A Night to Feel Homeless : Social services: A hundred people pay $25 apiece to go without a roof and are joined by the real thing. The proceeds will be used to keep an Oxnard shelter open.

As he surveyed the bundled-up campers feeding the fire at a Ventura beach this weekend, a ruddy-faced fellow named Joshua said it was nice of them to show their solidarity with the homeless.

But somebody better tell them how to do it, he said.

“They’re using valuable wood for firewood here,” Joshua said, shaking his head as he watched “perfectly good” fence slats and 2-by-4s being heaped onto the blaze. Down at the Ventura River bottom, where he and two dozen other homeless people live, “stuff doesn’t go to waste,” he said.

And while he applauded the hundred or so people who paid $25 apiece to be homeless for a night, Joshua said a camp-out at Emma Wood State Beach is considerably different from life on the streets.

“This is like a back yard,” he said, pointing to the park’s electric lights, the bathrooms with mirrors, the running water, and the food truck sent by the American Red Cross. “Look at all that’s been brought for them.”

Organizers of the Friday night camp-out, which raised money to keep a shelter in Oxnard open through the winter, agreed that participants got only a glimmer of what homelessness is really like.

“We know when we get up tomorrow that we have homes to go to,” said Brian E. Bolton, director of the Red Cross’ Ventura chapter, which helped sponsor the event. “But this lets us get a feel for it.”

And as the homeless wanna-bes and have-to-bes huddled around the fire singing 1960s protest songs, it was a chance to talk about the problem, Bolton said.

“It’s different talking about it out here,” he said as brisk winds made the 45-degree weather seem colder. “You’re not in an office, or a business, or a restaurant.”

Bolton said he was astounded at the turnout. “We expected about 15 to 20 people,” he said.

Public officials alone numbered close to a dozen, including County Supervisor John K. Flynn; Ventura Mayor Greg Carson and his predecessor, Richard Francis; Ventura Councilmen Tom Buford and Gary B. Tuttle, and Oxnard City Council members Manuel Lopez and Dorothy S. Maron.

Other participants included Red Cross volunteers, social service workers, a leader of the Green Party, and Gene Daffern, president of the Ventura Chamber of Commerce and a co-chairman of the event. About 10 homeless people also attended.

But many had no official reason to be there, just an interest in the homeless.

Grace Gaston of Ventura was there with her sons’ girlfriends, Tara Phillips and Kristie Smith. “We saw it in the paper and thought it was a good grass-roots effort,” Gaston said.

Deputy Public Defender Susan Olson said she and her husband also learned of the event in the newspaper. They brought their young son, Kevin, one of several children at the camp-out.

Burt and Irene Munger came down from their oceanfront home on Faria Beach. “We like to backpack and camp out,” Irene Munger said. “It’s no hardship.”

Participants were provided the same meal that about 70 homeless people at the Oxnard shelter received that night: beef stew, rice, bread, margarine and coffee.

“Check this out--rice without ashes,” said Joshua, who cooks over a campfire at the river bottom.

His friend Rod, who also gave no last name, said he had lived at the river for about four months. “It’s what you make of it,” he said.

But he and the other homeless people at the camp-out said they would not be caught dead at the Oxnard shelter. “Most of the people there are the town drunks,” said Joshua, adding that he doesn’t drink.

Rod agreed. “I’m not going to hang out with a bunch of winos,” he said.

Linda Wilson, a program administrator for the county’s Public Social Services Agency, said that a large share of the people who use the shelter are alcoholics.

She and Shirley Bush, another agency official, were pleased that the shelter fund-raising campaign is going so well. Organizers said the drive has already raised more than half of its $40,000 goal. Solicitations were mailed to 20,000 Ventura County homes this week, and another consciousness-raising event--this time a $30 soup kitchen--is planned for Feb. 6.

With the goal half-met, Bush and Wilson may no longer have to look at the thermometer before deciding whether to open the shelter. With limited funds, they have had to close its doors on nights when the predicted low temperature was higher than 40 degrees. So far, they have enough to keep it open every night through mid-February.

“We work at the shelter. We’ve seen these guys and know they’re out in the cold,” Wilson said. “But we had to be fiscally responsible.”

Not everyone who donated $25 stayed for the entire night, but close to 50 were still there at sunrise to get a pancake breakfast prepared by a Vietnam War veterans group. Some, like Flynn and his wife, brought tents, while others slept in the open or in their cars.

“We don’t have to stay to know what it’s like,” said Melinda Fernandez of Santa Paula, who was there Friday night with her husband, Rodney. She said she had bummed around Texas in her post-college days, “before homelessness had a name.”

“Back then it was kind of cool,” she said, as someone at the campfire sang “The Eve of Destruction,” a ‘60s anthem. “It was a lot easier then.”

Fernandez said social consciousness isn’t dead. “I think people still care,” she said. “But this is such a big problem. What can you do?”

Then she answered her own question: “You do what you can, and hope others do too.”