Meet Ryan

Ryan Interview with Bobbi Rathert:

RYAN M. and I met in Tent City. When asked if he wanted to tell his story, Ryan said he did and would like to tell it right then, but without his picture included. He said, "Yeah, it is better to tell it without knowing your face will be on it." Ryan seemed open to talking about himself, seemingly for the first time in a long time. 

I told Ryan I wanted to know how he got there today, living outdoors alone. "You are not that old to have a long history out here, are you?" I asked. "Thirty-one," he answered. "I am thirty-one years old." He was handsome, noticeably groomed, and nicely dressed in what appeared to be clean clothes. His hair was combed and trimmed. All this unexpected of people living unhoused, with few resources, while battling weather and the outdoors full-time. Besides his physical appearance, I saw that Ryan's face was filled with emotion, but I could not interpret what it was I sensed.

"What happened to you that brought you to live out here?" I asked. Ryan elaborated, "I've been homeless a lot in my life, even as a child. As a child, but you know, becoming an adult, I was homeless. Like I lived on the streets, and back then, I didn't look at it as homeless, you know." 

I questioned if he had always been in La Crosse or if he had been in other cities, too. "Yeah, the whole time, in La Crosse," he said. Ryan continued to explain that he was born in La Crosse and that this was the lifestyle he had always known. "I was, kind of, raised into drugs and to do drugs, you know." When I asked him to elaborate on whether his family raised him in the drug world, he said, "Oh yeah, in a way, yeah." He agreed that if a person is born into a different family, their choices would differ. "But that's what you knew," I said. "Yeah," he said, "and it's not just what I knew, but what I was, I'd say, I guess, or allowed to do and encouraged to do, to be able to support myself and my family." 

You can find Ryan’s full story in “Where’s Home: People Experiencing Homelessness in La Crosse County Share Their Stories.”

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