Living in a tent in California may be doable twelve months a years, perhaps, maybe, uncomfortable, but not cold.
Living in a tent community under a bridge, off route 195 in Providence, Rhode Island, can't be an address anyone wants to maintain come Winter.
More than 80 people are living together now, but I am concerned for their welfare as the weather worsens, and as the novelty wears off.
Tent cities are not new, but news of them is infrequent, and this article in the New York Times, with many colour photographs of the residents really turned my day around--and not for the better.
I remember all too clearly the Winter of 1993--blankets of snow, impassable roads, windows shuttered and taped, and temperatures below freezing.
I remember the quick, unruly, and seemingly unlikely hurricane that caught Eddie and I on South Main Street without provisions, no electricity and severe warnings from the Mayor.
The hurricane hit on the Wharf, just a short walk from this same spot off route 195, and was probably only contained by the barriers put up some years early after a similar event.
These folks are unprotected in more ways than one.
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