The tent is the kind you stand up in, that families use for car camping. There’s a flat of bottled water and small barbecue grill outside, near the entrance. A fishing rod leans next to the tent door. Inside against one wall is a couch that looks like the back seat of a Suburban. It doubles as a bed. A chainsaw in a fluorescent orange case sits in the middle of the floor. Opposite the couch, lawn chairs are parked in each corner of the tent, facing each other.
Jesse Smith sits in one of them. He wears running shoes, faded jeans, and a burgundy t-shirt. Reflective shades perch atop a blue ball cap. A thick gold chain hangs around his neck; a silver bracelet cuffs one wrist. Both arms are clasped in his lap and there’s a slight scent of aftershave or cologne in the air. Crude self-applied tattoos sleeve both of his forearms. On the left arm are the words “sink or swim” and the symbol of a broken chain. Beneath his right eye is a stylized tattoo of the letter “a.” He can’t remember what it stands for. His eyes look glassy and opaque. He has a kind face, but one that betrays the weight of a life lived hard.
This tent in the woods is the 37-year-old’s home. Smith is a peer-to-peer outreach worker, and a father of four kids between the ages of 6 and 16. He’s been smoking crystal methamphetamine, or meth, since his early teens, and he’s been unhoused off and on for years. His last hit of meth was at around 3 a.m. in downtown Courtenay.
“I’m going to have to smoke again. My eyes are starting to close,” he tells me, before stepping outside briefly for a puff then returning to his lawn chair.
The annual point-in-time homeless count
Every year in the Comox Valley, non-profits conduct what’s known as a point-in-time homeless count. Staff and volunteers hit the street to count and interview unhoused people over a 24-hour period. It’s meant to be a snapshot rather than a conclusive count, and homeless youth are often underrepresented. In 2023, the point-in-time survey counted 272 homeless people, up from 132 in 2020. Smith is one of them.
With his tattoos and gangster aesthetic, it would be easy to rush to judgement: another homeless, drug-slinging addict pushing around an overflowing shopping cart and filling their pockets from the shelves of 7-Eleven. But every person has a story, and Smith’s is far more nuanced than this stereotype.
He’s bright and thoughtful in conversation. He seems capable. The floor of his tent is swept clean and his possessions are neatly stowed. There’s obvious pride in this modest, makeshift home that he hopes will escape the attention of bylaw officers. It’s relatively quiet and a short walk away from a small lake where he can fish.
“My dad always told me if you want peace, spend time on the water,” he says.
Turning points
There’s a lot about Smith’s life that is as ordinarily Canadian as maple syrup. He’s of mixed Barbadian and Metis heritage. His father was a member of the Canadian Armed Forces and was routinely posted to bases across Canada. His parents split when he was young, but he says it was an amicable separation. Smith played hockey to a high level, first as a goalie, then as a forward.
But there was trouble in school. As an ADHD kid, he acted out and fell in with a tough crew. He says he smoked meth for the first time at just 12 years of age. It was a dangerous turning point. He quickly developed a habit, all while playing competitive hockey throughout his teens. He admits to a blank spot in these early memories. “I guess I’ll figure that out some day,” he says.
In his early 20s, he became a father for the first time. He worked in the oil patch earning the kind of blue-collar wages that could fill a garage full of toys and put a solid roof overhead. But drugs—or his craving for them—wreaked havoc on any notions of stable domesticity. At one point he got busted for fraud and possession of stolen property, which landed him eight months behind bars at the Edmonton Remand Centre.
“I’ve been a shithead. I’ve drained my mom’s bank account, I’ve stolen from friends,” he says. “My life’s an open book. I don’t have anything to hide.”
I take Smith at his word. Curiously, I trust him. I get the sense that if you were ever in trouble, Smith, despite his own problems, is at his core the kind of person you could call and count on.
An unexpected diagnosis
After moving to Vancouver Island, Smith got his blasting ticket and a job with a Campbell River contractor, building logging roads. Again he was making good money, but addiction haunted him. A few years ago, he experienced a sudden loss of hearing and blurry vision. The ”sound of silence” was scary, he says. Doctors at first were puzzled, but eventually diagnosed him with Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada (VKH) disease. It’s an extremely rare disease of poorly understood causes that attacks the central nervous system and afflicts just one in 400,000 people.
Doctors prescribed a treatment of the synthetic hormone prednisone; so far it’s kept the disease in check. Still, the spectre of losing his vision hangs over him.
In 2021, Smith was living on the streets and peddling meth (he claims it wasn’t for the money but to ensure he and his friends had a safe supply.) One night that fall, he met Nikki Morrison while she was driving around the Comox Valley with a few volunteers in her Dodge pickup. It was cold, dark, and wet. They had hot food, jackets, and boots for those in need. Morrison, a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN,) runs a peer outreach program during extreme hot and cold weather events. Back then, she was a Community Outreach and Residential Support Worker at Dawn to Dawn Action on Homelessness, but now she works independently.
Peer outreach workers have the sort of empathy only possible through lived experience with addiction and homelessness. They get training in emergency first aid
and how to administer naloxone. They also learn how to help prevent or de-escalate confrontations with people in crisis while helping to keep professionals like Morrison safe.
Previously Morrison had worked for 11 years at an urgent care clinic in the Comox Valley, where she treated many homeless and addicted people. In 2019, she made the switch to working directly with people experiencing poverty and addiction. For Morrison, the work is much more than a paycheque; it’s personal. She has five kids. The oldest two are struggling with drug addiction, and three years ago her 29-year-old stepson died of an overdose in Vancouver.
As they did their downtown rounds, Morrison and her small team rolled up behind the Walmart. They noticed a tarp covering a stairwell.
“I called out, ‘We have sandwiches and hot food.’ Then I saw this this head peek out from the side of the tarp,” Morrison says, remembering the first time she met Jesse Smith.
The beginning of a friendship and working relationship
Smith feared it was the cops. But instead it was the start of a friendship—and eventually a working relationship. Morrison and her crew gave him some warm food and clothing, chatted for a while, then left. But Morrison continued to see Smith on the streets over the next few months, and whenever she did, he would ask how he could help.
“Jesse really wanted to give back, so I decided to bring him on,” says Morrison. “He was living on the streets. He’s in it, but he also never gives up.”
For Smith, peer outreach was an opportunity to earn a wage and supplement his monthly PWD (Persons with Disabilities) benefit that he started receiving after the VKH diagnosis. But he speaks about it like it’s a higher calling, something that he is destined to do—to help what he refers to as his “street family.” It is a family bound by shared experience, suffering, and heartache.
Nearly three years after that fateful meeting in the stairwell behind Walmart, Smith calls Morrison his “saviour.”
“I don’t know where I’d be without her,” he says.
A raven squawks loudly outside his tent. The sound of traffic hums in the distance. He glances at his cell phone. It’s almost time to catch a ride into town. Besides his work with Morrison, he also does peer-to-peer outreach with SOLID Outreach, a Victoria-based organization that runs a program in the Comox Valley.
It is difficult work with an emotional toll that would crush most people. Smith can’t begin to count the number of overdose victims with blue lips and a grey pallor that he has revived with a jab of naloxone. In the past three months, he’s lost 16 members of his “street family” to toxic drugs.
This past March, his best friend Tim died of an overdose. Smith gets quiet for the first time in our conversation. He wipes a tear with the back of his hand and shifts in his chair.
“Tim was 26. They found him on the stairs at Simms Park,” Smith says. “I can’t go to memorials anymore.”
Morrison told me that she worries about Jesse, that he gives so much of himself that he’s at risk of breaking down. That he, too, is in danger of succumbing to the freight train of toxic drugs that continues to roll forward, destroying lives along the way.
For those of us on the outside of this world, it’s hard not to zero in on the shopping carts piled high with trash, the plight of downtown business owners who face urban poverty and petty theft day after day, and the shock of seeing someone hunched over and injecting across from city hall on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
We should be shocked. There’s something deeply wrong with this picture. But it would also be wrong, even immoral, to be numbed into viewing the homeless and addicted as just numbers on a grim balance sheet. They are people, each with a unique story. Many even have hopes and dreams despite the odds. Smith is proof positive.
“My number one goal is to be done with meth. I want a legitimate position doing outreach work, but I know I have to get clean,” he says.
He has so much to give. I’ll place my hope with Jesse Smith.
