CUMBERLAND, Md. – A thin man stands outside the Union Rescue Mission. He pulls a pack of filterless cigarettes from the front pocket of his black winter coat and taps it on a gloved hand before reaching in, grabbing a smoke and lighting it.
He pulls a camouflage ball cap firmly down onto his ears as an icy gust of wind knifes between the old brick buildings along Queen City Pavement.
He’s early. Or so he thinks: The mission’s backdoor is locked. He appears to miss a sign on the door that reads, “All meals closed to the public!!! This is due to all the trouble and fights, sorry to those who are not the cause of this,” as his painfully thin frame paces the sidewalk between the mission and a long-closed discount liquor store.
He looks old; he’s likely not. Whether it is addiction, poverty or a dark sense of hopelessness that ails him, they all take the same toll: first your looks, then your virility, ultimately your potential and finally your soul.
The decision to suspend the rescue mission’s public meal program for a week because of fighting and drug dealing was not taken lightly, according to Pastor David Ziler.
“We needed to isolate the drug dealers from preying on those who need the most help in the community,” he said.
The problem had become intolerable: “We had to take a stance. We have people who come to our facility for three meals a day who are trying desperately to work their way out of addiction and poverty.”
He was uncertain how the community would react; after all, the nondenominational church’s rescue mission has provided three meals a day to anyone who needed them since 1963.
He was even more uncertain how the drug dealers would react to being shut out.
Then something incredible happened.
The city — located in Appalachia at the base of converging mountain ridges, at the confluence of Wills Creek and the Potomac River — has long been known for a breathtaking view of church spires jutting from the rolling cityscape and reaching towards the heavens.
While the spires reached heavenward, the church congregations spread outward to help.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ziler recalled. “They just all showed up. We literally had people from all of the churches and all of the denominations show up and help us hold our ground.”
They converged on the city blocks where those in need walked to come to Ziler’s mission and get their meals; they made sure that all of those who needed food would get inside, but those looking to prey on the needy people would feel their presence.
“Essentially, the pressure and the dark presence of the drug dealers was so bad that our residents didn’t even want to come downstairs and eat meals,” Ziler said.
“All that has changed — the light and darkness do not coexist, and the darkness was forced out by the people in our community.”
It took a week, but the problem is now gone.
Last year the mission provided 73,000 meals to those in need, about 250 meals served three times during a day. It housed 62 people and provided cold-shelter cots to an additional 22.
Ziler is one of those folks who never left the region; he grew up in nearby Rollings, went off to college at Frostburg State, then returned to serve at the mission.
“This is home, this is family, and this is where I am needed,” he said.
Cumberland is yet another American community at a crossroads: Once the second-largest in Maryland, the “Queen City,” located on what was the western frontier, has lost half of its population and more than half of its jobs in just a generation.
Prosperity, or at least a decent middle-class life, has been replaced with hopelessness; to dull the pain of poverty, failure or losing the power that once made you a solid member of the community, many people turn to heroin.
It’s cheap and readily available. Just ask those whom the drug dealers were trying to lure at the mission.
The national media talks about the opioid crisis sweeping through old industrial cities and small rural towns without getting to the root of the problem, according to Ziler.
“It’s as if they are only looking at the surface of a pond,” he said. “The problem for these folks is much deeper than a cheap high. Society has not only left these people behind, it’s left them with few options, and it’s essentially told them, ‘You have no value to us anymore.’ ”
As if to punctuate the point, a headline from the local newspaper reads: “Veteran Cumberland defense attorney said that during a recent 14-day period, six of his clients died from heroin overdoses.”
The Union Rescue Mission takes zero government money; it survives entirely on small donations to provide shelter and food for those in need. It is not a rehab shelter, but a place where the homeless, many of them single mothers who work full time but aren’t paid enough to afford a home for their children and themselves.
“We cannot politic our way out of this problem that is plaguing the center of our country,” Ziler said. “Over the years there have been so many promises unmet from Washington, so many stories by the media who come into towns like this and spend a day and sensationalize the situation, then leave.
“The answer has to come from within.
“You don’t know what it is like to have to look a drug dealer in the eye until you’ve done it. You don’t know what it is like to sit with a person with a needle in one hand, about to put in into their arm, and try to tell them there is a better way out, until you’ve done it.”
Salena Zito is a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
