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"Anybody can end up homeless ... we never thought it would be us."

We invited residents of several homeless encampments in Seattle to share their personal stories, life lessons, frustrations and dreams.

Here's what they said on some of the resulting handwritten journal pages, accompanied by black-and-white portraits that each person helped create. Above are Marie, Leo and their dogs at a camp along Interstate 90. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

The people who agreed to participate in this project, in most cases, lived in settings that lacked a space to comfortably and neatly write down their thoughts. Recognizing this, we have transcribed each of the journal entries.

"THEY DON’T BUILD mansions like this in Beverly Hills,” a man named Charles says as he greets visitors to a tent city beneath a tangle of highway overpasses in Seattle’s Sodo District.

It’s a cold, damp day, and Charles warms himself by a smoldering campfire in a cluttered cul-de-sac of tents, bags of clothes, and pots and pans — everything you need when you have no place else to live.

The locals here optimistically nicknamed this triangle of earth and puddles bordered by roads on three sides “The Field of Dreams.” But a stroll through the camp’s main drag of dirty rugs, soaked blankets, shoe-sucking mud and wooden pallets reveals only a boulevard of broken ones — theirs and ours.

What photographer Erika Schultz and I don’t realize on this first visit to “The Field” is that the city is about to evict dozens of occupants of the camp due to safety concerns, including allegations of rape and prostitution, as well as the obvious public-health issues that come with people living outdoors among piles of garbage, heaps of personal possessions and intrepid rats.

On this day, the rodents scurry across the mud and under the pallets that separate many of the tents from the soggy ground.

In a matter of weeks, everyone we meet and everything we see here will be gone, swept out of sight at this location. But the gnawing crisis of homelessness will only have slogged to another patch of dirt or pavement in a perverse cycle of settling and uprooting.