news-record.com

An hour before dawn on a jagged stretch of West Lee Street, they shine a flashlight beam under an abandoned loading dock, down a back alley, into every shabby hidey-hole marked by a star on their street map.

On this map, every star represents a person. Today, they count five souls in 10 blocks.

That's a third of the number of homeless who were sleeping out in August in these 10 blocks, from Freeman Mill to Aycock. Then again, it's cold. Cold enough that field worker Buffy Casto feels something land on her cheek.

"Hey. It's snowing," she says, stopping for a moment to glimpse the swirl of fine confetti in a streetlight across from Beef Burger, the down-at-the-heels beacon that is dark at this hour, its peaked roof hung with unplugged Christmas lights.

In silence, the hour-long search goes on, for huddled figures in doorways, sleeping bags in the shape of humans wedged under heat ducts, with one telltale sign of life.

"There's a pair of shoes," says Casto's field partner, Mitch McGee, as he shines the flashlight through the grimy plate glass window of a vacant storefront. "Those weren't there yesterday."

But they don't go closer, not on the predawn count. Homeless or not, you don't want someone walking into your bedroom with a flashlight.

So for the first two weeks in December, the Housing Support Team from Family Services walks softly, and at those spots on the map that are question marks, puts down bags of food and toiletries.

"If the bag's gone the next day," Casto says, "somebody's living there."

Paid with a grant from the "Housing First" plan to end chronic homelessness, Casto is a community justice student at Guilford College; McGee, a veteran social worker who once lived and worked in a St. Louis homeless shelter for five years, and later worked with the AIDS epidemic.

As a team, you might say they have adopted this stretch of road — though hardly for the scenery.

Across the railroad tracks, the UNCG campus is well-lit and manicured, like a backdrop for a Lionel train set. Lee Street, in comparison, is a charcoal sketch, gap-toothed, irregular. A slow demolition in progress.

Although the U-Haul rental still does a good business, especially at the end of the month, the big beauty school moved out, leaving nothing in its place. Tastee's Bar is closed. Even the adult bookstore couldn't make it.

All of which makes the street oddly inviting for the homeless, a ground zero for the hardcore street people the city's "10-year plan" has visions of reaching.

They're not the temporary homeless, out here because of a house fire or a lost job, or some other blip on the screen. No, the freezing nights of December, the wind, the rain, will drive those to the overflow at the shelter.

Those who remain won't come in, whether because of overriding mental illness, or addiction, or both. And though they cannot function in a shelter, they know how to survive outside in winter. They've done it before.

The points of interest on their map are day labor pools on Lee Street, where you'd best be in line by 5 a.m. Failing that, it's a short walk to breakfast at Beloved Community Center, lunch at Potter's House, free e-mail at the library, the weekly dinner at Grace Community Church.

This is a neighborhood where vacant houses sit shoulder to shoulder with metal-finishing shops. The police don't ride mountain bikes here. There are no parks, let alone "park closes at dusk" signs to enforce.

This is a street for hard cases, block by block, alley by alley. Inexplicably, the number will go up later in the week, even as the weather turns icy and the temperature plummets.

But for this day, they count five. Five living, breathing bodies in 10 blocks. It's still dark as Mitch McGee puts the food bags back in his car, and watches a white-haired man walk to work at Industries of the Blind.

On the opposite side of Lee Street, the man swings his cane in a wide circle, then crosses the street quickly. Once on the sidewalk, he slows down.

The pavement is rougher there, and with nothing else to guide him, the blind man counts his steps.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com