‘God Looking Back at You’

It’s a typical Friday at the foot of First Road in McKinleyville, where the pothole-pocked street hits the unincorporated town’s easternmost point, cutoff by the swath of former timberland that is now the McKinleyville Community Forest’s southwestern corner. It’s overcast and Christine Flores-Cozza has a jacket over her daisy-patterned, light blue dress, and Bubba, her brawny but mellow brown and white dog, lies a few feet away, leashed but unattached to her or anything else.

To Flores-Cozza’s left is a pile of trash. There are seven or eight industrial size black garbage bags, all full, as well as a pair of blue metal public trash can lids, a couple milk crates filled with debris of various sorts, an array of broken tent poles and metal rods, and a half-dozen corrugated plastic roofing panels, all waiting to be hauled away. Flores-Cozza is houseless — “free range,” she jokes, though she admits she doesn’t move around too much, and has called the modest camp tucked off a trail nearby home for about four years. But this isn’t her trash. Rather, it’s the product of a week’s worth of her work, litter collected from on and around the multi-use trails that snake through the sprawling property, or pulled from an abandoned encampment, the latest one she’s working to erase from the landscape.

She’s waiting for John and Rick, she says, the “real heroes” of this story, the two men who spend their Fridays — all of them — driving around McKinleyville, picking up loads of trash, and hauling them to the dump, free of charge and with smiles on their faces. Rick, she explains, has permanent respiratory damage after almost dying of COVID-19 a few years back, while John has had two strokes in recent years. Still, they always show up.

“I just thought they should get some recognition,” she says, explaining an email she sent the Journal pitching a story about how while people angrily debate homelessness, tariffs and politics, a small group of volunteers spends their Friday’s “doing something radical: cleaning up quietly.”

As Flores-Cozza talks, a beat up and dusty white Tacoma pickup bounces down First Road toward the pile of rocks that signals an entrance to the forest. Out bound John “Johnny” Calkins and Rick Eacret Ellis, both smiling broadly.

Calkins, a ring of sweat visible on his green cap, tells Flores-Cozza he can’t help much today, lifting his shirt to reveal a bandage in the center of his chest where his team at University of California at San Francisco Medical Center had implanted a heart monitor the day before, hoping to find the cause of those two strokes. But Calkins says his wife drove him down and back in the same day so he could make his rounds today.

Eacret Ellis immediately begins picking up bags and tossing them atop what already seems a very full load in the back of the Toyota and quickly grows to resemble the Grinch’s sleigh after he robbed Whoville blind. Calkins then tosses a pair of yellow tie-downs over the pile, carefully cinching them down to secure the load, with Eacret Ellis at one point going into what he called “goat” mode to shimmy atop the pile and free the strap.

Satisfied he’ll be able to get to the dump without losing a bag or a piece of roofing, Calkins and Eacret Ellis give Flores-Cozza a small hug, slide back into the truck’s cab and slowly drive off. As the truck pulls away, with what Eacret Ellis estimated was about 1,000 pounds of trash aboard, Flores-Cozza moves a few remaining bags that didn’t fit behind the stacked rocks, where they’ll sit until Eacret Ellis and Calkins return next week.

The trash isn’t all from the homeless, she says, noting that hikers litter, teens who party in the woods sometimes leave the place trashed, and some families that can’t afford garbage service dump their household trash, old tires and broken appliances here. But, she quickly adds, just because she’s unhoused doesn’t mean she can’t be part of the solution.

“Just because I’m homeless doesn’t mean I don’t care,” she says.

A few days later, Calkins dismisses any hero talk. If anyone deserves some kudos — not to mention a place to live — it’s Flores-Cozza, he says. The first time he walked the trails off First Road, he says, he was stunned.

“There was just so much trash up there, everywhere,” he says. “I mean, it was fucking everywhere. And every week, she’d bring down five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 bags. Drag them down to the end of the street. She was always there, every week, never not there, for more than three years.”

Calkins pauses, noting that that stretch of the spruce and fir forest is almost immaculate now.

“She can work,” he says with a chuckle. “She’s pulled 50,000 pounds, at least, dragged it out of that forest.”

Originally from San Jose, Calkins has lived a varied life. He joined the U.S. Navy at 17 and spent three years in the service, long enough to make two trips to Vietnam, before returning stateside and decamping to Yosemite for a handful of years. Word that his father was sick with cancer and had about a year to live brought him to Humboldt, where he planned to care for his father and help run the Trinidad Eatery, which his father owned. But his dad kept kicking another couple decades and Calkins and a sister ended up buying the restaurant.

They ran it for about 10 years before selling. Calkins then planned to return to Yosemite but was recruited to work for the California Conservation Corps, spending 23 years supervising work crews, some for six months at a time in the backcountry. He then went to work for AmeriCorps in local schools for a handful of years before retiring at 62 in 2009. He then quickly started looking for something to do and applied for work with the U.S. Census, taking a post supervising the count of Humboldt’s homeless.

“I was very interested in homeless people because a lot of the people I worked with in the corps were homeless before they joined, or were sleeping on couches,” he said.

He says he spent three months making the rounds through Humboldt, just forming relationships with houseless residents so they could be counted when the time came.

“I learned they’re good people,” he says. “A lot of them are really good people. There’s some weird ones out there, too, but most are just good people with bad luck in a world that doesn’t give you many chances. I got to know them as people and recognized they’re just like me except they’re pretty poor.”

After the Census wrapped, Calkins says he started exploring the homeless population in McKinleyville, meeting Eacret Ellis, who was living in his truck behind the old K-Mart building, and invited him to some monthly round-table discussions of how the community could better support its houseless members. Calkins says he soon started working with Arcata House Partnership’s emergency shelters in the winters, eventually running it for a few years.

Eacret Ellis says it was a former co-worker who first introduced him to the Joyful Healer, the United Methodist church on Central Avenue in McKinleyville, telling him they had “Saturday soup,” feeding people a bowl, no questions asked.

“The first time I went in to eat, some of the pastors sat down with me for two hours and we talked and listened,” Eacret Ellis recalls. “When I got up to leave, I got up and started putting stuff away and they said, ‘Rick, you don’t have to do that.’ I said, ‘Yes, I do. That’s the way I was raised.'”

Eacret Ellis kept going back and soon started helping, eventually summoning Calkins to join him. Calkins says he instantly took to the place, would encourage people to go and recruited some folks from Arcata House to spend Saturdays there trying to connect people with services. When his 90-year-old mother moved to Humboldt from Arizona, Calkins says she started making the Saturday soup, spending all week planning and executing the task.

The effort expanded and grew, Eacret Ellis says with evident pride.

“What we do on Saturdays is small compared to what people really need, but it’s action,” he says. “We feed people. We clothe them. We provide them with hygiene products. For a while, we were providing them with bus passes and laundry vouchers.”

It was at these Saturday gatherings when Friday garbage pickup was born, with Calkins telling Eacret Ellis it was something he wanted to do.

“He asked if I wanted to help, and I said, ‘Yeah,” Eacret Ellis recalls.

Calkins says his thinking was simple. First of all, the trash accumulated at homeless camps is a major problem, as is the regular illegal dumping that comes from the housed community.

Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone, who helped arrange to pay for Calkins’ dump bills until an anonymous donor stepped forward to cover it, says illegal dumping remains a huge issue throughout the county, including his district.

“The illegal dumping costs go unpaid and accumulate in nature’s account,” he said.

(Emily Sinkhorn, the environmental services director in Arcata, meanwhile, says a nonprofit contracted by the city recently pulled 31,120 pounds of waste from the Arcata marsh in a little more than two months of work.)

The other thing Calkins knew was that houseless people are capable and some could use a source of pride.

“There’s a lot of people who aren’t needed in this world and that makes them feel not OK about being alive,” he says bluntly. “People need to feel like they have some worth in the community. This was my way of saying, you’re worth something. If you clean this up, I’ll pick it up. We’ll work together.”

Flores-Cozza says she vividly remembers the first time she came into the Joyful Healer for the Saturday gathering almost four years ago, told she could go there to get a bite to eat. She says she immediately noticed elders and kids laughing together, while someone played piano and folks ate.

“It was like a big dining room,” she says, adding that she met Calkins that day and immediately asked to help. “I was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t we clean this place up?'”

Eacret Ellis says he was born and bred in Humboldt, and has “lived in just about every town around here.” He says he’d been homeless for a couple years when he first met Calkins while living in his truck behind K-Mart.

Eacret Ellis says it was a quick decline that got him there. His wife died of heart failure in 2012 and he says he “couldn’t function” for a whole year, falling deeper into drugs and losing his home. And by the time Calkins approached his truck, Eacret Ellis says he was angry — angry at his town, angry at his lot in life and angry at the way his housed neighbors treated him. So when Calkins wanted him to sit down with housed folks who maybe saw things a bit different than he did, he says he wasn’t sure what to expect.

“Being homeless, I was on the unhoused side of it,” he says. “And I was guilty of pointing my finger at the people on the other side of the fence, the people with houses and businesses. And I know now I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The thing is, lots of people have to decide every month whether they’re going to pay rent or eat. And they’re the ones screaming loudest about homeless people, and that’s because they’re afraid they’re just a click away from being homeless themselves.”

In a county where 18 percent of the adult population lives in poverty, according to the U.S. Census, meaning they earn less $15,650 annually, Eacret Ellis says he figured that if he was going to call it his home he needed to stop being angry and to start making change.

“You can’t call it your town if you’re not going to fight for it,” he says, adding that his adage when it comes to Friday garbage pickup is, “be part of the solution, not the pollution.”

Standing under the trees about 100 yards from the foot of First Road, Flores-Cozza shows a stranger the corner of forest that has been her home for almost four years now. There are her sculptures: an elk pieced together of wood, an oversized piece with vines that seem to form waves above a wound, moss-filled nest cradling several rocks; and a wooden ladder supporting a circular dream catcher, which she calls her “ode to William Blake.” Nearby sits a pile of branch pieces, all tinged blue, and she notes the color is the result of a fungus, adding Cal Poly Humboldt is researching how to make natural wood stains with it.

She uses the nearby mini lending libraries to keep stocked on books, noting she recently finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and just started The Sense of Ending by Julian Barnes. Someone stole the guitar she used to busk from her camp, she says, but quickly says she found an AI song generator app on her phone that helps scratch her musical itch and make use of the lyrics she writes. She says she has good housed neighbors, noting she helps out by doing some gardening and watering plants, and they give a hand when she needs one.

There have been a couple of scary encounters with bears, she says, but generally humans leave her alone and she does her own thing, reading, writing, hanging with Bubba and walking the trails with her wagon to pick up trash or deconstruct abandoned camps. Well, until recently, that is. In recent months, she says some folks from the McKinleyville Community Services District, which operates the community forest, and a private land owner who purchased the greenbelt abutting the forest, have come by. So did some sheriff’s deputies, responding to a report of another woman who’d left some puppies tied to a tree, when they stumbled upon Flores-Cozza’s camp and arrested her March 11 on suspicion of trespassing and illegal dumping. The district attorney declined to prosecute the case, but it was still rattling.

Flores-Cozza says she grew up in Chicago and raised her kids there as a single mother, bartending or working in the food service industry, sometimes working several jobs at once. After her kids were grown, she says she was sharing a studio apartment with a friend, paying $900 a month, when after months of struggling, they both wound up unemployed at the same time and got evicted. So, she says, she left.

“I just jumped,” she says. “Nothing was working there.”

She traveled to New Orleans and Austin, she says, making art and music to get by, and even performed at the South by Southwest music festival. Then she says she decided to come to Blue Lake, where her grandfather was from, and things have been challenging since.

Flores-Cozza says she hopes to find housing, or at least a safe place to stay, but hasn’t had any luck. She says street outreach workers from the county came and talked to her some months ago and said some promising things, but never came back.

Eacret Ellis, for his part, says it took him several years of putting his name on various wait lists and applications before he landed a place to live. He says he’s hopeful things go easier for Flores-Cozza, though he concedes it’s tough everywhere.

But he says he’s continually awed by Flores-Cozza’s dedication to clearing trash from a forest she will soon be forced to leave.

“She doesn’t get any kind of compensation for what she does up there,” Eacret Ellis says. “She doesn’t do it for any reward. She does it because she wants to, because it’s right.”

Eacret Ellis pauses for a while, then says he believes in a power higher and greater than himself, and asks this reporter if he’s ever seen God. Told no, he insists the reporter is wrong, that he has but just didn’t realize it. Eacret Ellis then says there’s something he’s taken to doing when someone asks him for a favor.

“I say, ‘Sure, but it’s going to cost you,'” he says. “And they give me that look, ‘Oh, no. What’s it going to cost me? How much?’ And I let it hang for a second, and then I tell them, just a smile. And they light up. And when you see that light, that smile, that’s God looking back at you. When that smile goes all the way up to their eyes and it sparkles back at you, that’s God looking back at you.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated from a previous version to correct the branch of service in which John Calkins served. The Journal regrets the error.

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 105, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.

This article appears in ‘God Looking Back at You’.