Addiction is a scary word.

When I read it I think of many things, all of them terrible.

People plunging needles into their forearms.

People stealing from family and friends to feel their insatiable physical and mental need.

People dying in squalid rooms that smell of rotting food and soiled clothes and despair.

But there are other chapters in this story.

Chapters that represent the opposite of those awful scenes my mind conjures.

I witnessed, as it were, a couple of those chapters on late June evening in Baker City.

I was invited into two homes.

Into two families.

The houses, one on the west side of town, the other on the east, are Oxford Houses.

New Directions Northwest, the Baker City agency that treats people for drug and alcohol addictions, owns the homes.

They are open to people who have finished treatment and who want to live in a secure place with other people who are also striving to remain sober.

Both of Baker City’s Oxford Houses opened in 2023. One is for men, the other for women.

The residents have to pay their share of rent and utilities and other expenses. They have to work or volunteer. There is, they told me, no tolerance for backsliding.

On that June evening I interviewed residents from both houses for a pair of stories published in early July.

I learned much.

Mostly I listened to these men and women.

I watched their faces, saw their tears and their smiles.

I heard about the crimes they committed.

The loved ones they betrayed.

Honesty, of course, is an integral part of beating an addiction.

The Oxford House residents scarcely needed to say that they weren’t capable of getting better until they admitted to themselves that they were in a bad way.

Several told me they are certain they would be dead if they hadn’t passed that threshold.

The cliché is “rock bottom,” and like many clichés it is apt, if overused.

When I walked down the steps of the women’s home, the latter of my two visits that evening, my overriding impression, even as I pondered how I would go about telling these stories, was sincerity.

The dozen or so men and women I had talked with over the past few hours surprised me in a sense.

I try to avoid starting an interview with preconceptions, of course.

But I expected that the Oxford House residents would have something of the innocent enthusiasm that can distinguish people who have recently passed some dramatic intersection in their lives.

It’s a type of zealotry, and it can be a trifle offputting.

This is a poor analogy, but I’m thinking here of a conversation you might have with someone who has found a new hobby and taken to it with a devotion that seems, to the unitiated, nearly manic.

The men and women living in the Oxford House certainly could have justified such an attitude about their sobriety.

They had, after all, transformed their lives — saved them, even.

They were happy, to be sure, about their newfound circumstances.

But it seemed to me that their gratitude was tempered — that they took nothing for granted.

Indeed, many of the residents emphasized that their challenge continues, that every day they remain sober is an accomplishment but none is the final victory.

About one thing they all agreed — that their new family is integral to their success.

Isolation, the residents told me, is a catalyst to addiction. The brief euphoria of intoxication is the balm to boredom and loneliness.

But living in an Oxford House, they said, is the antidote to that poisonous combination.

Sharing quarters, meals and chores with people whose experience mirrors your own forges a powerful bond — more powerful, in its way, than shared DNA can create.

I know nothing of the science of addiction and its treatment.

But I understand that the lure of substances, both illicit and legal, can be formidable.

That they can become, with awful swiftness, the most important things in a person’s life, and by a wide margin.

No problem so immense can have a single solution.

But after my fascinating early summer evening in two Baker City living rooms, where I listened to tales of tragedy and of triumph, I believe that Oxford Houses offer, for people willing to adopt a new family, a chance for a future that is immensely more promising than their past.