LOS ANGELES _ Laura Kasten stood outside her mother's house in Fullerton, a backpack pulling on her hunched shoulders. She fidgeted.
The 51-year-old and her mom, Jan Rockwell, hadn't spoken since arguing just before Christmas. Laura braced herself.
"I've got your mail right on the table," Rockwell, 79, said as they squeezed onto a faded living room couch. "I'd like to hug you if I can hold my nose."
It was early February and Laura was back in the narrow, three-bedroom suburban house where she'd grown up. But it was a far cry from the place she called home, a sprawling tent city along the Santa Ana River, a tableau of misery that included drug addicts such as herself, runaways, felons, the mentally ill and people priced out of the skyrocketing housing market.
"I bet that riverbed is gross. Gross," Rockwell said. "I hope you've been staying out of trouble."
"Mom, don't start, or I gotta leave," Laura said. "We fight every time, which is why I can't see you much. And no _ you don't need to visit me. You don't want to see those crazy sights."
The riverbed was then the largest homeless encampment in Orange County. It swelled with hundreds of residents _ with men and women whose teeth were decayed from drug use, their skin bronzed by the blistering sun. They napped during the day and tried to stay awake at night to guard their few belongings. The smell of pot filled the air, riding the scent of grilled burgers and human waste.
Neighbors around the tent city wanted them gone: They can't stay, they protested. They aren't from here.
But like Laura, many of the riverbed's homeless had roots elsewhere in Orange County.
Now, in the living room of her childhood home, Laura and her mother chatted and compared physical ailments.
As the light faded and Laura prepared to leave, Rockwell told her she worried. She'd watched a story on the news recently about someone trying to stalk and kill the homeless and wondered where her daughter might be. Rockwell, diagnosed with pulmonary disease, couldn't offer Laura refuge. But she begged her daughter to turn her life around. Maybe get a factory job, she suggested.
Despite her mother's pleas, Laura missed the camp when she was away. She and her husband, John, and their dog, Sebastian, lived in what she called "the compound" _ interlocking tents covered with tarp and about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, in a prime spot near Orangewood Avenue in Anaheim, under the towering Big A sign outside the Los Angeles Angels' baseball stadium.
She left her mother's house that Saturday night, took a Lyft to a thrift shop in Orange, picked up her bike from its parking spot and pedaled "home" to the riverbed.
It wouldn't be long, though, before that home would be scrubbed away.
