Tending a garden of hope

"You need to rewrite the ending of your story," said the insistent voice on the phone. "People need to hear that what you wrote is no longer true."

The woman was calling about Jeff Alexander, a homeless man I met when he was living in Ballard's car-camping colony last winter. In a column on Sunday I told how Alexander had planted a stunning garden of irises and kale under the Ballard Bridge. But hope wilted in the dry Seattle summer. He died this month after falling off his bunk at the King County Jail — and after a lifetime of drugs, crime and squandered promise.

His garden, I wrote, was also dead. Only a few irises remained, "with no one to tend them."

It's only the tale of one man. But it sums up how I feel about the entire issue of homelessness and the efforts to solve it.

Take the latest drive, an ambitious 10-year plan by churches, social-service groups and government to end homelessness completely (we're currently in year two).

On the one hand, I'm all for it. How could we not try to make life better for the 5,000 who sleep on the city's streets?

But the central goal seems unreachable. Do we really have the will and follow-through to reduce homelessness to zero? And there are so many out there like Jeff, who, as his stepfather said, "had a monkey on his back that he just couldn't, or wouldn't, shake."

That's why I struggled with the story of Jeff's garden. Every life has value, whether it has a roof over it or not. But the story ended in despair anyway.

Wrong, said the voice on the phone.

"The first thing I thought when I read your article is that those planter beds have got to have flowers in them," said a 46-year-old "Eastside mom" who declined to give her name.

She had never heard of Jeff before. But she went out to Ballard to water his irises. Amid the trash she planted some pansies and kale. And she noticed Jeff had buried some crocus bulbs. Oblivious to his death, the bulbs have sprouted and will bloom this winter.

"There's the hope right there," she said. "You have to take that hope he left behind and move it forward. His garden will be tended. That's the story."

Scores of readers agreed. More than a hundred called or wrote to say they felt inspired by the guy, though he died a junkie shipped off to jail.

He was trying, readers said. If he could try, shouldn't we?

I went back to Jeff's garden Wednesday. It's still mostly bare dirt, despite the Eastside mom's handiwork.

I bought six pansies, some ornamental grasses and a dozen daffodil bulbs. As I planted them, William Mulvaney, of Pasco, panhandled nearby. He lives under the bridge. His belly is horribly distended from a hernia, but he says he can't persuade the government to pay for an operation.

I told him the story of the garden, and he got teary-eyed. He vowed to watch over it.

Then I gave him $5. He immediately left to buy a six-pack of beer. It was only 10 a.m.

Yes, you have to believe to plant a garden. But it's also true it won't grow on hope alone.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday.

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