Barely Hanging On, But Under the Legal Gun

In summer, at least, she could sit outside and listen to the coyotes sing, to the cacophony of crickets, the whir of nighthawk wings, the everything of nothing but breezes across an East Mountains meadow.

It feels like winter now. Quiet. Frozen. What remains of a foot of snow from a bitter storm last week still covers the meadow and the two creaky recreational vehicles off N.M. 217 that have been home since August 2009, when her world collapsed.

It is not an easy place to live, especially with the snows, with temperatures dipping below zero and winds pushing in cold and mean from the eastern New Mexico plains.

Where Candace Olson lives, there is no heat, no electricity, no running water, no money and, when she thinks too hard about it, no hope.

“I’d trade this for a real place to live in two seconds,” says Olson, 60, who lives in one of the RVs while a friend she looks after lives in the other. “It’s very stressful.”

It’s also in violation of a Bernalillo County zoning law against using an RV as living quarters or storage.

Zoning officers first took notice of the RVs in February 2010. Sandy Fish, director of the county Zoning, Building and Planning Department, said a neighbor had complained that people were living in RVs on the property.

Fish says the county has attempted for nearly two years to work with Olson, allowing her all this time to either move or build a house, put in a mobile home, something with an approved water supply and wastewater system that meets zoning codes.

“Our goal,” he says, “is compliance, not fines or jail, which is rare.”

But how do you build a home when you are homeless?

And, Olson adds, what is the harm of letting her survive the only way she can?

“I am not hurting the land, my dogs are tagged and fenced in and we are barely surviving,” she wrote in a letter to the Journal. “I just don’t understand why I need to be harassed when I am barely keeping myself from walking the streets.”

A hearing is scheduled Thursday in Metro Court, where a judge can impose a fine of up to $300, jail up to 90 days or allow more time to find that elusive compliance.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do to us,” Olson says.

We meet after her first day of training for a seasonal job as a client service coordinator with an Albuquerque H&R Block. It is the first job she has been able to find since losing her last one as a part-time pharmacy tech at a Walgreens last July.

Olson, a twice-divorced, child-free woman who looks surprisingly younger and cheerier than her age and her situation might suggest, says she has a bachelor’s degree in business management and a master of divinity degree. She moved to Albuquerque from Florida in 1996 after falling in love with the city while on vacation. She held steady employment managing a restaurant and a pet store until 2009 as the economy cratered.

She depleted her 401(k) trying to keep up. She can’t touch a $164,000 pension fund from her six years as a Methodist church minister in Florida until she turns 62.

In July 2009, her car was repossessed. In August 2009, her home in the Northeast Heights, which had been for sale, was foreclosed on.

“Everything fell out from under me,” she says.

That’s how she ended up parking a couple of junkyard RVs on her brother’s five acres in the East Mountains.

A generator burned out months ago. So did an old 1992 Saturn car. She uses a battery-powered lantern now for light, a stove rigged with a barbecue grill propane tank for cooking and heat. She is not worried about carbon monoxide from the stove, because of the cracks in the RV’s seams.

For warmth, she sleeps with all five dogs snuggled on her bed. Her dogs, she says, are the reason she refuses to go to a homeless shelter.

“Some of these dogs are old,” she says. “I won’t leave them.”

On her first day at H&R Block last week, an old 1982 truck she had been using for transportation broke down.

She has no idea how she will continue to get to work, but says she will figure it out.

“I keep thinking we need just that one break, just that one fresh start,” she says. “So far, it hasn’t happened.”

And then again, maybe it has.

This Thanksgiving, Olson was the recipient of a turkey basket donated by the Valley View Christian Church in Edgewood. When no one at the church could reach her to pick up the basket, Tammy Hill, the leader of the church women’s ministry, packed it in her car and went looking for her.

“All we knew is she lived in RVs somewhere on 217, so I said good enough and said a little prayer: Dear Lord, please let me know when I’m getting close, she needs this food,” Hill says. “And I look and see these two RVs and think, what are the odds? It was Candace’s place. I call that a God thing.”

That day was the start of their friendship. Hill, whose generosity seems exceeded only by her snappy humor, enlisted her fellowship group to provide weekly donations of food, dog food, toilet paper and other necessities for Olson. When Olson’s truck broke down last week, it was Hill who picked her up and drove her to work.

It is Hill and her merry band of givers who are trying to come up with a plan to help Olson, at least enough to keep the zoning folks appeased.

It is Hill who gives Olson hope.

“I just feel like if you are blessed enough to be able to give people a glimmer hope, then you must,” Hill says. “It feels good to give. I wish more people knew that.”

In the cold of an East Mountains winter, the warmth of Hill’s generosity feels very hopeful indeed.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal