He shares his mentor’s gene for optimism. But, then, if your profession were treating addicts, you couldn’t survive otherwise. “We ran the squatters out. Got the building condemned and then found an investor to buy it.” There are programs to help with the financing, he explained. And there are organizations that will come in and do their part. Everything from Habitat for Humanity to the state’s electrical utility, Green Mountain Power, which had taken one derelict building and turned it into a “smart house” with solar panels on the roof for power. I remembered it. Rotting clapboards, broken windows sealed up with green plastic trash bags, garbage in the bare dirt yard. Prouty was still there, but he was now Commander Prouty. He seemed glad to hear from me and eager to show me around. “Can you make eight o’clock?” he said, “I think you will find it interesting.” When we met, he looked the same and his affable nature hadn’t withered under the strain of command. We got into his cruiser, buckled up, and returned to the neighborhood where he lived. “We’ve been working to tear down the worst places and rehab the ones we can save,” he said. “Like that one, right there. It used to be one of the worst. You didn’t answer a call on that one without backup.”
“There are young professionals living in that one,” Prouty said. “And more like them are coming back.” There was no missing the pride in his tone. The sidewalks had been repaired. And there were parents using them to walk their kids to school. One vacant lot had been converted into a playground. The crumbling buildings on Prouty’s own block had been repaired. “You remember how that woman came out and was screaming at us? It’s right here.” It had been rehabbed beyond recognition. I was impressed and said so, but asked, “But what about the drugs? They haven’t gone away.” But things were visibly and undeniably better. Like so many other fights, it seems, in the war on drugs there are no conclusive victories. But that doesn’t mean you quit fighting. A lot of people had given up on New York, after all, before Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor. The city, they said, was fated to be the Calcutta of the West. If New York could come back, why not Rutland? Men like Prouty will stand their ground and fight to defend their homes. McKenzie had, however, moved on. She was in Arizona where she said the heroin problem was worse than in Vermont. But she was still fighting the good fight. Her successor, whom she had trained, is Eric McGuire. He is a big, friendly man from Boston who will never shed the accent. He “No. And we still have some bad neighborhoods. It’s never over.”
American Consequences 55
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