Gretchen Wibel wakes up most mornings in the driver’s seat of her car under a pile of blankets with a chill in her bones.
The layers of Afghans cannot ward off the bite of the late September air as the spectre of winter looms closer each day.
With overnight temperatures in the 30s, a foggy dew coats her windshield until she starts the engine, turns on the defroster and moves to her next location.
The 85-year-old hasn’t had a warm bed in months, beyond the rare night at a hotel for respite.
Since becoming homeless at the end of June, Wibel has been living out of her 2008 Chrysler Pacifica, chock-full of her belongings, driving around Concord and trying to access resources. During the day, she used to roll down the windows to catch any whisper of wind on her skin — a welcome respite from the oppressive heat — but now she keeps the glass rolled up, while bundling herself in a sweatshirt and jeans. She prays the temperature won’t drop further, but she knows it will.
“I freeze every night,” she said, her voice grave, eyes watery.
After an entire summer, she finds herself no closer to finding stable housing than she was the first night she slept in her car. Hope and despair have become regular companions, but the latter seems to be more present these days.
“What I want to happen next is to get a place, a roof over my head. I need a place, especially at night,” she said.
The Monitor continues to document Wibel’s story. While her future remains uncertain, she takes every day as it comes.
Still, the turning of the seasons stops for no one.
A chill in the air
Wibel has cycled through numerous sleeping locations in the city — hospital and church parking lots, cemeteries and parks.
Every night, her goal is to stay put until dawn, with no police or security guards shooing her away.
From her driver’s seat, she tries to create as much semblance of comfort as she can, reclining as much as the suitcases and boxes in the back seat will allow.
She usually sleeps in whatever clothes she wore that day, then finds somewhere to change the next morning. She can see her breath in the cool air, which fogs her car from the inside, while condensation collects on the outside.
“I don’t know. I can sort of keep warm, but it’s getting ridiculous, and it just has to stop,” she said.
Each night seems to be worse than the last.
Wibel owns a hat — somewhere in her car, she said — but doesn’t have any gloves.
“It’s getting harder.” She sighed.
Although several months remain until snow blankets the streets and ice encases everything from roof ledges and trees to windshields and sidewalks, Wibel knows she’ll be in trouble when the biting cold does settle upon the city.
To help the city’s approximately 300 unhoused residents navigate the cold, the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness and the Friendly Kitchen both expand their hours during frostbite season.
The Coalition also houses people in its winter shelter on North Main Street. Last year, the shelter operated for 121 nights, with an average of 37 individuals each night.
“We saw a higher than average count last season but we saw fewer unique individuals, indicating fewer people cycled through the shelter and more people stayed for extended periods,” said Kait Gallagher, the Coalition’s director of development and communications. “Nearly 24% of individuals who used the shelter stayed for 60 nights or more.”
Filling her days
On a Monday in the middle of September, a crisp breeze shook the tree branches above Gretchen Wibel’s car, casting dancing shadows across the cyan dashboard of her Chrysler Pacifica as the afternoon light skimmed the Sewalls Falls parking lot around her.
She sat, eyes closed, hands clasped in her lap. Not asleep, just resting.
A few other cars remained parked in the lot, their owners off on a stroll along the trail or down by the river with their fishing rods cast out in the water. No one paused to give Wibel a second glance.
She finds herself seeking solace in solitude a lot recently.
Wibel’s white hair has grown longer in the time since she began calling her car home. Her ankles are still inflated beyond their normal size: the result of sleeping in a sitting position rather than horizontally. She knows she doesn’t walk enough.
“I’m just damn tired all the time,” she said.
She likes Concord’s cemeteries for their tranquility, parking her car there and cracking open a mystery book to pass the time.
“I read a lot, or I get out and walk, and I don’t have money to go shopping and all that stuff. I mean, I don’t really need anything anyway,” she said.
Sewalls Falls, for Wibel, has remained one of the few places she consistently ventures, both for its verdant nature and the lack of bother she experiences there. The world just leaves her alone.
At the urging of a volunteer at the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness and the Friends of Forgotten Children, Wibel started frequenting The Friendly Kitchen for dinner most evenings. Other than that, she nibbles on Triscuits, cheese slices and bananas, without eating full meals.
“I don’t even worry about breakfast in the morning much either,” she said. She hasn’t felt consistent hunger since becoming homeless.
A membership at Planet Fitness on Fort Eddy Road — around $15 a month, she thinks — gives her a consistent place to shower and charge her phone.
Driving around or stopping into Market Basket, she blends into the sidelines of society. Few see her for what she is: one of the income-poor elderly who doesn’t make enough money to afford her own home, with few options on the horizon.
A longtime attendee of the Salvation Army Church on Clinton Street, Wibel tries to go to Sunday services when she has the energy. One time recently, she recalled, she arrived in sweatpants, but it was the best she could do that day. The “come as you are” mentality among her fellow congregants made her feel welcome nonetheless.
“I think I’d get further if I got help. Let’s put it that way. When I just do things on my own and whatever, and right now my phone’s not working well…” she trailed off. “But it helps to have help.”
On the occasional Thursday, Wibel will drive to Rise Again Outreach in Loudon, where she volunteers alongside several other women to help organize clothing to be donated to those in need. The nonprofit has been a source of assistance to her when she’s sought it, too.
Grasping for help
As has happened multiple times since she became homeless, Wibel’s phone recently began to malfunction. When people try to call her, they receive an automated message stating, “The person you are calling cannot accept calls at this time.”
She’s not sure how to fix it and has tried several times to replace the device.
Without a working phone, she is effectively cut off from her children, her sister in South Carolina and any social services that would call about appointments or housing opportunities.
“I applied for the McKenna House. I didn’t hear any more about it, so I don’t know. They’re not crazy about me because of my past history,” she said.
Wibel has a criminal record, including multiple stints in prison. She also struggles with alcohol — and drinking in a sober residence is the reason she found herself homeless to begin with. Alcohol is also the reason she hasn’t gone to live with any of her children.
“So I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “I decided [if] things get worse, I’m just going to land in my daughter’s driveway and say, ‘Here I am, like it or not.'”
A woman in Concord who read the first Monitor story about Wibel over the summer has repeatedly brought her food and a blanket to stay warm. She’s tried to help the octogenarian find housing but has hit dead ends in terms of availability, price tag, and coordination with Wibel, who struggles with logistics and is prone to confusion.
It’s nice to have someone who cares, Wibel said.
Twice, she said, she’s been down at Sewalls Falls when people have seen her and gotten worried about her health to the point of calling an ambulance. But she’s just tired, she said.
“Nothing really wrong with me. I may be tired, but I’m not gonna keep popping into ambulances because somebody thinks I don’t look good,” she said with a wry chuckle.
Sometimes she runs into people who recognize her from the set of Monitor stories featuring her over the summer.
Becoming homeless, she said, has changed her perspective. Especially as she grapples with the impending arrival of frigid temperatures.
“I know a lot of people that have all these judgmental comments about the homeless, and I used to hear them, but people aren’t homeless because they just want to be homeless,” said Wibel.
She remembers encountering unhoused people in the community before and avoiding their gazes.
“They’re just people. They’re homeless. There’s nothing wrong with them,” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t judge anybody like that anymore.”
From day one of living out of her car, Wibel understood that sometimes life gets the better of people.
“It’s not because you’re lazy. It’s not because you don’t have a job,” she said. “It happens. It’s just something that happens.”
