Russell Dickson doesn’t know when he’ll get used to sleeping in a real bed again.
For a while he slept on the ground, only his sleeping bag and tent separating him from the cold, hard earth. (He wouldn’t recommend it.) Then he slept atop a sign advertising a nearby condominium development. Next – for years – a thin piece of plywood. Finally, about a year ago, he was gifted a crib that changed his life by raising him a few inches off the ground. “You fall asleep much better if you’re not on the floor,” he says.
But it was different when he crawled into a bed last September – the first time, he says, he’s slept in one in about two decades.
A local organization that supports homeless people in Toronto had rented him a hotel room where he could recover from dental work before venturing back into the woods. “The first night I went in there, I stayed up all night,” he says. “…I couldn’t get used to sleeping in a bed with blankets.”
In a city of 2.8 million, Dickson lives largely in obscurity, a tall man with long gray hair, a quick smile, a calm demeanor, and bleary blue eyes. For the past 20 years, he says, he’s lived in a blue-tarp tent on a remote, wooded hilltop in central Toronto and watched condos shoot up the skyline over the years.
His time outdoors makes Dickson a rarity in Toronto. Homelessness has increased dramatically in recent years, but many cycle between periods of sleeping in shelter or public housing. According to data collected in 2021, only two percent said they only slept outdoors. Few, if any, have lived in the urban wilderness as long as Dickson.
After speaking with his longtime employer, visiting associates and local police, the star confirmed Dickson has lived in his current location since at least 2009 and likely longer.
But now he’s ready to move back indoors, although Toronto’s lack of affordable and subsidized housing makes it difficult to say how long he’ll have to wait. When that day comes, Dickson plans to bring his crib with him.
It was his doctor who urged him to look for an apartment. A sustained spinal injury he suffered as a child would make a simple fall — especially near his hidden home, where he might not be found — disastrous, he explained. “And that’s the only reason,” says Dickson, who just turned 61. “Otherwise I like to stay outside.”
There’s a lot he’ll have to get used to once he moves back in. The ease and privacy of his own washroom. He no longer has to worry about his water freezing, his “hot pot” running out of fuel, or remembering to put his food away so the raccoons don’t break into his house again.
The other people.
Aside from the wildlife and the occasional mountain biker, it’s a mostly solitary existence. Dickson doesn’t own a phone or computer and says he’s never used the internet. As the world trotted on around him, he seems to have stayed in a place “where,” as he puts it, “no one sees you — and I bother no one.”
He will miss this place and the animals he shares it with. He says he stumbled upon the spot a long time ago after sneaking away on a field trip to elementary school. “What a nice place to hide,” he recalls.
Dickson was born under a different name, a fact he says eluded him for much of his youth. He spent his early years on Moravian 47, a small reservation in Chatham-Kent that is home to the Lenape (Lunaapeew) of the Delaware Nation of Moraviantown.
When he was a little kid, at the height of the Sixties Scoop, he says, authorities came to pick him and his siblings up. Eventually they were put up for adoption. Despite keeping him and his younger brother together, his sisters went to another home. But he insists he is not a victim. He says his father was abusive. “I didn’t mind them coming in and getting me out of there.”
He was taken to the Hamilton suburbs. His new mother was “strict but fair”. His new father was more relaxed. However, by the time he reached his late teens, his adoptive father had died and his adoptive mother wanted to move him out. He says he never saw her again.
He stayed with the YMCA in Hamilton for some time. After working at the Hamilton Spectator, where he stuffed the newspapers with flyers, he hitchhiked around southern Ontario and eventually settled in Toronto. For a time, Dickson, who didn’t finish high school, worked as a bartender but soon slipped into a pattern of “living from one job to another.” In the late 1980s he was delivering leaflets, a job he still does today when his back gives out.
There were moments in his life, says Dickson, when it felt like he was getting a promotion or a new job that was far from progressing – an alternative path where he would have the funds to buy the sports car, he had dreamed of as a kid – before the opportunity was gone.
Through it all, there were quarrels with the law that made him cynical about the justice system — and frequent moves. He bounced around town, sometimes renting, sometimes sleeping on a friend’s couch or in a hostel or lodging, an environment he says only brought trouble.
“Sometimes it was my fault and sometimes it wasn’t,” Dickson says of his past homelessness. “And sometimes I was like, ‘Ahh, damn it, I’m just going to live outside.’”
Life went on like this until he moved to the hill he now calls home. (In order not to disturb his home or oust Dickson, the star agreed not to reveal the location of his tent.)
“I just wanted to stay out there until the fall, save my money, get another room, you know, start over,” he said. But he fell in love with her, especially the bond he developed with the local deer and other wildlife, which over time became accustomed to his presence. (He hadn’t fought the raccoons yet.) Some days he would wake up to fawns laying footsteps from his tent, and they “didn’t flicker at all.”
“That’s life,” he thought. “I’d rather have that than being inside, neighbors yelling at each other. Stuff like this.” For the first time in a long while, he felt safe. He felt happy.
Just steps from one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares but surrounded by trees, Dickson has enjoyed a front row seat to nature – the rabbits, the coyotes, the wild turkeys that appear in late summer, the golden eagle that used to precede all came around construction. But it’s not all idyllic. Barely. The winters are hard. Summers teem with bugs, which has taught him the dangers of using scented soap. Even washing your clothes can attract mosquitoes, he says.
There was a learning curve, but through experimentation he discovered how he could make his life a little easier: Breathable laundry bags helped prevent mold, a constant threat. Cotton clothing is preferable to polyester because it melts in a fire and can cause severe burns. Spicy food is usually avoided by animals looking for a meal. And once they get used to your scent, Dickson explains, wildlife — or more specifically, the sudden absence of them — will let you know if someone’s been snooping around your tent.
During a storm, falling trees can shake the ground around his house. Then there was that July day in 2013 when Toronto was inundated by an historic downpour and the top of his tent was pattering with downpours. “God, please,” he recalls. He tried his best to stay calm and not touch the side of the tent to keep the water from flooding in.
In the warmer months, he spent his days walking around town, sometimes delivering handbills or collecting bottles. Perhaps he would read a book (he cites Pierre Berton, Tom Clancy, and Stephen King as some of his favorite authors), get a newspaper, or catch an afternoon matinee at the movies.
Has he gotten lonely? “Not really.”
For years, he says, he actually had a human neighbor. A man of a similar age lived about 50 meters away in an underground cellar built of found wood and lit by strings of battery-powered lights. One social worker described it as “an apartment,” ten degrees warmer than the ground. “You’ll be surprised where people live,” jokes Dickson.
Aindrea Kiss met Dickson just before the pandemic started. She works as a nurse at Sanctuary Toronto. Dickson first stopped by after the drop-in service he had been relying on for showers and shaving suddenly closed and it became difficult to find a place to warm up.
“I often think, ‘Where’s he from?’” said Kiss, who after nearly four years of working in homeless services has never met anyone who has lived outside as long as Dickson.
After they met, Sanctuary helped him access medical and dental care, bought him the crib, and rented him the hotel room after his dental surgery, which she says prompted him to move back indoors. She remembers him talking about how nice it was to be able to watch the evening news.
“He really came out of his shell,” she said. But it could be years before he can move back in.
In addition to what he earns from handing out handouts from time to time, Dickson also collects ODSP. But with the average one-bedroom Toronto apartment now listed for almost $2,500 a month, that’s nowhere near enough to get a place of your own.
He recently added his name to the list of more than 84,000 Toronto households currently awaiting subsidized housing. The city states that the average wait time for a homeless priority senior is about four years. (Applicants have to wait an average of 14 years to get into a one-bedroom apartment.)
Aside from the neighbors and the conveniences that most of us take for granted — including, of course, the bed — Dickson will eventually have to get used to the quiet that four walls and a roof provide, another thing he loves about this hotel room few times awake held months back.
“It was quiet,” he says. “If you sleep outside, you have noise in front of your tent all the time. Insects, rodents, quadrupeds, owls and stuff like that. Things to get used to. You get used to the raccoon walking around you. You know almost to the minute when he’ll show up.”
He can’t sleep and remembers looking at the night sky from the hotel balcony. “I just sit there and say, ‘Yeah, that’s beautiful.’ And best of all,” he continued, “no mosquitoes!”
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