Finding dry land for a man nearly drowned by life

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/02/2010 (5435 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When you’re a newspaper columnist who writes mostly about people — in a city with no degrees of separation — the border between the professional and the personal can blur.

How do you keep a professional distance when the person you’re writing about becomes more than a subject?

The first instinct is to back away.

But that’s not always so easy.

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I’ve written so much about Faron Hall that even I’ve begun to have doubts about continuing.

He was in the last column I wrote before leaving on vacation in early January because he’d been beaten up on Main Street after getting out of an alcohol rehab program. And he was the first person I wrote about upon returning this week. You can appreciate, then, my reluctance to make it three in a row.

But then my daughter emailed me Wednesday morning.

“How’s work?” Erin began. “What happened to Faron? Have you talked to him? Is he OK?”

If Erin cared and wanted to know, I decided, others do, too.

“Spoke with Faron yesterday by phone,” I began. “He was badly beaten about the head by his street “friends’ who were drunk. He said he thought he was going to die. He’s still in a four-bed critical care unit. Says he’ll be taking physio because he injured his leg in the attack, as well. They were in his apartment Sat. p.m. when it happened. He fought back but there were two of them and when they broke his table they took one of the legs and used it like a baseball bat. With his head as the ball. They were also stomping on it. He says he doesn’t know what started it but blames the booze, although he wants the pair — a man and woman — ‘prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.’ He sounded good. But I’m afraid for him and his future.”

As it happens, Faron’s future is the primary purpose of this column.

Before Faron was nationally celebrated as the homeless man who risked his life last spring to rescue a young man who had fallen into the Red River, before Marion Willis chanced upon the scene and began caring for Faron, there were two other women from St. Boniface who had spent years watching out for Faron and his street friends.

Buying them groceries, inviting them to dinner, letting them pitch a tent in the backyard during the summer.

The other two women don’t want to be publicly identified, but one of them called earlier this week saying the other woman wanted to talk. I’ll call her Cathy.

Cathy was invited to a meeting with Faron and his caregivers at the Health Sciences Centre on Tuesday.

“They had to put my skull back together with staples,” Faron told me. “In three different places.”

It’s his long-term recovery Cathy wanted to talk about.

And, more specifically, my role in it.

“For him,” Cathy said, “you’re more than a journalist. He connects with you. And maybe you can help him.”

What Cathy was hoping is I might be able to find him a job when he gets straightened out again.

A job, and perhaps even more importantly, a purpose.

Faron’s natural instinct is to help others and not just by jumping in the river. He turned his Manitoba Housing apartment into a mini-shelter for his street friends, the same apartment he was beaten in. That earned him an eviction notice and nearly put him in a body bag.

What could Faron’s future look like if he could stay sober?

Well, he’s kind and charming and charismatic and he has a remarkable life story to share. And, according to Cathy, he can speak several aboriginal languages and some French, too.

So I suggested he could make a wonderful spokesman or mentor or even role model for an aboriginal organization or maybe the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba.

I believe if Faron could find another community of friends and turn his natural instinct to rescue others into a purpose with pay, he might be able to finally do what so many people in this city, province and country are hoping he can do.

Rescue himself.

The question is, who’s willing and able to help? Who’s willing to help pull Faron Hall to dry land?

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca