Bob Remington didn’t trust Don Catterall when he spotted him standing in front of the James Bay Plaza. He figured the friendliness was an act, a way to lure spare change into the upturned ball cap.
“When I first saw him, all the biases of my comfortable life came out,” Remington says. Then he discovered, as did the rest of the neighbourhood, that the act was real, that the homeless man genuinely cared about the people who streamed past his sidewalk post each day.
“I bet Don knew, by name, a thousand people in James Bay,” Doug Snowsell says. A pastor who works out of the Mustard Seed street church, Snowsell presided over an informal memorial for Catterall outside the Simcoe Street plaza on Wednesday morning.
Memorial services for homeless people are often insular affairs, a matter of one member of the street community being eulogized by others. A smattering of the latter were among the 70 people who gathered Wednesday, but the crowd was a cross-section of James Bay — young parents with babies, merchants, Gore-Texed retirees (and a few of their dogs) — all professing a real sense of loss. Starbucks brought out coffee, for free; the people who work there liked the 52-year-old Catterall, too.
The neighbours took turns telling stories of how they took care of him and he looked out for them. Plenty had hired him to do work around their homes. One woman brought him a hot meal pretty much every day. When the weather turned cold and Don fell ill this winter, someone in the neighbourhood said “come stay in my spare room.”
That’s where they found Don when he died last month.
It was easy to see how much he touched people in James Bay over the past couple of years.
What’s harder to explain is how he got there.
Don grew up around the Saanich Peninsula, a happy kid who knew every inch of Cordova Bay beach. He attended Cordova Bay, Royal Oak and Parkland schools, though it didn’t come easily to him.
“One day he said to me: ‘Dad, I don’t like going to school anymore,’ ” his father Ken recalled Wednesday. So instead of graduating, Don went into construction with his dad, who taught him how to use heavy equipment — bulldozers, crushers, that sort of thing.
Exactly why or when things went sideways is hard to say. Don was maybe 40 when he gave up construction in favour of odd-jobbing. He would disappear for long stretches.
Mental health? Yes, he ended up in Eric Martin a decade ago during one of his disappearances, but those in James Bay saw no outward indications of mental illness. Substance abuse? The autopsy showed fentanyl, but people at the service said he wasn’t a user; some suspected that Don, his health declining, had been given a pill to make him feel better. Poverty? He worked like a demon, harder than people with steady jobs, but money didn’t mean much to him. Homeless? Yes, but he could have lived with his parents had he wanted. Instead, he just dropped out of sight altogether in 2013.
His family searched for him and took out newspaper ads, to no avail. Ken would come down from Parksville, where he now lives, and scour the streets. Other relatives looked, too. Nobody thought to look by the planter on the sidewalk in front of the James Bay Starbucks, though.
Family members at least got to hear Don remembered fondly Wednesday. “When I broke my arm, he was more concerned about my health than I was about his health,” one man said. Words like respectful, polite and genuine were repeated.
“He seemed as concerned for everybody in the neighbourhood as they were about him,” Remington said. Bad knees hampered Don’s ability to get a job, to get on top of life, but “he never asked anybody to feel sorry for him.”
Snowsell, who met Don 21/2 years ago when the latter was living under a bridge in Beacon Hill Park, called him “one of the most spiritual people I’ve met — not religious, but spiritual.”
Joan Athey recalled Don knocking on the door of her home, asking her for $10 so that he could buy a new inhaler for his asthma. She gave him the money, but was taken aback by the uncharacteristic request. The next week he apologized to her for having to ask. Now Athey wonders what kind of a society reduces an asthmatic man to begging for money for a puffer. It angers her that the help Don needed — with housing, finances, his health — was so hard to get. “I thought this was a preventable death.”
The homeless get tossed around like a political football during election campaigns, are often treated less as human beings than as a problem to be solved. In James Bay, people didn’t see “the homeless.” They saw Don.
