Recovering addicts find a landing pad with DART work crew

Mike Wydnes has been trying to get sober ever since he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when he was 18.

He got launched off that wagon so many times he lost count and each time the landing opened up a world of hurt.

The constant flushing of booze poured into his system wasted 60 pounds off what used to be a chiseled pipefitter workingman’s body, leaving a gaunt mirror reflection he struggled to recognize.

He tried quitting a few years ago and was seven months into the Salvation Army Miracle Valley Treatment Centre program in Maple Ridge when he relapsed after finding out his father in Comox had drowned.

His rock-bottom moment happened about a year ago when he was found near death in his motel room, suffering from acute alcohol poisoning.

“I lost everything,” Wydnes said. “I had a good woman who tried to help me for eight years. How do you help somebody who’s powerless? Love is not enough.

“I went to jail for a while. I haven’t done major crimes or anything, everything I’ve done in front of a judge has been alcohol-related.”

Now, at 54, he’s quit drinking, has a full-time job working in Prince George on a yard maintenance crew and for the first time in years he’s talking to his family again.

He has three (“at least three”) grown children – a son and two daughters, all on Vancouver Island – and says they all are keen on connecting with him now that he’s off the booze.

In January, Wydnes served out a jail sentence for breach of probation and was released from Prince George Correctional Centre. From jail, his landing pad was the Integrity Recovery Centre, a Prince George halfway house whose clients are often hired as labourers by the Drug Awareness Recovery Team (DART).

After a winter shovelling snow and hauling clients’ junk to the dump, Wydnes now spends his working days behind a weed eater or lawnmower on a DART crew. He’s back in the workforce earning a regular paycheque and not spending a dime of that on alcohol.

He pays $1,000 a month for his room and board and is saving what he can in case he decides to pay a visit to his family on Vancouver Island.

“I’m in pretty good shape for the amount I drank, my higher power has been pretty kind to me,” said Wydnes. “Alcohol wastes people away and turns them into emptiness. It takes everything you’ve got and gives you hopelessness back.

“The last time it nearly killed me, that’s why I’m here today. Working with DART gives a guy a sense of purpose again. It shows you that you can do it. You’ll always be an addict/alcoholic, but you don’t have to suffer from it anymore.”

Former heroin addict Bob Scott started the Drug Awareness Recovery Team Society in Prince George in 1996 when he saw the need to give recovering addicts the ways and means to become human again, by putting them to work in gardening, snow removal and odd jobs.   

Scott spent the better part of four decades trying to kick his habit and was able return to a healthy lifestyle and create work opportunities for other reformed drug users through his gardening business, until he died of emphysema at age 68 on July 18, 2008.

DART has continued to grow and now has two crews that do yardwork for commercial and residential property owners. They also help maintain city parks and facilities and do odd jobs for people on a list of about 100 regular clients.

“A lot of the clients are seniors and they appreciate the work that’s being done, and when the crews see that it makes them feel good and it shows that no matter what type of work it is, they should do a good job, whether it’s something sophisticated or maybe more mental or something physical and labour intensive,” said DART executive director Len McNamara.

“They get the added bonus that they’re amongst crew members that have been through the same types of programs and face the same challenges and they see how other people grapple with their situations. All in all it’s a pretty good program that Bob started 28 years ago. Not only did he provide the work, but Bob provided counselling for those people.”

Northern Health provides funding to DART through an annual grant established years ago by Scott and DART president Gary Godwin, a retired RCMP officer. McNamara says the not-for-profit society has outgrown its Third Avenue headquarters and would like to find a larger space big enough to combine its office and equipment storage space which would also allow DART to conduct on-site counselling services.

“We’d like to have something we can run 24 hours a day, so it’s the business in the daytime and at night it’s group meetings or workshops or those types of things,” said McNamara.

“They say, on average, you go through eight to 10 recovery places before you actually have success. It’s a struggle. It took Bob 38 years from the time he felt he was in addiction. I don’t think he ever said he beat it. He still craved heroin and all those types of things, but it was 38 years to get himself clean.”

Before DART hired him in January 2023, it had been five years since Dave Barber had held a job. Getting high as a kite was the most important thing in his life and he says there was no way he could go to work every day. He couldn’t stay sober long enough to get through a shift.

“Who’s hiring somebody like me, with my eyes like a dinner plate,” he said. “You’re disheveled, you’re a sick person. People think it’s a decision, and at a certain point we lose that decision and you just slide down this scale and by the time you wake up you don’t see a way out. You cross a certain point where you can’t stop anymore, despite the desire and the necessity.”

The lack of affordable housing is contributing to a problem that now affects an estimated 450 homeless people in Prince George. Integrity was already housing some of Barber’s friends from jail at the time he was released and they provided the peer support network he now relies upon. But during that first two weeks his cravings dominated his thoughts and he was ready to leave.

“If it wasn’t for them talking me out of it I don’t know where I’d be right now,” he said.

Barber, 41, has two children, an 18-year-old son on Vancouver Island and a nine-year-old daughter in Fort St. John, and he admits he hasn’t contributed financially to their upbringing. But with his addiction in check and his plan to go back to school at the College of New Caledonia to become a registered addictions counsellor, they are both involved in his life again. He hopes they learn from his mistakes.

“I just want to be able to show there’s a way out and help with that, you kind of find the purpose once you get rid of the problem,” he said. “Through helping others in Integrity and otherwise, it just seems like the right thing to do.”

Lawn care makes up 80 per cent of DART’s business and currently the workers are about 95 per cent male. Numbers fluctuate between 15 and 20 and last year 75 people worked on a DART crew. Some have been with the organization for several years and come back for seasonal work.

As long as they remain substance-free, Integrity clients have the opportunity to work with DART, which gives them their identity as contributing members of society. They earn life skills, build up a work resume and gain references they would not likely get elsewhere.

“I’m just grateful to be where I am and grateful to give back to the community that I took from for a long time,” said Barber.

“For me to get out (of jail) and go back to work full-time flat out, I wouldn’t have had the time to fix the problem. Work’s not our problem, drugs are. The work side of it is teaching us how to live again. We were outcasts for so long and a lot of guys have never worked. They don’t know how to live; some of them haven’t had a house in 20 years.

“We’re not housebroken half the time, but we get structure and accountability at Integrity and the opportunity to start our life again. This (job) gives us that opportunity and with that we get some dignity back.”

Now that his mind is speaking sober thoughts again, Wydnes has regained his purpose in life. He’s talking about getting back into pipefitting and for the first time in eight years he’s having regular conversations with his mother in Comox. He’s also made contact with his three adult children, but knows fixing those relationships won’t happen overnight.

“My alcohol cost me the kids, I lost everything” he said. “Now, due to this (job with DART) I’m starting to get a little bit back. They’re grown up and I wasn’t there when they needed me the most. I couldn’t be a father and I’ve got to earn their respect back.

“This is a path. Could I ask them to forgive me? No, that’s has to be their choice. But I can certainly make an effort to try to be that man I could have been.”