In the spring of 2014, the black stink of smoke floated across Lewiston.

For the second year in a row, an arson spree had leveled buildings across the downtown. The wave of arson in 2013 destroyed 10 buildings and left more than 200 people displaced. In April of 2014, it seemed like the same thing was happening all over again and the city was on edge.

No. Not quite on edge. They were on edge in 2013, but by the spring of 2014 that fear and unease had morphed into something else.

When I went out to talk to people downtown in 2014, I remember a stark difference in the attitudes of those who had been so frightened a year before. Fear had turned to anger. Frustration. Rage.

I see the same thing happening now in Lewiston, only in reaction to a wave of shootings rather than flames. Folks are still nervous about random gunfire spraying rounds in all directions, of course they are.

But when I go out to mingle with the populace these days, I’m not getting whiffs of fear as much as I am whiffs of disgust and resignation.

It’s the resignation that really sings.

I don’t mean to be snide, but Lewiston’s motto right now could be: “I don’t want to live here anymore.”

It’s a line I’ve heard over and over in the past few weeks as gunfire and other violence continues, including in parts of the city where you wouldn’t expect it.

Lewiston mayhem is not just for the downtown residential area anymore and people know it.

Scott Dunn? He lives in an area close to the Androscoggin River in a quiet neighborhood behind Central Maine Medical Center. He has kids, does Scott Dunn. A family.

And now he has blood stains in his driveway after a 14-year-old shooting victim collapsed there last week after taking a bullet to the leg.

“I don’t even want to live here anymore,” Dunn told me.

And he means it. It’s not just because this one shooting occurred so close to home, he said. It’s because Lewiston seems to be getting more and more violent and that bedlam is spreading out to parts of the city away from the combat zone.

Dunn wants no part of it. If things don’t improve soon, he’ll consider moving his family out of Lewiston altogether.

Another man who lives near the same shooting scene actually found a handgun in the grass while walking his dog. That pistol, with its extended magazine, serves as a perfect avatar, he figures, of the current situation in Lewiston.

But even before that 14-year-old was shot in his neighborhood, Travis Johnson had been thinking about getting out of Lewiston.

It’s the violence, mostly. Add to that a potentially sharp hike in property taxes, he said, and what is the point of staying in this city at all?

Kristen Globensky, the mother of four, told me the same thing with the same passion just a week before.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said, just a day or two after gunfire right outside her window had caused her family to take cover.

A woman on Nichols Street echoed that sentiment after a shooting in her neck of the woods a couple weeks ago.

I’ve heard it from younger folk who came here believing that Lewiston would be a fine place to raise a family. I’ve heard it from old-timers who have lived here their whole lives.

“I sold my 62 rental units two years ago,” Jay Allen told me. “I could see where Lewiston was headed. It’s sad but sometimes you have to make hard decisions. I don’t agree with the leadership of Lewiston or the state of Maine. I have one vote and that clearly isn’t enough to make any meaningful change. I’m not going down with the ship.”

One John Violette tells me that he and his wife, both in their 70s, moved away seven months ago. Both were born here and had previously expected to spend the rest of their lives in Lewiston.

Asked why he made the move out of the city in spite of that, Violette said its the violence that drove him away. But it’s also the political climate of the city, he said, that keeps us stuck in the same old rut.

Another woman, in her 50s, said she had always accepted that Lewiston is gritty and sometimes wild because at the same time, it was cheap to live here. But now that taxes are going up and rental prices are through the roof, she doesn’t see the point in staying.

One younger woman told me that she moved away in 2016 when she realized she couldn’t let her kids walk to the library anymore. In her eyes, the move was well-timed.

“It wasn’t safe then,” she said, “and it seems to be getting worse.”

Rita Morin, who does social work in Lewiston, says she hears from colleagues who are just lately getting wary of working on the front lines in this city.

“I’m hearing growing concern about personal safety and whether they can continue this work,” she said. “The recent uptick in violence is especially troubling because it’s happening in a highly concentrated area, not a large metropolitan setting, and often in broad daylight during the very hours when social service teams are out supporting the community.”

I hear these stories all day, every day lately and the sincerity about them is like nothing I’ve ever heard in three decades on the job.

Many blame leftist politics in the city. Some insist that Lewiston’s problems began after massive waves of immigrants began arriving in Lewiston. They will argue these points passionately even as they’re labeled “racist” or worse in inflamed online forums.

A few who monitor real estate listings in Lewiston noted that the number of houses for sale jumped from 76 to 99 just over the course of one recent week. A combination of higher property valuations and fears about the state of affairs in the city, these folks reckon, are prompting more people to look into selling.

And then there are those who just don’t care what caused the problems. They just know that things have become unbearable in Lewiston and now they’re looking to get out.

They might be scared by the recent wave of violence, some of them, but mostly they’re fed up. They don’t see things changing for the better and in fact, the situation seems to be getting worse by the day.

People can only remain under conditions of ongoing fear for so long. At some point the ol’ hypothalamus is going to demand that one either fight or take flight.

And yet in spite of that, there is still a core of people who scoff at the idea of a mass exodus from Lewiston.

You should have seen it in the ’80s, they say. Now THAT was a wild time.

Some say the same thing about the ’90s. People have endured violence in Lewiston before, seems to be the general philosophy, and they will endure again.

Others are more phlegmatic still about the idea of people running from Lewiston.

“I’m waiting for all the complainers to leave,” said Megan Parks, who works with the homeless and those with substance abuse issues, “so those of us working hard to improve our city can actually make progress.”

But that’s just the problem for a lot of people. They don’t see progress at all. Not a hint of it. They’ve come to see Lewiston as a Sisyphean hellscape in which those promises of progress never arrive. They see rising taxes and never-ending turmoil with an accompaniment of gunfire and sirens forever playing in the background.

Some of the people I’ve heard from have been trying their hardest for years to bring about change in Lewiston. They’ve gotten nowhere and now they are ready to give up and move on.

For the first time in my 30-plus years here, I sincerely believe people when they say they don’t want to live here any more.

For the first time in those 30 years, I can relate.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994.