Blossoms of hope wilt away

When I first met Jeff Alexander, I wanted to talk about his lot in life — how he came to be panhandling under the Ballard Bridge and living out of an old truck.

He wanted to talk about flowers. It was a couple of days before Christmas. I was writing about Seattle's "rolling slum," a loose colony of 50 to 100 homeless folks who camp in lower Ballard in their trailers, vans, buses and cars.

Jeff was one of them. I found the 52-year-old out-of-work fisherman lining the cab of his old pickup with cardboard for more warmth at night.

What's it like, living in the car colony, I asked him?

I knew the likely answer. I knew two people had just died of drug overdoses. Someone else had told me it was the kind of place where you can wake to the sound of someone peeing on your windshield.

But Jeff ignored my question. Maybe it was the grim look on my face. Instead, he said: "Have you seen my garden?"

There are some old brick planters along 15th Avenue Northwest under the bridge. Overcoming the stench of stale urine, Jeff had cleared out the weeds and trash and worked the soil. He claimed he was going to plant flowers.

He was very excited about it. He said he was doing it to say thanks to Ballard. For the money, the groceries, for letting him sleep there.

I featured Jeff in a column about the homeless colony. He was quoted as saying: "I don't figure on doing this for long."

Later, I dropped by to see if he was still around. I assumed his garden was all talk, but I was amazed — he'd planted a series of cyclamen, kale and irises, tidy and gorgeous. He fertilized them with pigeon droppings. He'd lugged water from blocks away to keep the plants healthy.

In February, the Seattle P-I ran a picture of Jeff and his garden, under the headline: "Planting Seeds of Hope."

It was a nice image. Beauty blossoming from despair.

It wasn't the whole story. I heard the rest this week, from Jeff's mother and stepfather.

It turns out that when I talked with Jeff, he was hooked on methadone. He was on that to get off heroin. He suffered from depression and spent decades cycling off one drug and onto another.

In the '80s and '90s he got busted for drug possession, and assault and a string of thefts. He did a few stints in state prison, where he planted flower gardens on the grounds.

His life was maddening because of his talent, his parents say.

"He could have been anything — a lawyer, a scientist," says Ralph Darden, Jeff's stepdad. "He should have been a master gardener. He could grow anything."

Jeff worked his Ballard garden until spring, when he got a job as a welder a few blocks away at Marine Fluid Systems.

Normally, he was Herculean — while captain of a fishing boat, he survived a midwinter shipwreck in Alaska by clinging to a cliff for five hours. (The headline on that story read: "Skipper Defies Death on Cliff.")

But something broke in him over the summer. Maybe it was living on the street. Maybe he was using drugs heavily again.

In the end, Jeff was camping in his truck near the Home Depot in south Seattle. Two weeks ago, police picked him up because he'd failed to appear in court for two traffic violations and a theft charge — a theft that occurred right around the time he appeared in that "planting seeds of hope" photo.

He fell off his bunk in the King County Jail and broke his neck. Last week, Jeff died.

The thing about the Ballard car colony that got to me was its invisibility in plain sight. People sleeping in their cars ain't news, one car-camper told me. Neither was Jeff's death. Which is why his parents called and invited me up to their Richmond Beach home.

"We just want everyone to know what kinds of things these people are going through out there on the street," Darden said.

Homelessness is a misnomer. Jeff's problems couldn't be solved by putting a roof over his head. He always had a house to come back to.

"I want to say that he was loved," said Jeff's mom, Shirley Alexander-Darden. "But no matter how much we loved him, he stayed lost.

"It's been a long journey. I don't know if it has any meaning at all."

I went back to see Jeff's garden under the Ballard Bridge. Six homeless people were gathered there. None of them had heard of Jeff. They had arrived in the rolling slum long after he left.

The garden is mostly gone. One of the planting beds is filled with beer cans. But even after such a dry summer, a few of Jeff's irises are still there, toughing it out.

His life may not have amounted to much. But it means something that there are irises in Ballard with no one to tend them.

Reach Danny Westneat at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.