff around his bicep: 150 over 89. Pulse 72. For Doug, a big improvement.
Good man, Bruce said.
Thank you. I’ve been taking my pills.
I see. I’m proud of you.
Doug reached for a black plastic garbage bag. He shifted the toolbox with a foot toward Bruce. Bruce squatted to face him. Doug smiled.
I have clean clothes.
You look and sound like you feel better.
I do. Cassy let me shower at MINT, too.
Bruce patted Doug on his shoulder and smiled back at him.
What is your goal, Doug? Why are we doing this?
To help me out. I can’t take everything with me.
And where are you going?
To Rogue Retreat, as far as I know, he said, frowning.
Right. I just want to see that you understand that the goal is to get you out of here before surgery. That’s the goal.
I know, Doug snapped.
Relax, Bruce said. We have 15 days before surgery. A room is ready for you at Rogue Retreat. Today is Wednesday. When do you think you’ll have everything packed up and ready to go?
Friday.
Let’s shoot for that. I will let Rogue Retreat know you’ll be ready to move this Friday, right?
Yes.
So today is Wednesday. I’ll hold the toolbox. Anything else I should take?
Not now.
What’s the status of your phone?
Half the time, it don’t want to work.
But this one works sometimes, so that’s good.
He reached back for Lil One and scratched the dog’s head.
I love your attitude. I’m proud of you. This is the Doug I remember. You’re in there.
I’m not all in there.
Enough of you is.
Cassy worried about Bruce. He had put a lot of time into Doug—all of them had—and Doug was more than capable of blowing it at the last minute, and he was fast approaching the last minute. Not long ago, a man named Brian broke her heart. The Grants Pass police referred him to her for urinating in public. Sixty-something years old. Struggled with alcohol. He lived on the street, and Cassy and MINT volunteers took him food. He got housed but lost his place because of his drinking. Cassy spent hours on the phone for about a week to get Brian into another housing program outside town. He stayed sober, but without booze he began hearing voices. He accused the staff of selling fentanyl and left for Grants Pass, where he camped on the street again. He became very depressed, and Cassy wondered if he was suicidal. She got him into a mental health program, but he didn’t stay. Cassy checked on him every day. Then one cold winter morning, a MINT volunteer found his body in a park, blue and frozen. All he had needed was a warm bed and he would be alive today, Cassy thought. Even if he had overdosed, he would have been surrounded by people who could have revived him. Doug wasn’t Brian. But the risks remained the same. All these tormented souls.
On Wednesday night, the rain fell in torrents. Doug put a tarp over his tent without calling Bruce, without asking for help. He wrapped blankets around Lil One to keep him warm. He watched it rain and was grateful he was leaving the J Street Camp before winter, when it would really rain. He counted the hours. He waited for Bruce to call.
The next morning, Doug’s phone rang. He fumbled with it, wiping moisture off the cracked screen. He recognized the number and answered.
Hi, Bruce.
Hi. How are you?
Cold.
Well, we can’t do anything about that today.
I know. It’s raining.
Listen, your room at Rogue Retreat is full of bedbugs. It will have to be exterminated tomorrow, and people can’t live there until Monday.
Doug didn’t react. Then he ran a hand over his face. He looked at the puddles outside his tent for a long time.
It’s better than getting bedbugs, Bruce said. I asked if they had a room just for this weekend, but they have no rooms at all. So I’m disappointed. Nobody’s fault. And I’m sorry for you. So now it’s Monday.
All right, Doug said. I wish you could check my blood pressure right now.
It was better when I saw you. I’ll see you tomorrow.
I know that, but I think you should check my blood pressure now. It would be even better. You’d be proud of me.
I’m proud of you. I’m sure it would be better, but I have other things to do with other patients. I can’t this afternoon. I’ll call you tomorrow and see when I can come out. Take your pills tonight.
I will. Two a day.
I left Grants Pass about 10 days before Doug finally moved out of the J Street Camp, but I kept in touch with both him and Bruce. On a Wednesday morning in November, Bruce drove him to Rogue Retreat. His room had a sink, a refrigerator, and a microwave. A bed with clean sheets and his own bathroom and towels. He said he liked having a door he could close and lock.
The next day, Bruce picked him up for a doctor’s appointment in preparation for his surgery. Doug left Lil One with another resident who didn’t understand the bond between them. After Bruce and Doug left, Lil One bolted after them and was struck by a car. When Doug returned and found out what had happened, he broke down. Bruce sat with him for hours.
Doug had his hernia surgery 10 days later. Bruce visited with him in the recovery room. It’s good to feel my nut sack again, Doug said. A photo showed him in bed in a blue hospital gown with Bruce next to him, both of them giving a thumbs up. After Doug was discharged, they celebrated with a meal at In-N-Out Burger.
About a month after Lil One died, one of the residents gave Doug a Rottweiler puppy. Having a dog that’s going to weigh more than 30 pounds will really hinder your chances of getting permanent housing, Bruce told him. Landlords aren’t keen on big dogs. I know, Doug said. Bruce didn’t comment further. Some things would never change. Doug had a long history of making bad choices. But he had a room and his health. Puppies love people, and this puppy would love Doug. Maybe that mattered more.
