How I survived being Homeless for a month

Those of you who know me know that when I moved to Carlsbad NM, I was homeless for the first month.  When I say I was homeless, I don’t mean it in the sense that most people think of it.  When I think of the term “homeless”, I picture a specific scene in downtown Ft. Worth.  If you take the Lancaster exit from Northbound I-35 at night, you will often find a handful of homeless people sleeping under the bridges.  To me, this is the true definition of homeless: no job, no car, no home, and no possessions except those that you can carry around with you.  My homelessness was a “cushy” version, one where I still had an income and a car. Even so, it was one of the more challenging experiences that I have been through!

Prior to moving to Carlsbad, my husband and I were living in Colorado Springs.  Living in Colorado was a really awesome experience, but we were having trouble making ends meet.  We were living in an apartment close to where we worked, and we were sharing not only one car but one phone as well. I even began to cut my husband’s hair (which grows like weeds) with a $20 clipper set we bought at Walmart.  Me? I learned to cut my bangs (sometimes with results that warranted me pinning them back for about a month) and I let the rest of my hair grow out the whole time I lived there.

So here we were, living in arguably one of the most beautiful states in the Continental US, and we couldn’t hardly afford to leave our apartment! So when a friend of my husband’s told us he could get him on in Carlsbad doing linework in the oil fields, we were packing our stuff up 3 weeks later and moving down to New Mexico. Again.

I tried desperately to find a place to live while we were waiting for our move date, but everything was sooooooo expensive.  They either wanted $1000/month for a one bedroom (or sometimes what appeared to be a broom closet) or they didn’t have availability for 6 months.  I was beginning to learn that living in an oilfield meant living in a super inflated economy where they were going to charge me double the price on everything.

It came down to moving time and still we had no place to stay.  It was my last night bartending at Chili’s and I was telling some regulars of mine about how we were going to stay in a weekly rate hotel.  (By the way, the weekly hotel rate was $500, another wonderful feature of an oilfield economy.  F@%! you, Carlsbad.) My regulars told me when they moved to Colorado many years before, they didn’t have a place to stay either, so they camped at a KOA campground for a couple of weeks.

The wheels began to turn in my head.

My husband and I were literally 30 miles from Roswell when we decided to stay in a tent instead of trying to make the outrageously expensive hotel idea work.  We stopped at Walmart in Roswell and bought the cheapest tent and air mattress that we could find.

We got a hotel the first night in Carlsbad, because it was too late to find a campsite in an unfamiliar place.  We stayed in what had to be the seediest hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  This hotel literally had a hole in the bathroom window that looked suspiciously like it was made from a bullet. Why didn’t we stay with my husband’s friend you ask? Because he literally quit & skipped town the same week he got my husband his job. Oilfield work pays, but it can be brutal…especially in the summer.

The next day my husband went to work, and I went to the Bureau of Land Management to get a map of their land.  For those of you who don’t know, you can legally camp for 2 weeks on BLM land before the law requires you to move.  It doesn’t specifically stipulate that you can’t just move to another spot for another 2 weeks, which is what we ended up doing to stay on the right side (or grey side?) of the law.

On a side note, I’ll never forget the conversation with my Dad when I told him what we were doing.  He knew we hadn’t found a place to stay when we moved there, and so one day he was questioning me on it:

Me: “I’m living in the desert.” (I start giggling at the absurdity of it)

Dad: (also slightly laughing because he thinks I’m joking) “No really, what are y’all doing?”

Me: “We’re living in a tent in the desert!” (still laughing)

Dad: (Now laughing himself) “No, really, where are y’all staying?”

This went on for a few minutes with me laughing so hard I was almost crying by the time I convinced him I really was living in a tent in the desert.

I was very concerned about people finding our campsite while we were gone during the day and coming back at night to mess with us.  The problem I kept running into on some of the spots close to town was the heavy oilfield traffic that drove through them.  I ended up finding a spot that was very secluded to the south of town….way south. It was 10 miles from the Texas border and took us about 25 minutes to get to my husband’s work in the morning, but it was a spot where no one was going to mess with us.  (Except for maybe the rattlesnakes and chupacabras.)

And so began the worst routine ever of living.  We would wake up at 5:00 every morning to drive into town and drop my husband off at work.  I would then drive to Walmart’s parking lot and park my car where all the truckers parked so I could go back to sleep.  You never realize how much you take for granted always having a place you can go. There’s always your house, your friends place, or your good ol’ parent’s house. I had to kill 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, in a town where I didn’t know a soul, in a summer where the heat was getting above 100 degrees every single day.

I would find a way to kill time until 6, sometimes 7 o’clock when my husband would get off work.  We’d stop at the gym so he could take a shower and we would drive back to our good ol’ tent in the middle of nowhere.  After a couple of weeks we moved our tent to a site we found closer to town.

What we didn’t know was our new campsite was a place where flash flooding occurs.  And just FYI, we were in monsoon season. And also FYI, we both grew up in the city where you don’t have to worry about flash flooding.

We stayed at that site for a couple of weeks until a flash flood hit us out of nowhere.  It had rained very lightly for a couple of days, but it always stopped around night when we were at camp, and it really didn’t seem like a big deal to us city folks. Then one day in our tent, when it wasn’t even raining anymore, it literally went from no water to thigh deep in a matter of ten minutes.  The tent, our lawn chairs, and our cooler were all downriver in a matter of minutes.  We were able to save our belongings and thank God we parked our car on high ground, or we would’ve really been screwed.

That was the last night we were homeless.  We stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights, and then we bought a steal of a deal RV that we were able to pay cash for since we had no living expenses for around a month.

It was a challenging and (at times) a really crappy experience to live in a tent, but we made it work. I don’t regret it, because we saved a ton of money between having no living expenses and my husband’s new job.  It was an experience that could have pulled us apart, but instead it made us stronger.  After all, as my husband says, “If she’ll stay with me in a tent, she’ll stay with me through anything.”

Life happens, and sometimes we just have to do the best we know how.  Here’s some tips for those of you who may find yourself in a similar situation as we did:

1. How to find a spot.

This would not be applicable in a larger city, but in a small city you are usually surrounded by BLM land.  This land is free for you to use, but as I stated earlier, there’s a 2 week limit to your camping spot.  You can google where a BLM office is in your town and stop there to get a map. This option is only applicable for people who have transportation into town. For those of you who don’t…refer to my story about Lancaster St in Ft Worth ( 😉 ).

2. Hygiene and Grooming

There are a couple of options that you could take for showering. The first, and the option we chose, was to get a local gym membership. By paying for a month membership we guaranteed ourselves a place to take showers daily.  Another option is to go to a truck stop, such as Love’s or Pilot’s, and pay for a shower.  Depending on how much the gym membership is, it would probably be cheaper to pay for the gym.  Look into the rates of the local truck stops and compare the two to see which will work for you.  I never felt like my hygiene was impaired by living in a tent because of my gym membership.

For brushing our teeth, we would buy a gallon of water and brush our teeth at the campsite.

3. Charging your electronics

Since I had 12 hours to kill, I would charge my phone wherever I stopped for the time being.  When the library was open I would make full use of it’s outlets while re-reading the Harry Potter series.  I also would charge things at the gym while I was blowdrying my hair, and at the laundromat as I washed my husbands clothes.  But what about when these places are closed and you really need to charge your phone before heading into the boonies? I’m sure a certain large, well known chain store would not agree to my saying this, but when you walk into this certain store, you may notice power outlets by their soda and Redbox machines…..

Opportunities surround you at every turn, if you will only look!

4. Places to kill time and get out of the weather

My favorite place to get out of the killer noon day heat was the library.  I would spend hours in the library re-reading the entire Harry Potter series, as stated earlier.  They have air conditioning, restrooms, and power outlets.  It was kind of like paradise.  I also spent a lot of my time at the Pecos River Park.  I would spend the later afternoons walking around and around and around the jogging trails that line the river.  I was very well tanned by the end of my homeless month.  Sometimes I would go to a fast food restaurant with Wi-fi and spend a couple of hours there if they had power outlets.  (Eventually though I got on with the Chili’s in Carlsbad and started working day shifts.  Killing 12 hours can be a lot harder than it sounds.) Libraries, Parks, Restaurants with Wi-fi, Laundromats…these are the types of places you can kill a day.

5. Food

For the type of homeless I was living, food was not really an issue for me.  I would get food at the grocery store or cheap fast food restaurants during the day.  When my husband would get off work, we would eat at another restaurant, and then go to the gym before heading back to camp.  We did buy a cooler for drinks at the campsite, and we did buy some non perishable items to store at the campsite if we got hungry.  We always packed them back in our car when morning came to prevent the migration of critters to our campsite.

6. Attitude is everything

Of course, we were living homeless by choice, so attitude was an easier thing for us to control.  We would just remind ourselves why we were doing this, and how much money we were saving in the process.  Keep in mind that rent was sky high wherever we looked…it’s not like we could have found a $300/month apartment and we just decided not to.  We were saving on $1000/month rent apartments, or $2000/month weekly hotel rentals, both of which we couldn’t afford when we moved there.

We bought an RV and have been living in it since August of 2013.  It has saved me countless of hundred dollar bills, because I have never had rent/electricity totaling more than $350/month in the last 3 years.  It has freed me up to travel, afford to pay for nursing school in cash, and so much more.

I’m not suggesting that people quit what they’re doing and live this way to save money, but sometimes life throws unexpected curve balls and we have to make adjustments.  For us, it was selling all of our furniture in Colorado, and storing some boxes at my in-law’s house in Deming while living in a tent in Carlsbad.  Not everyone will have the same options or same experience that I had, but if you ever find yourself in a pinch, hopefully these tips and ideas will help!

Leave me a comment, and until next time!!