Churches And Meth Labs

Boredom causes me to scour through Spokane neighborhoods when I'm off work. There's two things I've noticed about this city that makes it stand out in my mind. No matter what neighborhood or part of the town I'm in I always see a derelict meth lab and a church on virtually every block. There's few upscale places to live in, but even in the wealthier areas you can still easily find a house that was once a meth lab. They all look the same from the street as you drive past. The former nest of drug cooking nastiness will have all it's windows boarded up, and there will be trash laying all over the yard. Spray painted graffiti will adorn the walls in most cases and many of them have miscellaneous pieces of rotten furniture strewn about. Occasionally you'll also see an overturned appliance like a stove or an old washing machine. These places are an eyesore and it made me wonder why no one cleans these houses up. I wouldn't want to see that crap in my neighborhood every damn day.

Passing time in coffee shops on my weekend mornings I've been able to ask alot of questions from the occassional friendly local person. I have asked some of these talkative folks why no one cleans up the abandoned meth labs and the answer they all give me has stayed consistent. When a meth lab is discovered by the police and shut down, usually no one is responsible for the clean up. The inside of these places are generally destroyed. Outside the meth freaks tend to dump the toxic chemicals that are ingredients or by-products of the meth cooking process. Chemical cleanup of the soil is expensive. No one wants to pay for it so the house gets boarded up and abandoned indefinetly. They are trying to change this though. They're working on a new law that will make landlords directly responsible for the chemical cleanup as well as make them face a variety of criminal charges for allowing a meth lab in the property they own. I think the idea is to force lazy landlords to do a better job of screening out meth lab tenants before they even get a chance to set up their operation. I wish them the best of luck and I hope it makes a difference. There's nothing worse than meth labs and the tweakers who run them.

The other thing I notice here is an overwhelming presence of churches. Just about every corner in every neighborhood seems to have one. All of them were residential homes that some tiny congregation bought and converted over to a fundamentalist brand of Christian church. Competition for the souls of Spokane must be fierce because one hundred percent of these little bible thumping command centers have billboards on the front lawn with inane or downright crazy slogans and messages on them. It's obvious they're trying to capture the eye of passing motorists and entice them to stop in some Sunday morning and check them out. I wish I had brought a camera with me on this trip. I could burn roll after roll of 35mm film taking pictures of nothing but these goofy church billboards. With such a heavy saturation of religion here it makes me wonder if some of the crime problem Spokane seems to suffer from might be related somehow. Like, maybe it's a reaction or a sort of rebellion to being smothered and suffocated by overbearing religious zealots. I suspect there's a connection but I can't put my finger on it. I'll have to think about it some more.