Do you know what it's like to be homeless?

Do you know what it’s like to be homeless?

Well, I don’t. At least, not completely. Because in the end, I wimped out. But that’s actually the end of the story. So how, you may ask, did I end up living in a cardboard fort for a night? Or maybe you’re more inclined to just ask…why?

Here’s how it begins. One wild week in the life of Sandra Shurtleff. Actually let’s start a few weeks back.

A Monday night activity. I’m eating hot dogs with my FHE brothers at a Ward party. It was supposed to be a swimming party, but…that’s beneath me. Okay, actually I just lost my swimsuit somehow over the summer. And so I have to just look too cool to swim. This is also necessary since I actually don’t know how to swim anyway. My life is an embarrassment.

In any case, somewhere amidst the conversation one of my “brothers” asked what us three girls at the small table were doing after the move out day for our apartment complex. BYU housing has this strange problem where there is a week or two between the move out day of one complex and the move in date of another. Yes. It is homeless week.

Of course, we girls were all staying in the same place and avoiding that drama. But our guy friends said they were thinking about living in a cardboard fort. I thought they were joking. They weren’t joking.

The next Monday. It was definite by this point that they were building a collapsible cardboard fort and living in it for homeless week. They were building it in the parking lot of our complex. So that FHE night, as I was driving some guys to campus where we were going to play sardines, I drove past our friends building their fort and stopped to ask a few questions. My friend Stephanie called out that she was going to go and stay with them for a day. She asked if I wanted to come along, so I said sure. I didn’t realize she meant overnight.

Then the wild week.

Last Saturday. This is unrelated, but where the stress began. I try to volunteer at the MTC every week, but my car battery didn’t like the idea. It decided to die. Four times. Once right before I drove to my grandparents in Sandy. And again just as it came out of the shop there. So I was advised to get a new battery and away to walmart I went. I carried the quite heavy battery through the store looking like the pathetic weakling that I am, then drove to my sisters’ and had my brother-in-law put it in. Then I drove back to walmart to carry the very dirty/dusty old battery back to the store for a slight refund looking like an even bigger, dirtier weakling. I had to wait awhile because the auto services dude with long hair and a beard was enjoying his chat with the local auto techies for some time before he noticed my existence. In moments like that, I wish I had more gut. I would have butted into his conversation and given him a piece of my mind. And then he would have pummeled me. So instead, I was just silent.

Tuesday. This is where the real stress began. I had to finish preparation for the weekend’s TA training by planning mini lessons for American Heritage. I finished just about the time I had to leave for the airport in SLC at 4:30 to pick up my friend from kansas. Her plane came in at about 6:15. We drove back to provo and almost immediately went and found my former FHE brothers doing the finishing touches on their octagonal shaped fort of glory. It was huge.  And epic. And legit. All at once.

Me and my friend basically stood around a did little to help put it up, then went to the enclosed area inside and a few of us began playing cards. Around about 10:30 Stephanie and a few others came and we started talking, with some breaks for random trips to a nearby mcdonalds where i bought a surprisingly delicious smoothie. 

The topic of our conversation is worth note. Four girls and four guys discussing dating. Enlightening to say the least. I was trying to learn how to effectively tell a guy who was continually asking me out that I didn’t like him that way. I wanted advice on how to do so nicely. In short, the answer from our wise men was “that’s impossible.” You can’t turn a guy down without him being offended. This also led to the ladder analogy. Girls have two ladders-friends and potential boyfriends. Guys just have one. Telling a guy he’s on my “friend” ladder is like telling him I just shoved him off the only ladder he believes in. Basically, I needed to be blunt and honest, and he’d hate me, but be glad I didn’t prolong and make worse the eventual/inevitable pain of rejection. Or so I understood from the conversation.

In any case, this discussion, among other less serious ones, lasted until about 12:30 in the morning when we all decided to go to bed. Or mostly. I took my friend back to my apartment to grab some sleeping gear and then returned to the cardboard fort. We met up at a corner of the octagon and proceeded to talk/text through most of the night. It was actually really cool to get the feeling of staying the night in a cardboard box. Well, at least until 4:45am. I remember because I had just checked my cell phone when my friend spotted the golf cart man.

Naturally the later it gets, the more paranoid me and this particular friend always become. Whether it’s sleeping in a cardboard box in a baseball diamond in Provo or sleeping in a tent on the planes of Kansas and wondering if those howling coyotes are closer than they sound. In any case, we’ve had a number of fear-driven early morning adventures. This was no different. After carefully watching a few cars passing by through the small cardboard door of our abode, I randomly decided to start playing a game on her phone. But she grabbed me suddenly,

                “Hey Sandra, there’s a man in a golf cart coming for us!”

                I looked up skeptically,

“I seriously doubt  someone would come attack us in a golf cart,” I started chuckling, “He’s probably just passing by.”

                “But in a golf cart?”  

                “Yeah, weird.”

                I shook it off as if nothing, but leaned my head out for a closer look. Then froze. Because he wasn’t just passing by.

                “Oh heck, he’s coming this way!”

                “What?”

                “Yeah, he’s coming right towards the fort!”

                Then I shoved her down and dropped to the ground in my makeshift bed as I heard the cart proceed to make its rounds around the fort, as if inspecting it. Then, to my infinite chagrin, he stopped the cart. Right in front of the little cardboard door that was partially open so that I could see him almost perfectly. He had on some sort of uniform and a baseball cap. He got out of the cart, took a few steps towards the door, until he was quite close, and then turned on his flashlight and shined it right down on me. I couldn’t tell whether or not he could really see me, since I was blinded by the intruding light and the angle was odd. So he may not have seen my face, but he most certainly saw my form laying atop my blankets.

                At this point, I was officially freaked out. Pretending to be asleep almost made it worse. No one wants a strange man watching them in their sleep.

                And here comes out a small secret. I had brought pepper spray with me. And I was holding it at that moment—gripping it tightly in my hand. So I slowly lifted my hand and was just ready to spray it, saying one last quick prayer that he would leave. He abruptly turned off the flashlight, got in his cart, and drove away. After about a minute, I sat back up, my friend following suit. I peeked through the holes in the box, a million thoughts going through my head at once. Who the heck was this random guy? I started to worry that he would call the cops. This worry was compounded by my second, somewhat embarrassing secret. IN addition to pepper spray, I had brought my bb gun pistol that actually looks a little too much like a real gun. In my mind’s eye I could just see the worst case scenario. The police come. We explain that we’re just temporarily homeless college students who built a fort, and then they find that I randomly have a weapon in my possession. To protect myself? Sure, but it really just looks bad. I stuffed my gun in my little bag, trying to determine the best course of action. That’s when I heard the sirens.  

                In hindsight, I realize that it was highly doubtful that a whole squad of cop cars with sirens blazing would come to apprehend a few homeless people in a cardboard box. But in the moment, it was like the last straw to a long, stressful train of thought. I jumped for my shoes,

                “We’re leaving. Now.” I said quickly to my friend.

                We scrambled out of our little hovel. I hesitated whether or not to grab my gun bag because I figured that if it was the police, I didn’t really want to be caught running away while armed….oh the logic of the paranoid. But I figured it would be worse to leave it with my sleeping companions, so I threw it on my back and we started speed walking across the now seemingly endless soccer field to my parked car.

                “What about the others?” my friend whispered in the dark.

                “They’ll be fine,” I muttered. This could be because my criminal side has a policy of “every man for himself,” but I like to believe it’s because I really did think everything would be okay. I just needed to get that gun in my bag back into my room. And the reasonable portion of my brain kept saying that the police weren’t coming anyway. So we kept going,

                “Don’t go too fast,” I also found myself saying, “We don’t want to look like we’re running away.”

                It was a strange sort of excited anxiety, really. The idea that we just might be barely making our escape was somewhat thrilling. It was also enough to convince me that a life of crime was not for me. In any case, it was kind of exhilarating to feel that for once you really are living on the edge…even if it was all in my head.

                We drove back to my apartment and crashed on my couches for a couple of hours. We woke up to return at 8am, hoping to get back before they awoke, so they wouldn’t realize that we’d wimped out. Unfortunately, they were not only awake, but they decided to record on camera our return walk of shame across the baseball field. Hurray for us.

                We helped them clean up the camp area, giving a watered down, but sufficient version of the evening, and then went our separate ways. I had to go shower and get ready for a date…the one in which I had to inform the guy that I really wasn’t that interested. Not fun, but blunt honesty (in the nicest way possible) does work.

                After the date, which was long and actually took up a good amount of energy (we played nerf gun wars in the complex), I was admittedly very tired. But somehow, sleep still alluded me. New roommates started moving in (all freshman. Oh joy.) and I found myself over the next couple of days running around with little sleep and transporting people around and going grocery shopping. Nonstop.

Then came Friday. All day TA training for American Heritage. We were to build cardboard boats for a race across the swimming pool at our bosses large clubhouse. Instead, my group built a Jamaican bobsled and named it after Usain Bolt. Needless to say, we won. However, it required me jumping into the pool in my clothes to help my partner board. I was very wet.

Saturday. All day TA training again. This time we did eight hours of near straight lecturing and teaching. Still very tired.

Monday (today): First day of classes. Tripped twice on the stairs. Then went to FHE where I tripped again while climbing up a little waterfall. I was muddy and very wet. And everyone in the ward got to see. Then in the shower at home, I tripped again and fell into the shower curtain, knocking the whole thing down and hurting my knee. Wow. Four times. I hope this is not an omen for the coming semester. 

So wild week for Sandra. It included a dying car battery, cardboard fort living, Jamaican bobsleds, little sleep, overload of teaching, and tripping all over Provo. 

At least I did learn one thing:

I may not know what it’s like to be truly homeless, but I do know that the life of crime is not for me. 

From this moment on, I think I’ll choose my bed over golf cart creepers any day.