The Comfort of Home

Her Underground Years Behind Her, a Woman Begins a Challenging New Life

Not that long ago nor that far away, she was the woman who slept beneath the street in a tunnel, lying on a bed of cardboard boxes.

Inside an underground commuter walkway leading to the Bethesda Metro station, she constructed a bedroom of thin paper walls. As people passed in a hush of hurry, she slept, unbothered that strangers were walking through her paper bedroom.

When she was awake, you stood outside the cardboard wall, as if talking across a neighbor's fence. And she talked with you about the worried state of the world. And you encouraged her to get up, come out of the tunnel. Whispering to her to climb into the daylight, up the steps from depression. Encouraging her to put on a pretty dress and lipstick and join the world bustling above her.

But she smiled and curled up again, returning to deep sleep in her paper bedroom.

After a while, you walked away, discouraged by the circumstance. Thinking perhaps the situation was futile, that Virginia Skinner, 57, would never leave her tunnel. Thinking it vain to try to pull a homeless person off the streets when she did not want to go. Thinking people are responsible for their own lives. Adults can be pulled and pushed only so much. The will is that strong. Who are we to try to interfere with someone's will? That's why so many people drop a quarter in a can and keep going.

Nine months later, you receive a call. A happy voice: "This is Virginia! Do you remember me? I have my own place. I moved out of the tunnel. October 15. . . . Yes, I have an apartment. . . . I'm talking from my wall phone. . . . Yes. . . . Come on over!"

Virginia Skinner, who had lived in the tunnel on and off for about 12 years, refusing her family's entreaties to come into their homes, is now in an apartment, moving into another chapter in the story of human kindness, revealing lessons to be learned about hope. You realize that when you walked away from the tunnel, others who wished to help her kept watch, clinging to a stronger belief that the woman who lived in the tunnel would one day leave it.

'It Was Getting Cold'

"Hello! It's easier if you come around back!" Virginia beckons from the back door of her garden apartment in Silver Spring, next to a valley of trees. A cold wind blows. But there is a difference between this cold and the cold in the tunnel. Virginia does not shiver in this cold. She steps inside. She closes the door against the wind.

There is a decorated Christmas tree against the wall near the back door. The multitude of crates and bags that she kept in the tunnel are lined neatly against the walls. Virginia's rent is paid partly by a program called Home First, which receives funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Virginia pays 30 percent of her Supplemental Security Income toward her rent.

"All this stuff I had in the tunnel. Remember? When you are homeless, you don't stop buying things for your home," says Virginia. Her face, having emerged from the tunnel, shines. She shows off potholders she made, the shirt she stitched without a pattern, the wreath she twisted with gold. She has attached strings to the ceiling from which dangle six Christmas cards.

Her fingernails are painted red and she has tied her head in a pink scarf. She talks about how the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless helped her. Put her name on the list for an apartment. And when her name came up, they helped move her and her things out of the tunnel. "It was getting cold," she says.

Inside, there are no more grocery carts tied with gray string. She has pulled a full-size mattress out of the bedroom into the living room. "I sleep better out here," she says. Her mattress is surrounded by her things from the tunnel and in a strange way, the living room resembles her homestead underground.