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Bend man finds home after living in forest for two years
- Homelessness: Real Stories, Real Solutions
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
With a U.S. Forest Service sweep scheduled for May 1, and with the help of service providers, Mark Jenkins found an apartment just in the nick of time
By David Dudley
ForJournalism Lab
Up until a few months ago, Mark Jenkins didn't consider himself lucky. The seventh child born to Floyd and Willie Lee Jenkins, he was born on the seventh day of the seventh month.
"And I was all of seven pounds when I was born," Jenkins told FORJournalism on a rainy afternoon in early March. "The number seven is mentioned something like 54 times in 'The Book of Revelations.' It's supposed to have some special meaning, but I've never won nothin'."
He stood outside his travel trailer, which was parked in the woods off of China Hat Road, south of Bend. After being there for two years, he'd become comfortable enough to cook for his neighbors. He fired up his grill. A package of chicken leg quarters thawing nearby. He poked at the rock-hard chicken, then shared moments from his childhood, the struggles he's faced as a man, and a dream that keeps him going.
At age 6, Jenkins said he began picking beans to earn money for school clothes. By age 10, he'd joined his uncles as a logger. Though he didn't graduate high school, and can't read much, Jenkins said he was trained to become an arborist.
"I've worked hard all my life," said Jenkins, who's now 65.
Jenkins doesn't consider himself homeless. He's got a trailer, a truck, a couple of dogs, and a variety of tools and parts strewn about his camp.
"Home is where my heart's at," he said.
While the semantics of the word "homeless" don't add up for Jenkins, the U.S. Forest Service intends to forcibly remove him, along with somewhere between 50 to 200 other long-term campers in the area, on May 1. Ostensibly, the sweep is meant to keep people safe from controlled burns and other planned forest management activities.
While many of the campers who live in the forest don't know where they'll go, Jenkins, who's been living there since November 2023, is one of the lucky ones. He's been invited to move into an apartment at Cleveland Commons, a first-of-its-kind permanent supportive housing project in Bend.
'The devil came into my life'
Though he was born in North Bend, near Coos Bay, Jenkins spent part of his childhood in Grimsley, Tennessee, near the Kentucky border.
"My daddy was a moonshine runner, and my momma was a preacher," Jenkins said. "My grandaddy was a coal miner… until the depression hit. It wiped out everything. We lost him for a while there, but he never left us in a bad way, a bad position."
Jenkins pointed to a pattern that emerged in Appalachia around that time, as many men who had no discernible way to provide for their families disappeared into drink and wandering. Sundays were always a little weird in the Jenkins household, he said.
"Momma would preach love and forgiveness at church in the mornings," Jenkins said. "Then she'd come home and cook chicken, biscuits and gravy. My dad would come staggering in. She'd say grace, then look at him sideways."
One such Sunday, his dad, Floyd, staggered in and took a seat next to his son while Willie Lee was saying grace.
"My daddy grabbed hold of my hand and said something," Jenkins said. "He got one syllable out, then he yelped and squeezed my hand — hard.
"I looked up," Jenkins continued, "and he had a fork dangling from his cheek. He never interrupted grace again after that."
The feisty Willie Lee died when Jenkins was a little over 5 years old, leaving a void in the boy's world.
"That was the day the devil came into my life," he said. "My older sister, Ruth Anne Jenkins, raised me after that. She did her best, but our family fell apart. It was a lot of rough times after that."
Picking up the pieces
While Ruth Anne cared for Jenkins, his dad, Floyd, was still alive. Jenkins said that not long after his mom died, Floyd suffered a severe stroke. Floyd lived another 18 years, during which time he moved with his kids back to Oregon.
Jenkins said Floyd, an avid fisherman, caught a 69-pound striped bass while visiting Coos Bay.
"That's without the guts and gills," Jenkins said with a sense of pride. "Anybody who knows anything about fishing, that's a hell of a catch. It probably weighed 100 pounds."
While Jenkins inherited Floyd's love of fishing, he'd come to resent his father for passing on his addiction, and the trouble he'd seen because of it. A study by the American Addiction Center found that one-third of people experiencing homelessness are actively battling addiction, and two-thirds have a lifetime history of substance abuse disorder.
"I didn't forgive him until I was 33, and in Narcotics Anonymous (NA)," Jenkins said, poking again at the chicken, to see if it had thawed. "It wasn't until I learned how the disease works, how addiction works, that I could forgive my pops."
Jenkins began attending NA before serving 48 months in a California penitentiary on gun charges. Jenkins said he wasn't violent. He liked to drink, he liked to smoke a doobie, but the drugs on today's market are confusing and scary to old-timers like Jenkins.
"I've been around drugs since… the late 60s," he said as the rain let up. "I've seen biker dope, which was straight poison, heroin, all that. But that blue powder — Fentanyl, skittles, they call it all kinds of names — is something different.
"People are dropping like flies," he added after a pause. "It's tearing our world apart."
Keeping a dream alive
Like Floyd, "a good Southern man," Jenkins wrestles with a battery of health challenges, addiction, high blood pressure and cholesterol, carpal tunnel syndrome among them. But he's still telling stories, cracking jokes, smiling.
"If I'd known I was going to live this long," he said, "I would have taken better care of my body."
Back at China Hat, before the chicken could thaw, Katie DeVito, a member of the Homeless Outreach Services Team of Deschutes County Behavioral Health, arrived to take Jenkins to see Mosaic's mobile health care providers who were visiting the area.
DeVito is part of a team that makes three to four visits to the China Hat, Cabin Butte areas each week. DeVito helped Jenkins apply for the Cleveland Commons apartment, work through a screening process, and sign the lease. She also connected Jenkins with Stacey Witte of REACH, who helped find funding for the required security deposit.
DeVito's supervisor, Colleen Thomas, said that her team has been busy over the past month, connecting with individuals in the community to ensure they're equipped and able to cope with upcoming closures and changes in weather.
"Our work with Mr. Jenkins is much like the support and services we provided to many individuals throughout Deschutes County," Thomas told FORJ. "We are fortunate that he has allowed us to join him on his journey into housing and we will continue to support him in what he needs during this next chapter of his life."
Jenkins said that the Project SHARE van, an outreach program run by Shepherd's House, often manned by Tim Ellis and volunteer Lynd Wieman, helped by bringing propane, water, food and other supplies.
"I'm grateful beyond words for these folks and the services they provide," said Jenkins, poking again at the chicken, which was still frozen. "But it's a little scary for me. It's a different way of life out here. Many of us have become 'socially unacceptable.' I don't know what to expect."
Even with an apartment lined up, the ex-logger who loves to fish, clam and crab, still has big dreams that can't be landlocked.
"I'm a coastal boy, I get a lot of strength from the ocean," he said. "Once I get settled, I'm going to build a houseboat. I'm not sure where I'll park it. Could be the Columbia River, could be somewheres along the Pacific Ocean. We'll have to wait and see."
With a place to call home for the foreseeable future, he said he's grateful that he now has a fighting chance to follow that dream.
Homelessness: Real Stories, Real Solutions (realstoriesrealsolutions.org) is a journalism lab funded by Central Oregon Health Council under FORJournalism (forjournalism.org), an Oregon nonprofit dedicated to supporting journalism statewide. Sign up for weekly newsletters to receive updates.
