I moved to Portland, Oregon when I was 19 in 2008 after living a vagrant lifestyle for several years. I had some street smarts from my time hitchhiking, etc. but I was still a young woman with a naive romanticism about life on the road. I spent months living in a tent or a car when I first arrived in the PNW. Luckily, I met with friends I’d known from home town to live this lifestyle with when I got there and we could look out for each other.
When my life stabilized in my mid 20’s, I spent a lot of time volunteering with legitimate organizations that provided assistance to the homeless population in Portland. Among other things, I spent many weekends providing first-aid and wound care at a clinic set up in a church downtown. I enjoyed my time there but my interactions with some of my patients showed me how lucky I was to emerge from my earlier homelessness unscathed. There are some truly ill people who seem extremely friendly and kind until a flip switches and they are not. The most terrifying things anyone has ever said to me have been from patients there that were very warm and kind for awhile. Sometimes weeks.
Before this, I lived in flop/punk houses where trainhoppers would often stay. They were also cool until they were not. This by no means is meant to be a sweeping generalization of the entire homeless population of the U.S. but I have spent years of my life intimately familiar with this population as first a peer and later a healthcare provider: there are predators on the streets who only know how to survive by victimizing and taking advantage of naive, good natured people (mostly young women). They can tell when you’re new to the streets. They can tell that you are alone. They can mask for as long as they have to.
That said - “helping the homeless,” “really getting to know them,” and buying sandwiches for people I just met when I had a few bucks to spare is *so me* when I was in my late teens and early 20’s. Even though we only have tiny scraps of insight into the few days before Angel went missing and only a couple sentences about her interactions with the homeless population, I feel like I’m transported to my 19 year old self and can deeply relate.
Anyway, sorry for the long windedness of this post but here are a few of my educated guesses on where she might be/the circumstances.
- Quality Inns and Best Westerns can be pretty seedy. I’ve never been to those exact locations in Port Angeles or Seattle but I’ve certainly spent time in those areas. She may have met travelers there and decided to join forces to explore together.
- Walmarts/grocery stores in the PNW are where a lot of younger transient people spange (ask for money). If I were my younger self and on the road again and some younger spangers that seemed cool/fun to party with/interesting approached me outside of a store, I would have (and actually have many times) bought them food and probably beers and hung out with them. Maybe they suggested a camping spot they knew about and they all went camping together. Again, I do not know Angel but this is an exact scenario that I have lived and seems likely.
- I can’t remember and don’t want to lose what I’ve written so far but is she alone on the store video? She may have met people at the campsite and decided to camp with them and left on her own to get supplies and food for all of them.
Is there footage from inside the Walmart?
Hope this isn’t too disjointed, I just woke up. I hope Angel is located safe soon and is just having a great adventure.
