It’s good to know that United Way is trying to collect data on the homeless, but is late January the best time to judge the real scope of the problem?  One can’t truly be homeless in the normal urban style, sleeping in a cardboard box, a dumpster or under a stairway in a back alley in frigid January weather here.  The most desperate will, hopefully, by then found some sort of temporary shelter otherwise they know they will die.  People do freeze to death on park benches in Washington, D.C. and many other cities, but that’s not the usual procedure out here where park benches and police patrols are rare.  You will find they have doubled up in trailers with other poor folks and some other awful places, but you definitely won’t find them all in midwinter here.  Let’s hope if United Way is serious they will repeat the survey in, say, June or July.  Go down to the Flathead River near the old steel bridge site then and see who pops out of the woods.  Be sure to walk through the woods along the railroad from Kila to Columbia Falls at the same time.  You’ll find the problem of homelessness here in Montana is far larger than you believed from the January count.