By the time this is in print, Daryl Young, his fiancée Christine and her 19-year old son will have packed up their camper and left for Warren. For the past ten months, though, they have lived in South Waldoboro, paying $300 a month to rent land with no running water or septic while looking all along for an apartment or house to rent. To make do, Daryl fetched water from the creek below and dumped the sewage in the Port-O-San up the street. But renting land to people in campers or trailers without approved wastewater disposal is illegal in Waldoboro, and why the property owner is evicting the campers on his land. Right now, work is a question mark for Daryl, but in the past he has lobstered, worked for a lobster distributor, repaired lobster boats, built traps, and even did a stint at Hannaford’s.
I don’t know what normal is, but I think I had a normal childhood. I had good parents, and I had good times with my older brother Jason and my younger brother Brian. One year we all got these onesies with a little bear on them, and we stuffed balloons inside and bounced against each other. Another year we got this tiny, little dirt bike that made the three of us so happy. Small things were so much fun back then.
In Eddington (near Bangor) we used to go sledding on the way home from school. One day we begged our mother to let Brian come with us – he was in kindergarten, and we decided to sled down this one hill. We’d done it a thousand times, and me and my older brother went down first, laughing and hopping off at the end of the drive. Then my brother Brian come down. I remember how big his smile was. But he wasn’t stopping. He went out into the road and a car hit him.
Maybe life isn’t for all of us.
We moved after that, packed our bags until the camper was full, and drove up this way, to be close to the rest of the family who lived around Cushing. For a while, we parked at the Mic Mac Campgrounds in Union, then rented cottages and houses, each time for a couple of months or so until a couple of years later when my parents got a house in Thomaston. I started school in Cushing, but my parents thought I needed a bigger education, so I ended up at Thomaston. But it was still small. Only forty of us seniors.
I always wanted to be liked. Maybe that’s why trouble seems to follow me.
I did some restaurant work, but I always had my eye on lobstering. My favorite uncle fished for lobster, and I always remembered him saying, “You’re going to be my right-hand man, right?” Finally, I wiggled my way in.
I got my own place in Cushing near his boat. I was 19 or 20. I wanted to get in with the fishing people, and soon, people started showing up at night. The big thing was to get a buzz on, have a good time, and maybe there would be a fight, or somebody would punch the wall, but we were in an area where nobody was.
But I think back about it now. It was wasteful time. Time is everything nowadays.
One night, on my birthday, I was with one of my best friends, and he takes me into the bathroom. He’s got something white and crushed up and says, “Here, take this,” while he snorts another one.
But I tell him I’m fine because all I knew about drugs back then was if you did them, you would die. But he says, “Don’t be a baby.”
Peer pressure was a big thing back then. It’s a killer. So I said, “Alright, I’ll do a little,” and I did half. Then I waited because I thought I might die, but instead I fell in love with it.
I went from drinking beer every night to finding out where we could get cocaine. And I’m like, “All I need to do is find somebody who has some cocaine and then, if I go over to this party with cocaine, they won’t throw me out.”
But I broke my back around then, too, and it’s never been fused together.
What they don’t tell you when you stop taking the painkillers is that the withdrawal symptoms go on for what feels forever. They don’t tell you you’ll be taking meds for a couple of months, getting immune to them, and then giving you more, and powerful ones. They don’t tell you they’ll cut you off which will give you the kind of withdrawals that will make you wish you were dead, because you can’t get away from that thing that is crawling around under your skin so you can’t get comfortable. They don’t tell you you’ll be sweating; or that you’ll be cold.
I never went to rehab. I thought I had my problem under control.
I’ve been on methadone since 2000, but some of those early years I had cocaine relapses. In Waldoboro the MaineCare van picks me up every day at 5:10 in the morning. After all those years of drugging, I actually am in treatment.
But almost everyone I know has died. I feel queasy about getting close to people, because I’ll make friends and the next day, they will have OD-ed.
And the dealers, they’re coming from all over because in Maine they can get $100 instead of $30 like in the cities. Two people literally set up in the bushes here, a few months back, selling drugs out of their campers. They are everywhere. My daughter is turning twelve and I’m already scared to death about her growing up.
But nobody cares. Nobody wants to listen to this.
We’ve been homeless since 2020. Until the camper, we’ve either been sleeping apart on other people’s couches, or like last year, sleeping in cars.
The whole addiction thing has run my life and put me here.
At least this year, we’ve been together with a roof and heat. I could complain about our landlord. It was a crappy situation. But I thank him for letting us stay on his land when we didn’t have anywhere else to go.
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