Appalachia is known as the epicenter of the substance use/opioid/painkiller/stopfightingaboutwhattocallitandjustfuckingfightitokay crisis. It has recently come home in a personal way.

Most of you know that Jack got very sick over the summer. And that we had someone working our property (mowing, cutting firewood, some garden assistance) in return for housing on some land we own out in the county. The land has a cute little home on it, and after a month of hiring this guy for money, and being pleased by his work ethic and his investment in his own sobriety, we invited him to live there in a rent-for-work deal.

Don’t think us naive; this guy was the protegee of a beloved friend who also believed in his personal investment in his own future. And we all know what happened, right?

Right. And included in what happened is what’s happening to the house. It is bad. So here we are, six months after the great start, with our house wrecked and a terrible need to evict him. We tried HARD not to evict him, because for someone with a felony, adding a court ordered eviction could result in losing freedom at worst, or means landlords won’t even consider him at best. All this we tried to say to his case manager, who turned out to be a 20-something drunk on the power of his own misinformation. That meeting resulted in this poor guy formally getting the court notification of eviction we had tried to avoid–and a formal complaint against the bumptious case worker.

Stuck doing something we don’t want to do to a nice guy when he’s in charge of himself, I am trying to sort some complicated feelings.

1) Was I naive to enter this agreement? The guy was so self-invested, so sensible. But he went back to work in a hotbed of drug activity, partly because entry jobs tend to be those kind of places, and partly because coming out of prison limits options. So the slow slide might have been inevitable unless I was willing to act not only as his landlord, but his dorm mom. I did not want to do that, and here we are.

2) What wrecks a promising, intelligent, kind-hearted human? This kid could not catch a break. Born from a forced sexual encounter, raised in what he described as a dealing family, unable to sit still in school long enough to complete an education, and never accountable other than punishment. Never rehab, only punishment. And so it goes. But I saw this guy, when Jack came home from the hospital with a bewildering, frightening collection of machines, tubes, and valves, take them from my shaking hands, and give Jack his first (and subsequent) nebulizer treatments. My friend who told me it would be safe to have him stay as our tenant had seen similar care of her elderly husband. This guy would have made the world’s greatest nurse.

3) Why do people who know what it did to them get out of substance use, then go back? I asked him once, did he miss anything from his former lifestyle. (Naive question: he was already back into it.) He said doing certain drugs made him feel like Einstein, his brain could work so fast and so well. And that the world was made for the strong to survive, which is why disagreements were settled with fists rather than talking things out.

4) What happens now? We all lose. He’s being evicted. He may or may not be in active use, but someone has been doing lines on the table at the county property. We are losing our winter help, which is the least of my concerns. We are watching a gifted, capable, competent human being choose all the things that are wrong for him, and because we evicted him, we are the enemy who cannot help further.

And so it goes. There is no one in Appalachia who has not been touched in a personal way by the substance use disorder crisis. But sometimes personal gets right down into your soul and lies there, burning. Because you can’t help.