For the next few months, Kari hung out downtown at night. She walked through the open-air mall where the few remaining patrons of local restaurants skirted groups of kids in trench coats or sagging pants. She hung out at the central fountain the city had threatened to remove if street kids kept loitering there. And she asked kids for help. “This is what we’ve got,” she’d say. “We’ve got two hundred and fifty thousand. We’ve got a couple of buildings that we might be able to use, and something we could rent in the meantime. Does this matter to you? Do you want to help?” The kids looked at her and saw a woman who wore shoes that matched her pants and nail polish that matched her lipstick, even though matching wasn’t in style anymore. But she laughed at their jokes and wasn’t afraid when they postured. She was thin and pretty, the crook in her Roman nose just unusual enough to make people want to look at her face and then look again. She was definitely no cop, but she was also the kind of woman they knew was out of their league. No point running from her, and no point in hitting on her. Sure, they’d help her make a shelter.                        

In 2005, Kari sits at the kitchen table, the mosaic with glass over it that an artist helped Station 7 youth build, and looks at a girl across from her. At 14 years old, the girl is young for the population Station 7 serves. Youth ages 11-17 are welcome here, but most young people who buzz up from the intercom downstairs are 15-17 year-olds. This girl’s also a “time-out” youth, meaning she’s staying here for a few days because she is in conflict with her parents. But she’s not sure she wants to go home at all. She looks down at the shards in the table. In a hushed voice, she tells Kari about the names the street kids called each other in shelter last night -- not just the F-word, but the C-word. Names too nasty for her to repeat in more than a whisper. Kari wrinkles her nose a moment, like she's about to say something to a mischievous child, "Oh those turkeys," she says. The girl snorts, like her own laugh surprises her. This woman, in a blouse and a long skirt, doesn’t think these kids are bad? Scary? The girl had thought the name-calling was a big deal. Sometimes it is, but right now Kari wants to talk about something more important.

Kari stops smiling, turns her fingers downward, so her nails click on the glass surface, and speaks slowly, "The kids who stay here a lot live on the street when they aren't here, and living on the street is stressful. So sometimes that makes them crazy." Look, Kari might as well be saying, if you choose to start staying on the streets instead of going home, you are going to experience worse things than people calling each other names. So how bad is home? Think about it. The girl chews at an already worn nail. Kari rubs her lips against each other, smoothing out her lipstick.

Kari was born into a working class Montana family. Her mother’s people worked on the railroad; her father’s in the coal mines.  In 1941, when her father was six years old, his father and all of his uncles died in a mining accident.  Kari’s father grew up in a shed in his grandma’s backyard, homeless in his own town.

Kari’s parents had three girls, of whom Kari, they thought, was the homeliest. Her skin was pale, her hair so colorless you could see her scalp through it, and by age seven her nose had already become one of the first things people noticed when they looked at her. Her mom liked curly hair, so Kari wore rollers to bed by the time she was three years old and had a perms starting at age 11.  When the owners of a local ski shop asked Kari’s sisters to model for them, they didn’t ask Kari, and everyone understood. In an attempt to save their middle child’s image, her parents sent her to the Judy Rivers School of Modeling, where she learned how to walk around with books on her head.  The only thing she liked about the program was that it advocated  wearing makeup, which her mother had not allowed.  As a high school freshman, Kari moved to a new high school. Now she wore makeup. Her face had grown big enough to accommodate her nose, and she knew how to time a punch line like few of her peers. Kari became popular.

When Kari was 18, she got a job working with children who had been abused, and she started using her social skills to help people in trying circumstances. It wasn’t something she had intended to do. She just started working with kids, got attached to them, and didn’t want to stop trying to make their lives better. She worked with a 6-month-old boy she had to carry around because he was in a body cast. She worked with a 4-year-old girl who had been sexually abused and would pee on the walls and on your shoe and on other kids.  “But she had all this personality, and she got me,” Kari remembers.

“It’s lucky your first job wasn’t at McDonalds, because you’d still be there,” Kari’s mom likes to say to her. And Kari doesn’t think she’s wrong. She gets involved, gets invested and has a hard time leaving.