Acts of the Apostles

Early on a crisp and bright August evening, Chuck Clark stood in the basement kitchen of Enough Ministries, a Southern Baptist church on Washington Street in Barre City. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a fire-rescue T-shirt. But his aim was far from modest. Clark is a “church planter,” and he’d arrived in Barre weeks earlier to start a church from scratch.

It would not be an ordinary church. In a city brutalized by Vermont’s opioid crisis, Clark’s plan, at once radical and rooted in the New Testament, was to organize a church for the addicted, a population of the lost and the hurting who might have come from nothing or squandered riches.

Clark’s vision was as clear as it was unorthodox: The church would not just offer up prayers, a bit of food or temporary shelter to those who were unfortunate or struggling with substance abuse. Rather, it was to be all but wholly made up of people battling addiction and those newly sober. It would be both unpretentious and deadly serious. It would be a church, God willing, that would rescue lives and save souls.

Clark, who himself had wasted too many of his 65 years abusing cocaine, said there is no standard blueprint for how to found a new church, much less one for the sick and marginalized. But he said he’d identified instruction in the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles:

Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.

And so for weeks, Clark had walked the streets of Barre, knocked on the doors of its many emergency-use motel rooms, sat among those gathered behind the Good Samaritan Haven shelter on North Seminary Street, made small talk at soup kitchens and set up an information table at the city’s farmers market.

Now, in the basement kitchen, Clark’s early recruits began to drift toward the four rows of white folding chairs. He stood under the word “COFFEE” spelled out on one of the walls, the sign an offer of a hot beverage and an acronym for Christ Offers Forgiveness for Everyone Everywhere. Clark spoke to those who came by name.

Timmy wore a sweatshirt inscribed “Half Hood, Half Holy.” Danielle, who had a habit of speaking out of turn, wanted to pray for Rusty, a homeless addict who had not been seen or heard from in days. Malcolm, a 25-year-old in dirty road crew gear, was both noticeably high and genuinely interested in what Clark had to say.

Clark began with a statement based on a passage from the grandson of the Christian evangelist Billy Graham.

Christ’s church is for alcoholics, control freaks, adulterers, codependents, blame-shifters. It’s for gossips, shopaholics, liars, narcissists, worrywarts, the selfish, angry, and the arrogant. It’s for the proud, the scared, the unrighteous, the self righteous. It’s for you, it’s for me. Sinners are the only people God gives His grace to, and that means thankfully I qualify and so do you.

It was a bracing welcome for the 10 people in front of him, Clark acknowledged with a smile. Yet no one was offended or so much as winced. To be seen and accepted was rare, and more than enough.

Clark’s preliminary gathering came just weeks after yet another grim casualty of Barre’s opioid threat.

A man had been found dead inside a building site Porta-Potty just before 8 a.m. on July 25. He was on the toilet, his head slumped atop his left arm on the plastic surface next to the seat. He clasped a blue plastic straw in his right hand, and a bit of tinfoil with burn marks lay next to his face. A police report noted some “purge” had come out of his nose and mouth and been smeared across his forehead.

A small glassine bag used to package drugs was found, too. It bore a smiley face and two words: “Be Happy.”

The man was quickly identified in part because of distinctive tattoos on his neck and chest. His death certificate later captured the bare particulars of his life: 37 years old; born in Burlington; one-time construction worker; dead of a toxic mix of fentanyl, xylazine, cocaine and alcohol.

That man is among at least 56 residents of Barre who perished in the past decade by overdosing. Each death has been a gut punch to a gritty, proud city badly bruised by economic decline, historic flooding, and, day by day, opioids.

State records offer one kind of accounting for the city’s losses: The oldest among the 56 was 78; the youngest, 16. Thirty-seven were male; 19 female. Five were married, but a majority had never had a spouse. Some had been born in surrounding towns, but others had made their way to Barre from Walnut Creek, Calif.; Fort Riley, Kan.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and Puerto Rico. They had once worked in various professions: landscaper, musician, homemaker, bartender, teacher’s aide, chef, dental hygienist, fingerprint analyst, handyman, software engineer.

Clark’s church, however humble, is meant to stem these human tragedies.

Over an hour that August night, the improvised audio-visual equipment would fail. One congregant’s oxygen tank would crash to the ground. Some would get up and leave without saying a word, while others would arrive late with a quick apology.

Clark would invoke scripture, including a promise from Jesus: “Your sins and iniquities, I’ll remember no more.”

People who’d shown an initial openness to what Clark was preaching delivered impromptu testimony.

I’m not totally who I want to be. But I’m not who I was yesterday. George

“I’m not totally who I want to be,” a man named George said as he stood. “But I’m not who I was yesterday.”

Barre, of course, is not the city it was yesterday, certainly not the place it was decades ago. For much of the 20th century, it was one of the granite capitals of the world; a draw for immigrants from Italy and Scotland, eastern Europe and Scandinavia; and a hotbed of labor activism. Built on the strong backs of quarry workers and stone polishers, it became known as a city of churches and banks, and for years it was the livelier sister city to Montpelier, lit up with bars and restaurants, brimming with dancing and brawling. It had an opera house and handsome museums, too.

Today, its foundations are cracking. Barre has been steadily losing population for 70 years, with fully 10 percent of its residents gone in a single decade, from 2010 to 2020. The granite industry is no longer a robust engine of jobs and stability, shrunk by mechanization and undercut by global competition. It is the drug trade, though, that has taken one of the deepest cuts at the city’s sense of itself and of its future. Barre has for years now been a distribution hub for out-of-state traffickers, its homes turned into “trap houses,” from which first heroin and now mostly fentanyl and crack cocaine are spread through the city’s streets. That trade has brought guns and crime, from the petty to the violent.

In the face of all that, Barre, a cramped city of just four square miles and just over 8,000 people, has not quit on itself. Its people and institutions have mounted a committed response to the drug menace through education, treatment programs and the dogged work of the city’s police force.

And yet.

At Barre City schools, hobbled by poverty and lagging in overall achievement, some children’s learning is hampered by the drug use of their parents. One child recently reported to class after administering Narcan to a parent.

Caseworkers with the Department for Children and Families in Barre remain traumatized and fearful after the 2015 murder of one of their own by a woman whose children had been taken from her, at least once because of her drug use. Many of the children taken into state custody in Barre are removed at least in part because of parental drug use.

Over on Church Street, the People’s Health & Wellness Clinic, a free health care outpost, won’t write painkiller prescriptions out of safety concerns — for patients and staff both.

The police department, meanwhile, continues to make scores of drug arrests, including these from last August: four males apprehended outside 46 South Main Street in an operation that also seized drugs and guns, including an AR-15 style rifle. One of those taken into custody was a 15-year old boy sent up from Springfield, Mass., as a drug courier.

And of course, last July, the young man was found dead in a portable latrine in the center of town. He’s one of nine Barre residents lost in 2024, already the deadliest year of the past decade in the city.

Chuck Clark was hired last spring by Dan Molind, the pastor of Enough Ministries, and it was in that church’s basement that Clark held his makeshift service. Molind, a son of Barre and a career officer with the U.S. Army, had returned to his hometown upon retirement and become an ordained minister.

Molind’s first project was a soup kitchen that began serving many of the city’s homeless and addicted in 2014. He soon began to hold services in the kitchen, and a startup church there came to attract about 50 members, most of whom struggled with substance abuse. The church was called “Garden of feEden,” and for Molind it proved that a church for Barre’s most vulnerable and troubled could succeed.

A decade later, his own church now firmly established and perhaps too formal for Barre’s dispossessed, Molind tasked Clark with starting again.

Clark concluded that basement service in August with song, his wife Sonia on the guitar. Those gathered had lost children to the state; had been both institutionalized and cast out to sleep in the cold; had once been loved and, too often, forgotten.

Their voices raspy but together, they sang as one and with a vigor worthy of any cathedral:

I’m trading my sorrows,
I’m trading my shame,

I’m laying them down
for the joy of the Lord.

I’m trading my sickness,
I’m trading my pain.

I’m laying them down
for the joy of the Lord.

‘Amen’

Dan Molind was raised in a deeply religious household in Barre. His father was a surgeon who spent chunks of his career doing medical missionary work in countries around the globe. His mother was a motivated Christian, too, and she helped found the faith-based crisis pregnancy center in town.

Molind respected their work and its religious roots. But he didn’t hear God’s call himself until he was in uniform and on a combat tour in Afghanistan.

Molind had done an initial tour in Afghanistan early in the U.S. war on terror and returned in 2006, when he took leave from the Army and accompanied his father on a medical mission to Kabul. In the capital city, father and son made their way to an assortment of underground Christian churches — the secret routes to them marked in Kabul’s streets by a fish symbol.

Both men were struck by the courage and imagination of the 30,000 or so Afghans countrywide who risked their lives to worship Christ. In the U.S., including in their Vermont hometown, rain or snow was enough to keep some from church on Sundays.

Eager to protect such daring displays of faith from the Taliban, Molind volunteered in 2008 to serve a second combat tour. As chief of staff for the joint international forces in western Afghanistan, Molind earned praise from his superiors for his performance in a vast and deadly part of the country with limited resources.

“An absolute must to promote to colonel,” read one evaluation.

Molind said God, too, had plans for him. In the desert of Afghanistan, Molind said, God spoke to him and made clear his wishes: “You have mobilized armies. Can you lead a church?”

Back in Barre, Molind, now 61, first volunteered at Faith Community Church, a Southern Baptist congregation. He then participated in experiments with building smaller worship groups in the city and neighboring towns.

After an inauspicious start at Spaulding High School in Barre, he’d accumulated an array of degrees — in counseling and criminal justice, and in strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College. All of that learning, it turned out, was of use for creating and leading churches. One other degree, in diplomacy, wound up helping him negotiate with his wife, Cathy. There’s an old line that the hardest job for a wife is to be married to a soldier. The second hardest is being married to a pastor. Neither is home very much. The pay is poor. Cathy had done the first, and now her husband was asking her to do the second.

Cathy agreed to her husband’s pastoral ambitions. As partial repayment, Molind sent her to culinary school, one of her long-delayed passion projects. After her training, the two in 2014 opened a soup kitchen in what had once been side-by-side gun and skate shops at 84 Summer Street in Barre. An earlier soup kitchen had been run there by the First Baptist Church on Washington Street. The church’s board gave it over to Molind and his wife.

The place, not far from the city’s homeless shelter, was immediately full. Feeding people was one thing; turning the space into a church would be trickier. But Molind had a working theory for success, a reverse of the “if you build it, they will come” cliché.

If they come, he figured, we can build it.

It would take a bit. Once Molind started to conduct worship services inside — it was to be a Southern Baptist congregation, just like the church where he’d first volunteered — he and his wife and children were often the only attendees.

The uphill fight was not hard to understand. Frightened, wounded people living on the street can be deeply mistrustful, even paranoid. A church, to some, sounded fishy. Even those who were receptive to worship could struggle to be consistent, reliable presences. The notion that those who came would be able to tithe — donate regularly — was not realistic, and so finances would be tight.

But the flame started by free food became a considerable fire, and soon chairs and speakers had to be placed in the street outside the kitchen to accommodate the congregation. The Gospel was straightforward: All of us, whether handing out the food or accepting it, are imperfect, even broken, people. Your failings don’t define you. The broken still have value. Your former lives are not some imperceptible, irretrievable dream. Saying yes to Jesus can give you a new life.

The Gospel was straightforward: All of us, whether handing out the food or accepting it, are imperfect, even broken, people.

“Addiction is giving up everything for one thing,” Molind likes to say, borrowing a line from the recovery world. “Sobriety is giving up one thing for everything.”

In the first weeks and months of the church’s life, Molind visited crack houses to talk about Jesus. He drove potential congregants to rehab. He helped people secure supportive housing. While he doesn’t drink alcohol, or even coffee, Molind frequented bars, ordering wings to get a chance at conversation and connection. He met with a couple who called themselves Satan worshippers and was pleased when, after a chat in their home, they agreed to let him leave a bible behind.

In what he said was a rare pastoral feat, he twice saved the same soul.

One day a frantic woman entered the soup kitchen for help. Another woman had overdosed in a nearby apartment. Molind grabbed a container of Narcan and used it on the woman, who he guessed was in her forties. The woman, who had stopped breathing, came around.

Days later, she turned up at 84 Summer Street. She apologized for any awkwardness or hostility. But she was also frustrated and distraught.

“Why didn’t you let me die?” she asked him. “I’m sick of this life.”

Molind sensed opportunity.

“If you save someone’s life,” he said wryly, “you automatically have a lot of stock.”

And so he answered her: “Jesus came so that none shall perish.”

The woman was later baptized into Molind’s church. She was dunked in water, and she emerged, as Molind put it, remade, or at least far different than when she’d come to after the dose of Narcan.

“Smiling and excited,” Molind said.

That wasn’t the only development that felt like a miracle for Molind’s church. The American Baptist church leaders who had given him use of the building on Summer Street, impressed by what he had created, had a new gift.

In 2019, with First Baptist’s worshippers down to about a dozen people, its leaders asked if Molind wanted his congregation to take over their quite beautiful church on Washington Street, complete with a glorious stained-glass sanctuary. It was theirs for the taking.

Molind and his congregation of roughly 50 moved right in, welcomed by the remaining members of First Baptist. Some adaptation was required.

The church was renamed Enough Ministries, and Molind ran a new version of the soup kitchen out of the basement. Blue lights were installed in the church bathroom to make it harder for those still actively using drugs to find a vein to shoot up, and people were charged with monitoring how long folks were in there to further guard against overdoses.

Enough Ministries has become a force in the rebuilding of Barre’s damaged housing since the 2023 flooding. It has been a vital player in the distribution of food beyond the soup kitchen, giving out or delivering $500,000 worth in a single year through partnerships with Shaw’s, Walmart and other companies in the area.

And it has continued to baptize those who, as Molind says, make it up the toughest 10 steps on their journey to Christ — the staircase from the basement soup kitchen to the spectacular sanctuary above. It’s so hard, Molind said, for many to feel they belong, that they are worthy, that they won’t be judged by those in pressed suits and flowered dresses.

But some have made it, with each of those baptized writing their name and their favorite bit of scripture on a wall outside the sanctuary.

Carol, baptized on February 13, 2021, opted for Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good, to give you a future and a hope.”

Esther 4:14 was Sindy’s inscription on July 20, 2024: “And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

Earlier this fall, Virgil, seven months sober, his hair still damp from his christening, got on a ladder and with his tattooed right arm, wrote, simply, “God loves us all.”

He paused, then made a late addition.

“Amen.”

‘Maybe Today Was Good’

The morning of June 24, 2019, was a moment of truth of sorts for Kody Fitzgerald; his partner, Heather; and their baby boy, Kylen.

Fitzgerald, who had abused drugs since his early teen years, had already lost two children to the custody of others. He’d been jailed for theft, lived long winters in abandoned railway cars, seen his own mother struggle with addiction. But he had been sober for more than a year, had a job and felt like this was his last, best chance to be a real father.

Fitzgerald needed Heather to get clean for good, too. She had overdosed during the pregnancy, and after surviving that, and even after the birth of Kylen, she still pestered Fitzgerald to feed her habit. Worried about leaving their boy with her alone, Fitzgerald had lined up a babysitter for the hours when he was away at work.

With Kylen in his arms, Fitzgerald addressed Heather on their porch before work. He wasn’t going to stay if she could not get sober, he told her, and he aimed to take the boy with him if he left. Reflect, he said to her, on what life would be like without her boy. Fitzgerald kissed her on the forehead and let her kiss the baby.

Heather later called Fitzgerald while he was at work. She said she was in Barre and asked him to pick her up after he got Kylen from the babysitter. She sounded upbeat.

“Maybe today was good,” Fitzgerald said to himself.

Fitzgerald was born in Berlin, the grandson of a famous U.S. Navy war hero, William Charles Fitzgerald. His grandfather was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his valor in defending both his own men and civilians in the South Vietnamese village of Co Luy in 1967. The USS Fitzgerald, a destroyer that for years was part of the Navy’s vaunted 7th Fleet in the Pacific, was named in his honor.

Kody Fitzgerald’s best childhood memories involve time spent with his widowed grandmother, hearing stories about her legendary husband and taking summer trips to Maine.

But Fitzgerald was only 5 when he sensed there was trouble in his own home. Before long, he said, his mother had him steal pills from people in the community. He soon became a skilled burglar and later a high school dropout as he trailed his mother through a series of boyfriends and Vermont towns. He’d get locked up and do time mowing lawns while at prison work camps in St. Johnsbury and Windsor. Then he tried heroin.

“From that moment,” he said, “I fell in love with heroin.”

Fitzgerald said his first two children, a girl then a boy, who he had with different women, were walked away by investigators with the Department for Children and Families after he was caught trying to beat a urine test required by his probation officer.

Things got dark. Fitzgerald spent one winter sleeping in an old railway oil tanker on the outskirts of Barre. He’d wake up not remembering what had happened the day before and organize this new day around the question of how he would get high so that he could later forget what had happened that day.

He wound up for a time at the Good Samaritan Haven shelter, where he met Heather. They could not stay in the shelter all day and had to find ways to kill time until they could return. One day, the two of them walked into the soup kitchen at 84 Summer Street.

It’s where he met Dan Molind. Fitzgerald said Molind was the first person to take him seriously in what felt like forever.

“He straight believed in me,” Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald would listen to the Sunday sermons and get goose bumps. He found himself noticing more richly the tiny good things that might happen in a day. And each of those moments, from feeling the purity and directness of Molind’s interest in him to something as silly as finding a quarter on the floor, were moments when he was not thinking about scoring dope.

Call him crazy, Fitzgerald said, but it became his modest daily goal not to disappoint God. It had been so long since he’d feared letting someone down. It’s hard to disappoint those who’ve long ago given up on you.

In 2018, Fitzgerald told Molind he felt ready to be baptized.

As I came out of the water, something was different. I can’t explain what it was, but something changed for me there. I just respect life itself now. Kody Fitzgerald

“As I came out of the water,” he said, “something was different. I can’t explain what it was, but something changed for me there. I just respect life itself now. I don’t know the word I want, but just how unique, how important life is.”

That’s why he was so determined in June 2019 for Heather to get sober and to, as he put it, help him “raise a child up the way it should be.” He’d struck out twice on that; Heather, having survived a near-fatal overdose, didn’t have many strikes left, either.

Fitzgerald remembers the exact time he got a second call at work on June 24. It was 3:05 p.m., and it wasn’t Heather this time.

“Heather’s dead,” a friend on the phone said.

Fitzgerald, disbelieving, raced from Northfield back to Barre, taking a call from a number he didn’t recognize as he hit 100 miles an hour. It was the police.

“I’m here with Heather,” the officer said, “There’s been an incident.”

Back in Barre, at an address of a man Heather used to score from, Fitzgerald was out of the car before he’d put it in park, and it slammed into a police cruiser. The officers there put their arms around him, to restrain him and to comfort him both.

“You don’t want to go in there,” they told him. “You want good memories to be in your head.”

Fitzgerald soon managed to wipe the tears from his face. He had to compose himself. He had to go pick up Kylen.

“I feel like I haven’t properly mourned over her,” Fitzgerald said of Heather. “She was good with Kylen. She loved him very much.”

Fitzgerald, who is 32, now works at Walmart, which recently promoted him to a manager’s position. Kylen is a student at a private Christian school. It’s costly, Fitzgerald said, but worth it. His contact with his first two children is limited, and although he is saddened by that, he understands.

Molind considers Fitzgerald an exemplar of what a church for the addicted can produce — a life of abject desolation transformed to one of simple satisfactions and a sturdy confidence. It’s the work of God, Molind believes, and also a testament to Fitzgerald’s own redeeming tenacity.

“The first week after it happened, I was so angry with God,” Fitzgerald said of Heather’s death. “You know, How could you do this to me? I’m staying clean. I’m giving you my all.”

“But after a few months,” he said, “I came to the realization that maybe God wasn’t shunning me, disciplining me for the path I took in my past. Maybe it was his way of testing me. You know, seeing if I was worthy of him.”

‘Talk to Them About Jesus’

Five years after Dan Molind’s soup kitchen church took over the grand First Baptist Church, Molind had begun to worry that the congregation had become a bit too comfortable. Those folks who’d gotten sober had found their way to jobs and homes. The holdouts from the First Baptist congregation had by and large stayed, additional anchors to a growing Christian enterprise. New arrivals had come, attracted by the music or the stained glass, bringing the Sunday totals to as many as 80. The tithing was enough for Molind to consider taking a salary, although he opted not to.

Molind feared that the church had lost sight of those it was first formed to serve – Barre’s most alone and at risk.

And so in late spring, Molind hired Clark to breathe life into a second iteration of a church for the addicted. He invited Clark to use the Washington Street church’s basement for his early services, what the two men called the new church’s “soft launch.”

Clark had grown up in Granby, Conn. He dropped out of school, took up cocaine, and came close to losing his grip on life and his family. He found Christ, though, and after years in Florida building pools for people with money, he committed himself to building churches, including ones for those with next to nothing.

Clark’s reputation for church planting was expanding among the country’s networks of pastors and congregations, and with his son he’d recently started a church in South Burlington. Molind met with him, was won over and urged him to start reaching out for potential church members door-to-door in Barre.

Early one cool September afternoon with a rumor of autumn in the air, Chuck Clark climbed into his truck behind Enough Ministries on Washington Street. His destination was the Quality Inn about a half a mile away, one of the motels used to house the indigent.

“Hopefully, I don’t run into people like me,” he said, recalling his own issues with addiction and isolation. “Or maybe I need to run into people just like me.”

Clark got permission from management to go room to room. Each held candidates for his growing church.

He’d have to navigate the scene in the parking lot first. It was full of the young, the ill, the frightened and the scheming. There appeared to be various factions protecting turf, while others moved from corner to corner in search of a favor, maybe a dollar, maybe a cigarette.

“Dear Quality Inn Guests,” a sign posted on a motel wall read. “There are no visitors allowed in your room at any time. If he/she is not on your voucher and you’re caught with them in your room for ANY amount of time, you will be immediately vacated.”

Clark took it all in.

“Church is family,” Clark said. “Families have problems. Church can have problem families.”

It was slow going.

“I’m busy, and I’m high,” one female resident said. “I won’t go to church high.”

Barre is a complicated mixed blessing of a hometown for those dealing with addiction. Its appeal includes a housing stock that is 50 percent apartments, a rarity in Vermont, and lots of them are government subsidized. Residents can get a degree of free health care at the People’s Health & Wellness Clinic. A variety of nonprofits provide treatment and supportive housing. Public transportation provides critical links.

At the same time, the presence of the county courthouse, and the attendant probation and parole offices, mean those cycling through arrests and incarceration — 66 percent of those locked up in Vermont are taking opioid treatment medications — all but have to stay in Barre to meet the terms of their release.

The city’s surplus of drug operations, many orchestrated by gang members in Springfield, Mass., or Hartford, Conn., thus makes escaping the lure of drugs, and the access to them, deeply challenging.

In short, Barre is where many struggling with addiction have to be, even though they know it’s the last place they should be.

“For every gang member they take out of the city,” a man named Rusty said, “far more arrive.”

Rusty was at a table in the basement kitchen on Washington Street. He said he’d been born in Randolph and once dreamed of being an architect. But after becoming taken with the painkillers he stole from his dad, a telephone lineman, he’d been an addict most of his life. Even the birth of two sons could not shake him into sobriety, much as he loved his boys.

“No matter how high I got,” he said, “I was still their dad.”

No longer. He’d last seen his first son, now 16, when the boy was 4. He’d last seen his 9-year-old when he was just 18 months.

Molind, who oversees the congregation that worships in the church’s upstairs sanctuary, and Clark, who puts together the basement services for the new, as-yet-unnamed church for the addicted, have some strategic principles in seeking prospective members.

The military, Molind said, prioritizes mission over man. In building a church, it’s the other way around. He and Clark want to create relationships. Hear people’s stories. Understand the scope of their needs and begin to meet some of them. Then talk about Jesus.

Molind said his father used to say it took 18 positive encounters with someone before you could have a shot at gaining a convert.

“Don’t invite people to church; talk to them about Jesus,” Molind said of his thinking. “If you invite them to church and they don’t come, nothing good has happened. If you talk to them about Jesus and they don’t ever wind up coming to church, you’ve at least shared the word of Jesus.”

By this fall, Molind and Clark had been talking with Rusty for quite a while. He’d spent an entire winter under cardboard and blankets on the church porch. He’d been a regular at the food giveaways. But he was a hard sell. Another winter was looming.

That day in the basement, Rusty said of his life, “I always wanted more. I got a whole lot less. Once an addict, always an addict.”

Weeks later, in the same basement, congregants prayed for Rusty’s welfare. Word was he’d overdosed in Roxbury, left behind by those he was with. No one had heard from or seen him. Still later, some of those at the basement services would hear that Rusty had survived and was living in the woods around Montpelier.

A man named Chris did not make it. Clark had very briefly met the 37-year-old when he came for food. It might have been the start of a conversation, maybe the beginning of a relationship and, who knows, a step toward baptism.

Chris died of an overdose on September 18. A brief online obituary paid tribute.

“Chris was kind, caring, a good listener, and a true gentleman with a youthful personality. He was outgoing, bubbly, energetic, social, funny and determined. He was a talker and had countless stories that he loved to share with others. In his spare time, he enjoyed watching movies, listening to music, playing cribbage, swimming, biking and coloring pictures … He loved ice cream and candy, and treats could always cheer him up when he was sad.”

Clark has been undeterred by the setbacks, and he earns the salary Molind is paying him. He’s had to overcome the insecurities of those he encounters, many of whom can suspect outsiders of being cops. One man actually threatened to knock Clark’s teeth out.

Yet there Clark was one day in late October, conducting a prayer walk through the streets of Barre, including up Main Street. To everyone he met, he offered, as he put it, “Jesus without religion.”

“Jesus said there is no sinner worse than me,” Clark said in one of his early services. “And there is no sinner worse than you.”

Fourteen people showed up for the first service back in August, and the number has since fluctuated. In the second week of November, though, 33 filled the seats. Clark has cultivated a core group of members to serve as the backbone of the new church. In late November, after a formal assessment of his project’s progress, a national church planting organization pledged its financial support.

Clark and Molind hope to move the church out of the basement and into its own quarters next spring. The hunt has centered on the city’s north end, the corner of town worst hit by the repeated flooding. They scouted one building out by the railway lines and toyed with the idea of naming the church “The Other Side of the Tracks.” Most recently, Molind and Clark have their eyes on an old garage. It fits Molind’s calculus.

“A place where you might find a dollar store,” he said of the area around the garage. “If there’s a need for a dollar store, there’s a need for the gospel.”

‘It’s Not Working’

Three years ago, Dan Molind pulled into an auto repair shop in the city’s south end and was struck by the warmth of the owner who met him. It didn’t take long to sense his despair, too. The man had split with the mother of his children, and he missed his three daughters. Business was slow. Molind would soon hear from others that drug use was a problem.

Molind made it a point to have church vehicles serviced there and gave out the owner’s card to church members.

The man was a bit wary of a pastor, so Molind did not aggressively push Jesus on him. He was also circumspect when asking how the man was doing — noting everyone carried their share of “struggles.”

Over the years, something of a bond took hold, though the man never spoke explicitly of his drug use. Eventually, Molind told the man he’d like to pray for him. The owner hesitated but said OK.

“One day,” Molind recalled, “he came up to me and gave me his private cellphone number. I invited him to church. I thought to myself that we might be getting somewhere.”

The good work preaching the promise of Jesus is far from the only act of care being extended to those battling addiction in Barre. It is a city rich in civic loyalty and personal generosity.

At the emergency department of the nearby Central Vermont Medical Center, Dr. Javad Mashkuri has sought to humanize the care given to those damaged by drug use, offering rapid access to medication and installing what are known as recovery coaches to immediately work on sobriety with those treated for overdosing.

Those recovery coaches are staff members of the Turning Point Center of Central Vermont, based in Barre. Rosemary Rosa, assistant director, said each of those coaches are at work on their own sobriety, as well as caseloads with as many as 40 clients at once.

Inside the Washington County Courthouse on North Main Street, Kimberly Fortier earned the admiration of the judge in charge of what is called Treatment Court for her efforts with defendants who are trying to stay clean and out of prison. As the court’s clinical case manager, she was a fierce advocate and a demanding supervisor for the defendants she supported and cajoled, demanding honesty and showing forgiveness.

At the same time, younger families are moving into the city, priced out of Vermont’s more expensive communities. They’ve found solid, spacious homes and neighbors of kindness and optimism. New restaurants pop up every once in a while, and longtime stores in the city’s downtown, Nelson Ace Hardware and Lenny’s Shoe & Apparel, are still stubbornly open for business. Locals are quick to point out that other Vermont communities, including Rutland and Brattleboro, face the same issues.

And yet for many who love Barre, it still can feel like a city on the brink. The police, understaffed and always a step behind drug traffickers, are exhausted. Two years of damaging floods have upended lives and sunk morale.

Few people love and worry for Barre more than Thom Lauzon, who served as mayor from 2006 to 2018 and is now back for another stint. He grew up in Barre, and his memories of 1970s boyhood summers are vivid and detailed: kids on bikes everywhere; fishing every afternoon on Gunner Brook; an 8:50 p.m. citywide curfew, signaled each night with a whistle from the Barre firehouse.

Today, Lauzon, 63, misses those scenes. Not so much his lost youth, but the city’s dwindling numbers of young people. Barre, like so much of Vermont, is rich with the old and starved of a youthful labor force.

The toll taken by opioids in the city, then, has implications not only for devastated individual families but also for the economic future of Barre.

“We can’t afford to lose one kid,” Lauzon said.

Yet they are. State records show that eight of the nine Barre residents dead in 2024 of drug overdoses were 45 years old or younger. Some of those lost had worked at one time in just the kinds of jobs that Lauzon was talking about — a cashier, a mechanic, a store clerk.

Lauzon admits that his ability to reverse the onslaught is limited. The mayor’s job in Barre is not a position of great legal authority, the pay just a couple of thousand dollars a year. The work is part cheerleader, part facilitator — a driver of civic conversation more than a kingpin of policy and budgets.

And the job is also to be there in emergencies, be they floods or fires or traffic accidents. So Lauzon answered the phone in 2016 when there were nine overdoses, one fatal, in a single weekend, his initial disbelief turning to despair by the last call from emergency responders.

Back in office years later, Lauzon said the calls haven’t let up.

“We are sincerely trying to do the right thing,” the mayor said. “And it’s not working.”

“It sucks,” he added, “to feel like you are powerless.”

Molind, for his part, believes Jesus is all-powerful. But that doesn’t mean everyone accepts him into their lives, or that those who do will prevail in their struggles with addiction.

The auto shop owner, in the end, never made it to church.

“Perhaps rock bottom is deeper for people who don’t have another hope,” Molind said.

On October 4, at age 41, the repair shop owner died after an overdose.

Molind was sad for the man’s three girls and for the loss of another Barre City businessman.

And he was sad for Thom Lauzon. The shop owner was the mayor’s nephew.

‘How Can I Keep From Singing?’

On the morning of October 6, a quiet excitement was palpable inside Enough Ministries. It was the first Sunday of the month, and thus baptisms were in order, including three for people who had been coming to Chuck Clark’s basement services.

A sound check was under way for the musicians. The church’s front door was swinging open again and again with new arrivals. The baptism tub was filled up, and Clark, in jean shorts, was readying himself to step into it.

Just outside the sanctuary, old and newer members mingled over breakfast snacks. Craig Mugford, a former granite shed worker, was one of them.

“There’s something satisfying,” Mugford said, “about making a rough stone shine.”

Mugford had been a member of the old First Baptist congregation and had stayed and joined Molind’s group when they moved in back in 2019. He said the old congregation had not only been thinned out but also had “lost its sense of purpose.” He was grateful for the people and success stories Molind had brought with him when his congregation took over.

One congregant stood behind Mugford, holding a child’s hand in each of hers, nieces who had lost their mom to an overdose. She was their mother now. The back of her sweatshirt read: “If you are reading this, know that you are loved. It’s easy to feel alone and invisible, but you being alive is a gift to many. I’m sure of it. So, hang in there and love the person you are the best you can.”

Molind was there, too. He, like the mayor, worries for Barre.

By his count, he’s administered Narcan three dozen or so times; one victim required a dozen doses. He’s met a man who overdosed 40 times. A church member lost a son to an overdose and then, on the anniversary of his son’s death, a grandson. The grandson had gotten high to relieve the pain of losing his dad. The irony is piercing.

So, too, Molind said, are the signs that have proliferated around town: “No loitering,” “No public restroom,” “No panhandling.” Molind knows drug users perceive the signs are directed at them and their presumed unworthiness. It can feel, he said, “kind of like Jim Crow.”

Molind’s invitation to embrace Jesus, he wants to make clear, is for a church, not a 12-step program.

But Molind is an optimist. His invitation to embrace Jesus, he wants to make clear, is for a church, not a 12-step program. He is not a drug counselor. His churches — the one he was standing in and the one Clark was helping start in its basement — did not require sobriety nor promise it. Jesus simply made anything possible, in this life or the next.

The evidence was on the wall in front of him, the names of dozens of people with addictions who’d been baptized: Chris, Ashley, Bill, Sarai, Jeff, Michelle. Three on the wall had later been lost to their addiction.

One of those names was that of a Spaulding High state champion in football, track and field, wrestling, and powerlifting. His longtime demon was alcohol, and when Molind met him, he told the pastor that the only calories he got every day came from booze. Molind worked with him, and he was baptized.

The man entered a facility to treat his alcoholism. He got through detox but died while in rehab. Giving up alcohol can be more deadly than withdrawing from any kind of drugs. Molind questioned whether the man’s hard work of recovery and spiritual awakening had been worth it. The push toward sobriety appeared to have killed him.

A church member reassured him. The man, the church member said, was going to die, one way or another, sooner than later. His life was unsustainable. That he knew Christ through his relationship with Molind was a blessing, both for him and Molind’s church.

In the bustle outside the church sanctuary on October 6, two women were among the three congregants to be baptized.

One of them, Danielle, 40, had survived an itinerant childhood; lost her father, a Navy medic in Vietnam, to complications from exposure to Agent Orange; battled medical issues herself; and contemplated suicide more than once. But she was still standing.

“I can’t get out of this world yet for some reason,” she said with a chuckle.

She had an apartment for $280 a month, and she’d figured out a way to negotiate the city’s dangers.

“The quieter you are, the better it is,” she said of life on Barre’s streets. “You start talking, and that’s when you get a number on your head.”

She said she’d had water sprinkled on her head in church before, but it had felt like everyone, including herself, was just going through the motions. Here, working with Chuck Clark and his wife, preparation involved reading and genuine prayer.

This time, she said, “I know what I’m doing.”

Early in the service, as light streamed through the stained glass, she descended into the tub and met Clark, who was standing thigh-deep with his arms open. She turned, leaned back into his arms and was gently, fully submerged. She came up wide-eyed and soaking.

Applause erupted.

And then the congregants took up the song “How Can I Keep From Singing?”

Their voices reached the very back of the sanctuary, downstairs where the children were learning, and even beyond the front door, into the streets of Barre.

My life goes on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear it’s music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

Barre’s Bedrock

Meet some of the people supporting the city through the opioid crisis.

The Undertakers

Duffy Ballard and his son Cort, who together run the Pruneau-Polli Funeral Home on Summer Street in Barre, didn’t shy from the chance to sign a contract to drive people found dead of overdoses to the state medical examiner’s office in Burlington. While there isn’t much money in the work, it suits their sense of mission.

Those they pick up were often estranged from their family, if they had one. Care and dignity are needed.

In recent years, father and son have taken calls at all hours. They’ve been out to the Hilltop Inn in Berlin, to the high-rise public housing apartments on South Main Street, to private addresses as far away as Williamstown.

They made at least 11 runs in 2023.

If the bodies Duffy and Cort pick up go unclaimed, the cremated remains are held for three years at the medical examiner’s facility. The hope is someone will turn up. Those families who do claim the bodies often choose to have formal services at a different funeral home. One of the few that paid for a service at Duffy’s was the family of a 7-month-old Barre child who ingested drugs belonging to his parents.

Almost all the families that opt to work with Duffy and Cort choose what’s called direct cremation. There is no service, no obituary, and the ashes are handed over for the family to do with as they wish. The cost is roughly $2,800 — cheaper than a funeral package but still too much for some.

“A lot of time there is no money,” Duffy said of the families of the dead. “And that’s when I say, ‘OK, I’ll just do it for the state money.'”

The State of Vermont pays the home $1,100 or so for accommodating families that have nothing.

Duffy explains the details without judgment. He is not a man of pretensions, although he says with a laugh that people have told him his life story is worthy of a book. It would be a tale of Barre hardship, tragedy and survival.

His father, he said, was a “railroad bum,” killed by a train when Duffy was a boy. His mother, nicknamed Happy, worked for a bit as a cook at a local diner, but in complete truth, Duffy said, she raised him and his siblings on public assistance.

Duffy, now 58, did not make it past eighth grade. He was a father at 15 and had eight children in all. He has already lost three, though none to drug use.

Cort, 26, a former football player at Spaulding High School, is Duffy’s youngest. He’s seen less heartbreak than his dad but plenty all the same. A run out to Williamstown not that long ago still haunts Cort.

The body was on the porch of a home and had been there for a while.

“Kind of hard to recognize,” Cort said of the corpse.

But he worked it out.

“A kid I grew up with,” Cort said. “I went camping with him. We played football together. He was 23.”

The work goes on. There have been eight runs so far in 2024, including to retrieve the young man found in the Porta-Potty.

In late summer, for the third year running, the funeral home’s hearse rolled along in Barre’s Heritage Festival parade. Duffy and Cort threw Slim Jims and Starburst candy to the crowds.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people thought it was great,” Duffy said.

Not all, though.

“A couple of people didn’t like it,” he said. “It triggered something in them.”

The Detective

Detective Sgt. Steve Durgin was one of nearly a dozen officers to hit an apartment in East Barre 18 months ago. Inside, police found a woman in the living room of what felt more like an attic than a residence. Something about the woman suggested she was keeping a secret.

Durgin found the secret in a tiny bathroom — a 13-year-old boy with drugs, cash and a gun. The boy had no identification, and when he answered any questions at all, he gave the officers fake names.

Durgin has been with the Barre City Police Department for 17 years. He’d come on after a deployment to Iraq with the U.S. Army in 2004, a year, he said, when the country was “blowing up” after the seemingly easy toppling of Saddam Hussein. Back home, he was keen for the excitement and purpose of police work, but the shine of the job, as he put it, has faded. The endless combat against drugs in Barre is the cause.

“They change; we adapt; they learn how we’ve adapted,” he said of the cat and mouse with Barre’s drug dealers, many of them from out of state.

The child in the bathroom represented the latest strategic gambit: underage boys from Springfield, Mass., or Hartford, Conn., set up in homes to deal drugs. The out-of-state traffickers know that Vermont doesn’t typically jail juveniles. If they’re busted, the boys are eventually released, though several thousand dollars in cash might be seized.

“The cost of doing business,” Durgin said.

The boys often do not know where they are other than somewhere in Vermont. They’ve been told to withhold their names from police. They almost never leave the apartments, ordering in food.

Durgin and other investigators tracked down security video and saw the moment the boy, with nothing but a backpack, had been walked into the apartment by three adults. Durgin found Domino’s pizza boxes in the bathroom.

Occasionally, after hours of detention, and maybe threatened with prosecution as an adult, boys such as this one will give up their names on their own. At other times, police work with the Department for Children and Families to determine the identity of the boys and return them to their home states. It is not easy or quick work.

It’s often not clear whether the boys were sent to Barre against their will. They might willingly do it for money or to earn gang membership. If it were clear the boys had been coerced, the police might be able to make a human trafficking case. To date, Durgin said, they’ve been unsuccessful doing so.

Trissie Casanova, who heads up DCF’s human trafficking division, said youths are being stationed in other Vermont communities, too. Of late, she said, most of the boys are Somali immigrants.

A cynical and challenging new wrinkle in Barre’s drug-dealing operations is the last thing Durgin’s department needs. The department, with 21 sworn officers, has five unfilled openings, a staffing problem owing not to a lack of money but a lack of interest. The street crime unit has been eliminated. Durgin is one of the department’s two detectives; it once had four.

The uphill fight can wear on officers who have made at least 260 drug arrests in Barre over the past four years. Durgin is resigned to the idea that the job is a way to pay bills, to provide for his son.

“We’re never going to win,” he said. “So you do what you can so the city doesn’t burn.”

The Recovery Coach

The men in their late teens or early twenties cut Moriah Haggett to the quick.

Haggett, a recovery coach, helps people struggling to shed their addiction, whether to heroin or alcohol or something else. She is most often stationed off the emergency room at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin. Overdose victims, once revived and treated, are encouraged to meet with her. The goal is to get them to work on sobriety and safety.

When young men turn up there, she is struck.

“Oh, my God,” she can’t help thinking, “that’s my boy.”

Haggett lost her 19-year-old son, Tyler, on Mother’s Day 2023. He’d come home for the weekend to celebrate, gone out on Saturday night with friends and spent Sunday morning in bed. He’d worked a late shift as a welder in South Burlington, and so she let him sleep late.

“The poor kid’s just tired,” she thought.

When Tyler’s girlfriend called around 3 p.m. looking for him, Haggett went to check. She couldn’t get a response. When she called 911, she was asked to touch her boy.

“He is really cold,” she said into the phone.

She believes that Tyler, who had struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, smoked something laced with fentanyl after arriving back at her home.

It’s an emptier place today.

“My kids have always been my entire world,” Haggett said.

Haggett, 46, spent the later years of her childhood with her grandparents in Barre Town. She had her first child, Jonnah, when she was 17, and she never finished high school. She gave birth to Tyler, battled a cocaine and drinking problem, confronted the challenge of girlhood trauma with therapists, and got sober.

During her own work with psychiatrists and counselors, Haggett said, she was struck by how many of those she’d see in the waiting rooms were alone. She became determined to support people like them, and she got trained and hired as a recovery coach at the Turning Point Center of Central Vermont in Barre. Most coaches are in recovery themselves.

Part of what the coaches do is something Turning Point calls “motivational interviewing,” suspending judgment, building confidence and focus. Haggett loves the work, hard as it can be.

“I wasn’t always easy to deal with, and they aren’t always easy to deal with,” she said of her clients. “And that’s OK.”

Haggett found a coach for Tyler when he first confessed his issues with addiction.

“I wasn’t going to be his coach,” she said. “I needed to be his mom.”

As his parent, she’d seen him grow from a shy boy to a varied and competitive athlete. He loved hockey most, even if his mastery of skating wasn’t complete.

“He couldn’t figure out how to stop,” she said with a laugh. “Always hitting the wall.”

His efforts at sobriety would hit walls, too, including the final one.

With his death, Haggett decided to add grief counseling to her portfolio. She meets with those dealing with loss both individually and in groups. She finds the work easier, in its way, than the recovery coaching. It’s about sitting with people — holding space, as she put it, for people who don’t know what’s going to come next.

Asked what she expected of the future, she would not say. Not being overwhelmed by the now was enough.

“I’m OK,” she said. “I think I’m OK.”

The Prosecutor

One of the books that most influenced Kristin Gozzi after she took a job with the state attorney’s office in Washington County was The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. The moving work made clear “how trauma affects everybody,” she said.

Over her 17 years in the job as a prosecutor handling family court matters, she said, she has seen the book’s truths fully realized: families in crisis, fear and agony. She’s tracked all that trauma in her own set of statistics.

Since 2016, Gozzi has sought protection of one kind or another in family court for hundreds of Barre children, and in a sizable majority of those cases, substance use by parents or children was among the reasons. As of last month, 95 of her cases had led to the termination of parental rights, meaning the mothers and fathers lost any legal standing with regard to a child.

Some of those cases, Gozzi noted, amounted to critical “wins” that removed children from a dangerous situation. Yet she also views them as defeats of a kind – societal as often as personal failures. Homelessness, for instance, begets desperation, which can lead to destructive, dangerous decisions.

“Complicated situations that aren’t supportive of sobriety,” is how she puts it. “And I don’t know how we fix that as a community.”

Gozzi, 49, was certain she wanted to tackle the challenges of trauma work before she got to Barre. And for all the heartbreak, she has never regretted coming or ever really thought about leaving. She loves Barre’s working-class culture, the livelihoods of so many made through hard labor with their hands.

As a result, when a case concerning a child’s well-being comes to her, she sees the entire family as her client. The drug use of the parents may be at issue, but that does not make them the enemy.

“I do my very best not to demonize substance use,” she said.

Over the years, Gozzi has worked to make the courtroom environment in downtown Barre as humane and collaborative as possible. Parents are referred to by name, not as father or mother or defendant. When possible, tables and chairs are arranged so that everyone can see each other, not merely be facing a judge.

“If people feel they are heard by the court,” she said, “they are more likely to follow court orders.”

The volume of cases, however, can frustrate the best of efforts. Weeks, even months, can elapse before hearings are held, the timely scheduling of what are at their heart urgent matters feeling like “an impossible task.”

Of course, Gozzi notes, there are “glimmers of hope,” such as a young boy who first showed up in court bent over and nonverbal returning to stand straight and speak for himself; and a mother who ran into Gozzi at Walmart and told her excitedly that she was three months sober.

Recovery and family restoration are possible, she said. “People do it every day.”

When they don’t, though, the losses hit like cataclysms. Gozzi said both a parent and a child on her caseload had died of overdoses within the past year. And they were just the latest.

Addicts, she said, have often blown up relations with families and friends. The system, meaning in many ways her, is all they have. That system, she knows, is imperfect, even flawed, too often inadequate. And no book about trauma can feel like comfort enough.

Indeed, the past year’s deadly defeats, recorded in Gozzi’s growing ledger, packed a wallop. Feeling a bit unmoored by the losses, she said she’s been wrestling with personal and professional questions about just how effective she was in her long-held goal of limiting trauma for families.

“Struggling,” she said of herself, “with my place in the world.”

The First Responder

Barre firefighter Will Bennington and his colleagues often get handwritten letters or modest gifts from people they’ve helped, whether after a heart attack or just a lift assist into an ambulance.

Bennington, 36, also has revived opioid overdose victims in streets, parking lots, bedrooms and kitchens. When those people come around, they are often angry, embarrassed, afraid or confused. They don’t say thanks. “They have no idea who is standing over them,” Bennington said. He added, “No one is baking us cookies after that.”

Bennington makes no complaint about this. His feelings aren’t ever hurt. He’s not in the job for thank-yous. In fact, his guess is that, should the person he’s helped later make the long journey to sobriety for a fresh shot at a better life, that moment of revival, however genuinely miraculous, will not be a lasting memory.

“I am not the solution to the opioid crisis,” Bennington said. “Our job is to save people’s lives, and I think we do a pretty good job of that.”

Bennington’s sense of perspective and proportion dates back years. He was a high school senior when he found his older stepbrother unconscious in the bathroom of the family home in New Jersey. He wasn’t exactly sure what to do, and so he closed the door and went to tell his mother. Her “bloodcurdling scream” came next, he said. Bennington’s brother was dead of an overdose.

Barre, whatever its struggles, is not on fire like the Bronx of the 1970s. Emergency medical runs make up the bulk of the department’s work, shift in and shift out.

The department’s preferred treatment is to administer Narcan intravenously. It’s critical to get people breathing on their own because Narcan can wear off and the drugs, heroin or fentanyl, may still be a present danger. As often as not, though, those who have overdosed have been revived by family or friends or passersby before Bennington and others arrive. The firefighters encourage a trip to the hospital, but they can’t order it.

“Once they are alert,” Bennington said, “they have no interest in going to the hospital.”

They worry they’ll get billed or that cops will get involved, he said. Thus the question of whether these people suffer lasting harm — brain injury because of a lack of oxygen — can go unanswered.

In the latest bit of strategy, the department has been equipped with supplies to leave with those who have overdosed, including a cellphone. Phone numbers for a variety of treatment options have been preloaded.

Some have questioned the utility of giving away phones, suspicious they might just be used to order up more drugs. Bennington dismisses the concerns.

“People found drugs before cellphones,” he said.

Asked about any fatigue in the face of seemingly endless overdoses — there can be several a shift, half a dozen in a week — Bennington was quietly resilient.

“This job is hard. Always has been, always will be,” he said. “A blue-collar, emotional job. Most of us have pretty tough skin.”

No need, then, for formal thank-yous.

Journalist Joe Sexton has previously reported and edited for the New York Times and was a senior editor with Pro Publica. He lives in Vermont with his family.

To learn more about Sexton and why Seven Days published this story, read this week’s “From the Publisher” column from Paula Routly.

This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.

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