During the three years I worked part time as a counselor associate at Wellspring Women’s House, a residential treatment facility in Bangor for women in recovery, the courage of the clients and the talent of their counselors never failed to impress me.
Just how transformative that mix — courage meets talent — is perhaps best illustrated by one of the small but compelling outreach projects characteristic of the therapeutic program there.
One Sunday while I was working, several women gathered around the kitchen table to write “letters of hope” to women on Wellspring’s waiting list. These handwritten letters contained generalized but nevertheless powerful expressions of compassion and practical advice from women in recovery to their sisters who sought sanctuary and treatment at Wellspring.
Each letter urged each recipient to stay strong and not give up on her commitment to recovery. In short, the writers urged their readers to transcend their present condition. Would that everyone could receive a letter like that.
I remembered that project when, in October of last year, I learned that a good number of the women on Wellspring’s long waiting list lacked either insurance or private funding to pay for treatment. I discussed their predicament with Pat Kimball, a director at Wellspring.
Financial aid in the form of a scholarship might be another way to send a “letter of hope” to women on the waiting list. To that end, I said I would ride my bike 800 miles throughout Down East and northern Maine to raise awareness about and funds for the recovery program at Wellspring.
Much like the American Lung Association’s Trek Across Maine, the Wellspring Women’s Scholarship Tour would highlight health and hope for those struggling with chronic and sometimes relapsing mental illness and addiction.
Moreover, the generous donations made by my family, friends, colleagues, as well as strangers could be interpreted as direct expressions of practical hope not only to women on the waiting list but also to those Mainers eager to ameliorate the suffering that comes with addiction.
I also agreed to talk about treatment and recovery as I met and got to know people along the route. I am glad to report that all of the above happened.
My cycling partner and I completed the route without a hitch. The first bicycle tour raised funds sufficient to help several women on the waiting list.
Equally important, the tour, wide-ranging as it was, allowed more Mainers at least briefly to enter into the now statewide conversation about addiction and recovery.
We rode state roads and back roads through some of the most beautiful places in the world: Blue Hill, Machias, Pembroke, Danforth, St. John Valley, Castle Hill, Baxter State Park, and the Lincoln lakes area. Without exception the people we met expressed both concern about the illness of addiction and curiosity about its treatment.
Many of our hosts, thanks to the generous coverage of local media, knew about the tour and were intrigued. Fishermen and seaweed harvesters, potato growers and professors, therapists and artists all had something important to say about friends and relatives who were in recovery.
I answered questions about Wellspring from woodsmen and sales people, excavators and accountants, retirees and teens. We listened to park rangers, hoteliers, bear hunters and cashiers.
Some quietly gave me cash. A Fort Fairfield teacher handed me two twenties as I rounded a corner. In Millinocket, a room cleaner gave me a twenty. The owner of a variety store in Limestone passed me a ten and wished me a safe journey.
Others opened up about their own recovery. A librarian in the County invited us into her home to talk. A writer told us that he had not had a drink since 1984. An assistant manager in Presque Isle told me of her struggle with acute anxiety and her determination to avoid self-medicating.
Others revealed their heartbreaks. A youngish couple who transported our heavy panniers to our Nesowadnehunk lean-to on the Baxter State Park tote road, solemnly spoke of their beloved nephew who had recently died of a heroin overdose.
In Blue Hill, a host detailed his horror when his daughter found she was living beside a cocaine dealer. In Steuben, a young visitor to the coast told me of her admiration for a friend’s mother who still loved and supported him even as he entered his third round of treatment for opiate addiction.
At The Farm in Limestone, a 28-day treatment facility, a young woman spoke passionately about the frustration of waiting months for a place at Wellspring.
The comments of others revealed how the illness continues to puzzle and confound many Mainers. In Chester, a well-known farmer, after describing how he had overcome a decades-long nicotine addiction in four days, gave me a bag of vegetables “for the cause,” he said, despite his skepticism that addiction is a medical issue and not a failure of will.
In Van Buren, residents are still perplexed by the locally filmed Beneath the Harvest Sky, a dark fiction which, in part, depicts elders selling their prescription medicines and highlights local involvement in the illicit cross-border drug trade. In the Danforth community, many are deeply saddened by the proliferation of meth labs in their area.
My cheerful, televised interview outside Al’s Diner in Mars Hill at the end of June coincided with reports of more arrests for the manufacture and sale of meth in apartments in nearby Houlton.
The irony that my healthy, upbeat bike ride was taking me through troubled territory was never lost on me. Neither was I oblivious to the prejudice that many otherwise friendly people harbor towards addicts.
Nevertheless, like those letters of hope to women on Wellspring’s waiting list, I wanted to keep the message simple, direct and practical.
I have lived and worked in Maine all my life. I do not like to see my people suffering as they are in the face of untreated addiction. I know that we all can muster the courage to reach out and provide residential treatment for those who need it.
I also know that we can applaud those gifted therapists and medical professionals who weekly, daily and hourly support, nudge, guide and, ultimately, trust women and men in their recovery.
Finally, I know that even though the epidemic of addiction seems new to us in Maine, we have rich and instructive models for right behavior toward those who suffer. Some of those models come from religious traditions. Others come from the literature we have read in high school.
We “get” these models: The priest who gives the silver candlesticks to the thief Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables,” trusting that he will do good despite the trauma he has endured. The unstinting support the poet Virgil gives to the naive pilgrim Dante as they navigate the layers of unspeakable sin in “The Inferno.”
Modern literature provides more timely and specific role models. Many of us recall that Atticus Finch, the great compassionate lawyer/father in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” tells his children, and by extension, the reader, that Mrs. Dubose, a morphine addict who overcomes her habit just before her death, is the most “courageous” person he has ever known.
Certainly, his compassion for his suffering neighbor is well worth remembering and repeating to our own children. Atticus is a talented, “mighty” guy, and when he meets the courage of the vulnerable Mrs. Dubose, well, that mix is transformative and transcendent — words that could describe what is happening on many days at Wellspring in Bangor.
Lisa Scofield is an English teacher at Hampden Academy who recently biked 800 miles through eastern and northern Maine to raise awareness and money for women in recovery.