Thanks

A moment of gratitude in a New England mill town gripped by heroin

We break the padlock and open the door. I can taste the air before I smell it. My goggles are pinching my nose closed, and I feel the air, stale and thick, sticking to the inside of my mouth.

“Watch for needles,” the geologist tells me. “They’ll go straight through your boots.”

I’m the tallest person on the crew, and the low ceiling of the abandoned building compels me to slouch. The exterior walls are composed of crumbling brick, with portions that have been torn down and shored up with cinder blocks. Light peers in through the seams. The interior walls are bare drywall featuring the odd hole and spraypainted obscenity. As we pass through empty rooms further into the building, the drywall gives way to bare, rotted wooden frame, and the columns of sunlight through cracked walls eventually must be supplanted with headlamps. We come to a wide open room in the center of the building which gently slopes towards a grate in the floor.

“Alright, this is the spot” the geo calls out. “We’ll do one bore about…here, then another maybe two feet that way.”

I have been unraveling Ariadne’s golden thread behind us as we go, in the form of an extension cord connected to a winch hooked up to a generator outside. The three of us begin to set up the drill and start boring a hole in the concrete floor, about four inches across. The drill has an unslakable thirst, and must be supplied with water through the whole process, but eventually the concrete relents and we reach the ground beneath. A folding table has been set up inside the building, and as we begin to remove cores of soil with a hand auger, the geologist proceeds to examine the samples.

“Oh yeah, there’s definitely going to be a lawsuit here,” he says, examining the first foot of soil. “There’s no way they didn’t know about this.”

There are six different locations we’re taking samples from in the same few city blocks. Some, like this one, are abandoned structures fallen into decay, but others have already been demolished and the sites “cleaned up.” For these, we have to dig deeper — thirty feet or more — and for this we have a massive, self-propelled drilling rig that, by my estimation, could easily get us halfway to Hell. It’s loud — damn loud — and leaks hydraulic fluid from a crack that must be attended like an open wound. We will routinely pull the sample from its casing to discover a cross section of old bricks inside the core. These bricks are nearly a hundred years old, but under the ground they seem to have fared better than those forming the tenement buildings surrounding us.

Everything in this section of the city seems rotten. The sick-sweet smell of old garbage lingers in the alleys. The nicest building I have line of sight to is an old church, a Romanesque basilica dominating the next street over. On the third floor hangs a white X inside a red square, indicating the building is structurally unsafe. A “For Sale” sign sits behind the locked fence that surrounds the lot.

The drill has struck till — a mix of different sediments compacted together and deposited by a glacier — and has slowed to a crawl. It’s been about an hour after lunch and I have the desperate need to use the bathroom. I have, to put it mildly, “lived an interesting life,” and do not consider myself at all squeamish. I have both seen and done some positively disgusting things in my life, but after using a construction site port-o-potty the day before, I discover that even I have my limits, and set about finding a public restroom to relieve myself while the drill chugs on.

A ways down the street from the abandoned church is a McDonald’s, and I make my way there past boarded-up windows and discarded shopping carts, past the back stairs of an apartment building where four or five people every hour go up to the third floor and return ten minutes later, past the young woman who has been sitting atop a retaining wall, silent and motionless, since before we arrived at seven that morning, past a 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera left to rust on its wheel-bearings in an alley.

I enter the McDonald’s and go straight for the bathroom. I pull at the handle and meet resistance. It’s not locked, but rather someone is holding it from the other side. A second later, the door opens enough for me to see a single eye staring back at me, and from behind the door a voice asks “what do you want?”

The nature of the situation hasn’t hit me, and I answer reflexively: “To shit?”

There’s a pause, and the door opens. The urgency of peristalsis overcomes my better judgment and I enter. The eye is attached to a man in his late thirties or early forties wearing black track pants and a Boston Red Sox jacket. He seems as confused by the situation as I am, and kicks a dufflebag on the floor behind the door before saying, “yeah, yeah — you go.”

I quickly take care of business in the only stall, then make to leave, but the owner of the eye calls out to me: “Hey, wash your hands.”

“Yeah, my bad,” and I quickly wash up while studying the mirror for any sudden motion.

As I walk out the door, he closes it behind me and says “hey, be cool, alright?” I leave immediately.

On my way back to the site, I’m walking down the sidewalk when a guy in a black denim jacket and dark, messy hair peeking out under a tight blue beanie crosses the street coming towards me. “Hey, how you feelin’, man?”

I know immediately what this is about and answer him, dismissively, “just fine, boss.” He begins to turn away, but stops mid-step and faces me again. “Hey, what you building over there, anyway?” I’m wearing my bright green safety vest, my hardhat is clipped to my belt, and goggles hang from my neck.

“Uh, we’re not actually building anything, just checking the ground.”

“Yeah? For what?”

“Pollutants. Stuff that could make people sick. We need to know where it is and how bad it is so we can get it out.”

“You guys are doin’ that? That’s real cool of you man. Thanks.”

When I get back to the rig it’s still struggling with the till, and there isn’t much for me to do. I climb on top of the rig to get a better view and sit, watching the sun reflect off the windows of the old church, and down into the alleys, and spill at the foot of the stairs.

Thanks.

It was such an odd thing to say. “Thanks.” My undergrad was in Criminal Justice, and while I specialized in Forensic Science, I took a fair amount of Criminology, which I largely regarded as pseudoscience. I’ve answered maybe a dozen different exam questions about “Broken Windows Theory” — the idea that if petty crimes like vandalism go unremedied, they’ll escalate to more and more serious crimes as the community becomes filled with a sense that they won’t be addressed, that no one gives a shit. The answer to “Broken Windows,” my professors always told me, was strict enforcement, stop-and-frisk, increased police presence.

I saw plenty of police over the two days we worked that site, but the windows were still broken.

I thought about a lot of things, sitting atop the drill rig. Policing policy, the logistics of the heroin trade, how goddamn lucky I was to come from a neighborhood and a background not all that dissimilar to this one but still make it out.

I don’t go to work thinking I’m helping people. I do this job because it pays moderately well compared to what I’m used to. My coworkers were eager to pack up and leave the site every day before it got dark, afraid that the area was “dangerous” at night, but I would come home and have difficulty washing off the aura of despair I felt. That place hurts, and I don’t know how to fix it.

But somebody’s gotta give a shit, or the windows are going to stay broken.