Living in the Shadows: Arick’s Story
Living in the Shadows is a monthly blog written by the City of Auburn’s Anti-Homelessness Team.
At 6-foot-5, 47-year-old Arick Karl is exceptionally hard to miss. He’s the type of tall that towers; front car seats scoot forward for room; couches suddenly seem much shorter than they were a moment ago. When he’s there, you notice.
And yet, for more than 20 years, he’s been there. And here. Always external, sometimes with a sign, and usually high on drugs. Out there, he’s camouflaged.
It took a chance encounter one June afternoon near the front entrance of the Key Bank in downtown Auburn with the city’s homelessness outreach coordinator Matt Landis for that all to change. He hopes to never go back.
“I was just really, really sick of it,” Arick says. “The same old thing. And nothing really coming of it.”
It’s a story Matt hears often: enough is finally enough. And as Arick and others will tell you, it often takes that point before meaningful change can happen long-term. Sure, short bouts of recovery are possible throughout the journey, but the work required to get and stay clean must come from within, says Arick, before things really start to stick.
It’s why for 28 years, he’s been in and out of treatment. He could be clean one morning, and then that night, shooting up heroin or fentanyl or crystal meth. Right back where he started, not a hope to cling to. Because when life is spent out there, there are no friends. And coping is easiest with chemical help.
He sometimes wishes he could go back in time and get the ultimate do-over. He remembers the day well — he was at a party in the late ’90s at one of his boss’ houses and someone told him, “Hey, here’s a line of crystal meth.” So, he snorted it.
“I don’t remember much after that,” Arick says.
He wasn’t addicted yet, but the trap had been set. It wasn’t long before snorting a line turned into packing tin foil and inhaling the deja-vu. Smoking turned to syringes, sometimes filled with a mystery of color and potency.
It was fun, at first. Life seemed much easier when the only thing that mattered was the next hit. Then it got scary — what if the medicine isn’t there, then what? The shackles followed and remained for years.
“Doing drugs just isn’t what it’s hyped up to be,” Arick admits now. “Just don’t do it. It’s bad.”
While in the grand scheme, it doesn’t seem like much, Arick has been clean for about a month and a half, ever since moving to a clean and sober house in Renton he shares with seven other men. It’s a large, two-story home in a quiet neighborhood run by the non-profit Restoration Refuge.
It’s a good setup for him and it really works, he says. He wakes up each morning, does chores, hops on Zoom meetings with counselors, and focuses on his sobriety. Sometimes he watches TV. He really likes Marvel movies. On Sundays, he goes to church with the other members of the house.
Before the home was available — a step toward the larger goal of finding a permanent spot and then eventually, a career — he stayed at the Ray of Hope shelter in Auburn, run by the Auburn Food Bank. Shelters are meant to be transitional, and for many, the weeks and months can drag on as they work on getting the proper documents to find a more stable spot.
Debbie Christian, the food bank’s executive director, says that’s exactly what happened with Arick. With a few stumbles, too.
“When someone tries to make changes in their life, it often takes many tries,” Debbie says. “Arick stuck to the course. He had a plan. When it got hard and he got knocked back a few steps, he still came back to try again.”
On a cold, rainy Thursday afternoon, Arick and Matt returned to the spot where they first met. Arick lay down on the sidewalk, recreating the chance encounter that would change his life for the better. He remembers being dropped off in Auburn from Seattle and sleeping underneath a bridge near the train station. He walked to 7-Eleven, where a woman gave him $5.
A minute later, Matt was standing above him, asking him if he needed help.
He said yes.
“Arick has left a deeply positive impression on me and everyone he has met in his journey so far,” Matt says. “I couldn’t be more excited for him and his future. He has persevered and has not been afraid to be vulnerable about his struggles… I really can’t say enough about how proud I am of him.”
