As temperatures soared into the 80s on Tuesday, Ty Nichols was thinking of winter.
After the city forced them to vacate a campsite near the Fitzgerald Lake trailhead, Nichols and others from the former “Moose Camp” moved over to a new site along the Mill River, where another camp has existed for years. They had planned to spend the winter at Moose Camp, and now are working to clean up and winterize their new home for the time being.
The city had asked them to move to the new location, Nichols said, but the group didn’t want to be pushed into another existing camp without their approval. Instead, Nichols and the other Moose Campers chose the spot after the existing camp made an official invitation. Some other Moose Campers moved elsewhere nearby.
Moose Camp, which dubbed itself a “recovery camp” for those overcoming opioid addiction and took its name from a former Moose Lodge at the Cooke Avenue campsite, only lasted a few weeks before escalating standoffs with the city culminated in an early morning eviction on Oct. 11.
“Having your life thrown into trash bags and tossed into a truck by strangers is humiliating, invasive, traumatic, and cruel,” Jay Willett-Jeffries, a Moose Camp resident, wrote in a statement shared with The Shoestring.
“Imagine how quickly you’d leap out of bed as those voices inform you that you’ve got just five minutes to ‘get your things and go,’ or they’ll arrest you,” Willett-Jeffries wrote. “You are being forced to rank, locate, and safely pack the items most needed, important, and precious to you in this world in less than five minutes.”
As The Shoestring previously reported, the city cited fire risk, complaints from neighbors and trail-users, and the development of affordable housing at the site as reasons the camp needed to vacate the public land on which it was located. After receiving The Shoestring’s request for comment, Habitat for Humanity, the group helming the affordable housing project, alerted the mayor’s office they could be flexible with their timeline to allow the group to stay the winter.
In response to a public records request, Alan Wolf, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s chief of staff, provided The Shoestring records of the written complaints the city received about Moose Camp, as well as the city’s responses.
The records, which the city redacted to remove the names of the complainants, appear to show six people making complaints concentrated at the end of September. The only complaint dated before Sept. 25 was one dated Sept. 10, the same day the city says it first informed Moose Camp they would have to leave — a timeline the campers dispute. Some of the complaints also refer to conversations that took place over the phone.
Complainants repeatedly referenced fire risk, noise, and visible defecation in the woods.
“I’m running low on tolerance for the ‘we’re trying to find them a better place to go,’” one complaint from Sept. 28 reads. “They’re squatting illegally on city land, crapping on it and they need to be moved period.” Others expressed more sympathy for the campers but still said they felt the situation could not continue much longer.
Though some supporters of the camp attempted to canvas neighbors to establish good relations, the effort was apparently not enough.
“It can be incredibly challenging to see people are suffering in our own neighborhoods and not feel angry,” Nan Sibley, a supporter and advocate for the campers, told The Shoestring. Sibley has herself lived outdoors more than once in her life, and was employed until recently as the community engagement coordinator for the Northampton Resilience Hub.
“It’s easier to just be angry when we see unhoused people behaving in ways that don’t fit in our housed or privileged contexts,” she said. But the circumstances of living outdoors are so complex and challenging, she said, that “to ask any more from the folks that are illegal no matter where they’re existing is egregious.”
After waiting over the long weekend for the city to release their belongings back to them, the campers moved to their new location with the help of community supporters, who raised money to rent a truck.
The Division of Community Care offered to help move, but Nichols said that, regardless of the intentions of individual staffers, the city division had lost a lot of trust among the campers by the revelation that staff’s notes on interactions with the campers were being used by the mayor’s office to justify the eviction.
“I don’t even feel comfortable using their toilets,” Nichols said.
Nichols added that damage to their belongings had been minor, but still enough to cause headaches, like a missing cap on a water jug, or attachments on tents that kept the corners from caving in.
When The Shoestring arrived at the new site, Nichols was working alongside Sibley and Cara Jackson of the Pedal People Cooperative, which has offered free assistance in cleanup and regular trash pickups, to gather and sort trash and recyclables. Cyclists stole glances at the scene as they rode by on the adjacent Norwottuck Rail Trail.
Nichols, giving a quick tour of the camp, said people sometimes yell things at them from the trail. Indeed, it is much more visible to passersby than Moose Camp was. But Nichols felt confident about avoiding another sweep.
“If they come here,” they said of the city, “it’s clearly about us. Because this spot’s been here for years.”
Though having to start a new camp this late in the season felt like a low point, Nichols said, they were hopeful that community support for those living outdoors was growing.
Sibley summarized the point: “We cannot help the situation of houselessness by hiding unhoused people,” she said. “We need to begin to see tents and understand that those are homes.”
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