A Wild Ride

Matt Noble can make a home from some tarps, lumber and wooden pallets, make a wood-burning stove to heat it, and saw enough wood with a beat-up carpenter’s saw to keep the place above freezing most winter nights. But, even with the help of his wife, Bobbie Jo, he couldn’t rebuild himself into a manual laborer, after a heart attack and stroke in 2010.

“He has a stent running in a diagonal across his body now,” Bobbie Jo explains. “He has to take it easy. If he got hit in the stomach with that thing in there, he could die.”

For five years before the medical problems, Matt and Bobbie Jo lived and worked with a traveling amusement park that provided rides and concessions at community events like the Beaverdale Fall Festival. Matt was crew foreman for the rides, supervising 10 to 20 guys who assembled and worked the rides at each stop. Bobbie Jo worked in concession stands.

“We used to travel for six months every year, then stay with relatives in Des Moines for the other six months,” he says.

“But my sister sold her trailer home and moved, and we had no place to go,” says Bobbie Jo, completing the story for him.

So, for the last year, the couple has lived in a dwelling they built near the river south of downtown. Matt has applied for disability benefits and they’re waiting. They scan the computerized job postings at the Central Library regularly, and Bobbie Jo works when she can, but most months they survive on $367 a month in food stamps.

“I go canning most days (picking up beverage cans for the 5¢ deposits), walking from downtown to the Fairgrounds and back, and all around,” she says. It takes 400 cans a month for the $20 they need for Matt’s reduced cost prescriptions. “Some months I don’t make it,” she admits.

Still, they share. Others in the homeless community come to their place to warm up by the stove. They love to cook, and stockpiled and combined food so Matt could cook a Thanksgiving turkey over an open fire that served 20 unsheltered friends (see recipe). They did the same thing again for Christmas.

“Maybe we’ll get the disability (payments), maybe we’ll get a place again, maybe pretty soon,” Bobbie Jo hopes, “but . . . ” she sighs. “We’ll be OK, I guess.”

Thanks to your donations, in the last year Joppa Outreach has provided Matt and Bobbie Jo weekly visits and meals at their camp along with a space heater for supplemental heat, head lamps, blankets, groceries, socks, shoes, and more.