I drove into the parking lot Monday at Head of Falls in Waterville and parked next to a large van when something moving caught my eye.

It was a black and white kitten walking along the van’s dashboard toward me. Then a tiger kitten appeared, and another little black one.

Curious, I stepped out of my car and walked around to the driver’s-side door and rapped lightly on the window.

“Hello?” I said. No response, so I rapped again.

Shortly, a pleasant-faced young man appeared and said hello back. He looked sleepy, as if he had been napping.

I told him I was a reporter and columnist who often chatted with people doing interesting things in the community, and asked if I could interview him.

“Sure,” he said. “But I have to get to work soon.”

Loto Lakewood is his name, he told me. He owns a farm in the Franklin County town of Wilton, where he grows and produces his own organic food, but works as a chef in a downtown Waterville restaurant about three days a week to pay the bills.

Instead of driving the hour each way to and from his farm, the 25-year-old lives in his van in Waterville a few nights.

“I used to rent an apartment here, but that’s way too expensive for me — far more than I make a month,” he said.

Lakewood’s van is a 19-year-old, 16-foot-long black and silver Chevrolet Express 3500 with rust along the side panels. It has almost everything he needs, including heat.

“I have a propane heater with ventilation, electric-wiring, battery, I have lights. I cook, I have a shower and a hot water heater, plug-ins for electrical outlets and stuff. I’m working on getting a refrigerator.”

A dark-haired man with a short ponytail, Lakewood works on the van himself when it needs repairing. It has about 300,000 miles on it. When you grow up on a farm, you learn to hang on to things and fix them when they break, he said.

“I live off farming,” he said. “I stay here two or three nights and drive back home and get back to farming, go back to the homestead. It’s been in the family for three or four decades, passed down from my parents. I have livestock, I have poultry. I have a massive, half-acre garden. I make sure me and my family have enough and what’s left I give to the homeless shelter.”

As he spoke, the kittens — Tolba, a tiger; Moose, who is black and white; and Koda, all black —wandered around, climbing on the dash and steering wheel and jumping onto Lakewood’s shoulder and lap. They looked well fed and healthy.

“You give ’em lots of love and they’ll give you lots of love back,” he said.

I asked if I could photograph him with the felines. He declined but said I was welcome to take pictures of the kittens.

As we talked, Lakewood proved a genial conversationalist, tending toward the philosophical when asked what he thinks of Waterville and the people here.

“I would say that a lot of people, especially in cities, are really caught up in their own lives,” he said, “and not always thinking about the people around them and how they’re doing day to day.”

“We’re all connected, you know,” he continued. “What I do affects you and what you do affects me, whether it’s now or down the road.”

People should care more for one another, he said.

“Just think about, ‘I wonder what that person is going through?’ ” he said.

With that, he donned a backpack, said goodbye to his kittens and hiked up the bank by the railroad tracks, heading toward downtown.

As he did, I thought about how people are so resourceful these days, thinking up of all kinds of ways to get by.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.