The places the OV teams wander at night are the places the rest of us wouldn’t be caught dead in — or perhaps would be caught dead in, which is the point. They are the places our mothers warned us about: the abandoned lots, the shadowy overpasses, the rat-infested alleyways, the trash-strewn fens. Yet the OV crew tromps through these grim, isolated locations with abandon. "What I worry about," says Phillips, "is bumping my head, tripping up." With this, he stretches up to peer into a makeshift hut — a series of boards placed along the iron beams of an overpass. "Hello! Pine Street Inn!"

To the untrained eye, this little overpass shack would have been invisible. Which is intentional, of course. In order to avoid being told to move by the cops or hassled by ruffians, the people who live on Boston’s streets have learned to hide themselves. You wouldn’t know it, but the homeless are all around us — in crevices, ditches, doorways, abandoned vehicles, disused warehouses, beneath piles of wood, on top of buildings, behind construction equipment, inside packing crates. Only when the OV pulls up, its orange lights flickering, does this furtive community emerge from the shadows.

Such is the case when, in the deep of night, the OV arrives at the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth. First, a young couple comes shuffling over to the van. "Can I get some socks?" the woman asks. As the OV team doles out handfuls of cookies and crackers, sandwiches and soup, blankets and underwear, shirts and gloves, more and more people appear. One of them, a disheveled but distinguished-looking man in his 50s, looks suspiciously at the stranger with the notebook sitting in the back of the van.

"How are you?" Phillips asks.

"Not miserable," the man replies, shooting another wary glance through the van door.

Over the past few days — what with the terrible cold and the death of Bob Gurney — the local media have been covering the homeless story ad nauseam. These occasional spikes in interest put Pine Street in a tricky situation. While the publicity invariably leads to more donations to the Inn, and even increased calls for political action to address the homeless problem, there is a nagging concern among the homeless themselves that they are being gawked at, trotted out for the annual Homeless Story. The distinguished-looking man, for one, is not impressed. "Journalists are no good," he says. "I’m glad I didn’t make it as a journalist."

Our next stop is a well-camouflaged bivouac in a loading dock near Fenway Park.

"How you doing?" Phillips yells to the man inside. "Cold?"

"I’m sweating," the man replies.

"He’s one of those self-supporting guys," Phillips says a little later. "He’ll eat the cookies and the crackers, but he’ll give the sandwiches to the rats."

"Sometimes," says OV worker Shaughnessy Charbonneau, "you’ve got to make peace with the rats."

Charbonneau, like Phillips, was once a guest at the Pine Street Inn. "[Phillips] was in the men’s side while I was in the women’s," Charbonneau says. "I guess you could say we’re both graduates." A soft-spoken, middle-aged woman, Charbonneau is one of the Inn’s success stories. For the last nine years, she’s had her own room at the YWCA (she seems especially delighted that she’s been able to keep her cat there). And, thanks to Pine Street, she has a decent job, a purpose in life. For the hundreds of homeless people who pass through the Inn daily — doing the "Pine Street Shuffle," as she says — Charbonneau serves as a reminder that there is a way out.

For the most part, Pine Street is thought of as an emergency shelter, a place where people go when they hit bottom. Less familiar, though, is the Inn’s role as a place where the homeless can begin the process of getting their lives together. There are, for instance, a number of "Inns within the Inn," smaller units that cater to people with mental-health issues, recovering addicts, and pregnant and elderly women. There are job-training programs, as well as classes in job-interview protocols, computer use, literacy, and financial management. Guests who have managed to find work are eligible for relatively well-equipped, relatively self-sufficient units, with access to cooking facilities, a television, and books.

Shepley Metcalf, Pine Street’s director of communications, says her favorite time of year is when the participants of the Inn’s two-year job-training programs have their graduation ceremony, complete with a rendition of "Pomp and Circumstance." "For many of them, this is the first time they’ve graduated from anything," Metcalf says. "People often say, ‘Oh, how did you end up here?’ — like Pine Street’s the end of the line. But there is a way through this." Without such hope, Metcalf says, it wouldn’t only be the guests at the Inn who would fall prey to despair, but the workers, too.

Leo Adorno, who heads up the Inn’s outreach program, agrees. Adorno spent nine years on the OV; now he's the director of outreach services. He recalls, with an amused huff, that his first week on the job was very nearly his last. "We found this guy dead at Faneuil Hall, at two in the morning," he says. "By five, my head was spinning. I was thinking, ‘This is just not the right job for me.’ But when I got back to the Inn, I heard, ‘Leo! Leo!’ It was one of the guests, wearing a suit and tie. ‘I got a job!’ To me, that was like a sign."

All the same, Adorno harbors no illusions about the challenges facing him. "We take one person off the street, and five more take his place," he says. "I know people here who are second-generation homeless. There’s a guy in here now whose father died here. How do you help people like that?" Indeed, as wrong as it is to write the homeless off as hopeless, it’s foolhardy to imagine that all homeless people need is a little nudge in the right direction and they’ll live happily ever after.

On a bitterly cold Wednesday afternoon, Mike, a 51-year-old California native who’s been intermittently homeless for the better part of a decade, is sitting at a table in the food court of the Shops at the Prudential Center, reading Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume. To look at him, you wouldn’t know this guy is homeless. Thin, with a neat goatee, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a baseball cap, Mike looks like he could be a carpenter or an electrician. Actually, he’s an artist — a graduate of the Museum School, he says, and a one-time employee of a Newbury Street gallery. But Mike doesn’t speak of his career in the present tense any more. "I was a painter," he says. "You try being out here and doing your work. Forget it."

While Mike says this, a security guard comes over to the table and asks him to move to the corner. "I’m not going to ask you to leave," the guard says, "it’s too cold for that. All I’m asking is for you to go over there." There’s no apparent reason for the guard’s request. Mike is drinking a cup of coffee, having a quiet conversation. The well-dressed old lady noisily eating her soup seems a better candidate for removal, or the giggling, soda-sipping teens. But then, these people aren’t homeless. As another man put it earlier: "Out here, we have no rights."

So how does someone like Mike, clearly an intelligent person, find himself living like this? "You know that song by the Kinks? ‘Who would’ve known that I would fall prey to demon alcohol?’ " He pauses for a few moments, sips his coffee. "It’s a tremendous pain in the ass. That goes without saying. But I’ve got my books." And his Altoids tin filled with the butts he’s picked up. And his booze.

In fact, according to a Boston Rescue Mission survey, 66 percent of area homeless people are or have been substance abusers. The grim truth is, until people like Mike are able to sober up, their chances of finding a permanent home are slim to none. Mike, at least, seems to recognize this fact. When asked if he has any hopes of getting off the street any time soon, he ums and ahs, looks off into space, and fiddles with his smokes. "It’s not impossible to think of that kind of stuff," he says finally. "But, and I hate to echo the damned AA thing, it’s day by day right now."

This sentiment is echoed in turn by Tony, the man who spends his days and nights on the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets. "I’m trying to live in the moment," he says. "That’s for real." But unlike Mike, Tony seems desperate for some kind of change in his life. "I’ll be 39 in a couple of months. This is not good," he says. "I can’t take it anymore." Though Tony says he has qualifications — "I went to school for culinary arts" — he still cannot seem to get on his feet. "I’ve been trying to find work with a temp agency," he says. "But there’s no jobs, no nothing. I’ll do anything at this point."

What Tony will not do, however, is go into the Pine Street Inn this evening. "I’ll stay right here," he says. "I’ll stay in an ATM."

On our last stop, a particularly terrifying vacant lot somewhere in the South End, a guy named Rich responds to his OV handouts — socks, shirts, a sleeping bag — as if he’s just won Megabucks. "Thank you!" he hollers, clambering under a chain-link fence. "Ahahaa!"

As we pull out of the lot, the sky is already turning from black to cobalt blue. Against this, plumes of white steam are being whipped and twisted by the wind. It’s almost cinematic — City at Dawn. And the sense of being in a movie only increases when Janis Joplin’s "Bobby McGee" comes on the radio, and we all start singing along. A Hollywood movie-score composer couldn’t have come up with a more fitting refrain for our journey home: "Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose."

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com