Now imagine not being able to use it because you live next to a drug house. Garbage piled everywhere in the yard, from grocery carts to couches. Addicts and homeless living, and dying, in a little red barn just steps away, separated only by a 4-foot-tall, chain-link fence.

George Gallovin has lived the nightmare.

“There were two drug raids when kids were in the pool, and we had to get them out,” Gallovin said.

Gallovin lives behind the Jodi and Chris Buck Sr. home that was boarded up March 31 by the city. The nearby barn and the area surrounding it were piled high with junk, but Gallovin said it was half of what it had been.

“They were burning whole bags full” of garbage in an outside fire pit, he said. They were also digging holes and burying garbage.

“That’s no way to live,” Gallovin said, adding it was hard for him to go into his back yard because he didn’t know what his neighbors would do.

He said he has only lived there about six years but many others nearby had been there 30 or more.

Of one neighbor, he said, “She won’t answer the door because of the crackheads.”

Other neighbors tell stories of people at the Buck house stealing water or electricity, breaking into cars and knocking at their doors at all hours of the night asking for money or to use the phone.

Along with using his pool again, Gallovin said he’s excited to go dirt biking in a gully to the west that he also owns. Addicts used to bed down there, so it wasn’t safe to ride.

Another neighbor, Ellen Brodland, is actually the godmother of the Bucks’ children. She said addicts would keep the neighborhood up all night. Cars would drive there at all hours, and people would argue in the streets.

Brodland says it’s a vicious cycle and a trap addicts can’t escape. She partially blames the judicial system.

She said: They get arrested when they are young, and they are fined in drug court. They can’t pay the fine so a warrant goes out for their arrest. Even if they come clean, they have no money to pay fines, so they go back to jail again.

“They have no hope in life,” she said. “I wish we could legally force them into treatment.”

Brodland said Jodi Buck started using drugs when she was 13, so her son, Chris Buck Jr., “got sucked into this mess. It’s so depressing. That’s all he knows. Drugs put them into this dream so that they can’t think beyond their next high.”

Marysville NITE police officer Michael Young said he wishes all addicts could kick the habit, but it’s probably a problem that will never completely go away.

He agreed about Buck Jr.

“He’s not a bad kid. Drugs turn people into something they’re not,” Young said. “He never had a chance.”

Buck Jr. was taken out of school in the third grade. He was the only family member still in the home because his parents are in jail.

The Bucks also have a 12-year-old daughter, who also was taken out of school in the third grade. But she was taken away by Children’s Protective Services, was living with foster parents and now lives with an uncle.

“That’s one of my successes,” Young said of his job fighting drugs. “We were able to save that daughter from this.”