• Tragedy looms when OUI is a way of life
• Former radio host's new identity: The drunken driver
• One year in Maine: Stories behind statistics
• 1996 OUI arrests in Maine
• Alcohol-related deaths in 1994

Christopher Smith sits by the grave of his father, Michael Smith, at the North Waterford cemetery. The family couldn't afford a gravestone for the 39-year-old father of three, who was killed by a drunken driver in 1994. Though drunken-driving tragedies are often measured in emotional terms, the loss can also drag a family like the Smiths to poverty's edge. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

NORTH WATERFORD - The white wooden cross stands on the sloping cemetery hill - a stark symbol of loss to three children and their mother.

Beneath the homemade cross in this tiny cemetery lies the body of Michael Smith. He was killed three years ago on a warm Labor Day weekend by a man who drank too many beers and drove too fast down a country road in Harrison.

When John Goodwin barreled head-on into Smith's pickup truck, he ended the life of a 39-year-old father and robbed the Smith family of their sole provider.

He killed a man who found pleasure and peace in the woods with his family. A father who often took his children camping, fishing and panning for gold in Maine's up-country rivers.

Though drunken-driving tragedies are often measured in emotional terms - children who will grow up without a dad or mom - the loss can also drag a family like the Smiths to poverty's edge.

Michael Smith's death stripped his family of the $32,000 and health benefits he earned in his welding and contracting job. It forced Lori Smith, who has no skills and no high school diploma, to work part-time, minimum-wage jobs to feed and clothe her children.

With no significant steady income, Smith's family lost luxuries and necessities they once took for granted. There is scarcely enough money for summer vacations, new school clothes, trips to the doctor, the dentist and perhaps the chance to go to college.

And each time Smith's family visits the cemetery, they're reminded by the homemade wooden cross of how poor they've become.

''We don't have money for anything anymore,'' Lori Smith says. ''It changes your attitude. It makes you ugly. Mean.''

Michael Smith was one of 65 people in Maine and 16,589 nationally who died in alcohol-related crashes in 1994.

National experts estimate one life lost in a fatal car crash costs an average of $830,000 in lost productivity and wages.

''Drunk driving has a far-reaching effect on families when the breadwinner is killed,'' said Katherine Prescott, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. ''Nothing is ever the same. These families have to build a different life and some people never recoup from it.''

Lori Smith can't calculate how much her husband would have earned had he lived. She only knows that before he died in a crumpled pickup truck, there were a lot fewer worries about how she and her kids were going to get by.

''I don't think about the future anymore,'' Smith says. ''We just think about what's going to happen tomorrow.''

Michael Smith was working on his wife's van Sept. 2, a warm Friday night that marked the start of the Labor Day weekend. Smith often did mechanical work on the cars of family or friends in the evening after he finished his day job with a South Paris contracting company.

While Smith tinkered with his wife's car inside his Waterford garage, John Goodwin left the second of two bars where he'd been drinking beer that afternoon and early evening.

After his wife had died two years earlier, Goodwin, 57, had become a regular in the taverns in Naples and Harrison.

Just before 8 p.m., as the sky darkened, Goodwin barreled north on Route 35 heading from Harrison to Waterford. About the same time, Michael Smith decided to take a break and get something cold to drink.

A year or so earlier, Smith might have gone to grab a beer himself. But he had come to realize he had a drinking problem and had heeded his wife's pleas to give up alcohol.

On this night, he slid behind the wheel of his GMC truck and traveled south on Route 35 toward Harrison. A few miles down the road, Smith glimpsed a maroon van swerving into his lane. He tried to avoid the collision. Goodwin's van careened head-on into his truck at 62 mph.

The impact squeezed the front end of Smith's truck like an accordion and thrust the back end eight feet up a roadside tree. The force crushed Smith's head and chest. He died within minutes.

Except for facial cuts, Goodwin was uninjured.

Lori Smith's phone rang about 8:30 p.m. It was her brother, who had a friend on the Harrison rescue team.

''Where's Michael?'' he asked Smith.

''Working at the garage,'' Smith said.

''No, he's not,'' her brother said. ''He's dead.''

When Smith saw her husband's truck, she barely recognized it. She would later learn Goodwin's blood-alcohol level was 0.16 percent, twice the legal limit in Maine.

On a chilly Friday, the start of Memorial Day weekend nearly three years after her husband's death, Lori Smith sits at a kitchen table in her cramped North Waterford home.

''We'd just celebrated our 14th anniversary the day before,'' Smith says, remembering her husband's accident. ''We didn't have a perfect marriage. We fought and Michael sometimes drank too much. But he had given that up and things were just starting to get better.''

Alisa Smith, 14, looks through memorabilia in her North Waterford bedroom. Her mother, Lori, stands in the doorway. Alisa is reluctant to discuss the death of her father, killed by a drunken driver in 1994. But added pressures at home took a toll last year, leading to a suspension for sneaking vodka into school. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Smith sighs and looks around her home.

A few weathered chairs, a couch and a kitchen table fill a small room that serves as a living-room and eating area.

Her children - Christopher, 12, Alisa, 14, and Rhiannon, 10 - share two crowded bedrooms on either side of the bathroom. Smith sleeps in the basement.

The paneled walls of the living room are scuffed. The salmon-colored carpet is thin. The linoleum is torn. A green lamp, minus its shade, sits on the kitchen table. The wooden kitchen cabinets, fairly new, contrast with the home's worn interior. They remind Smith of her loss.

''Michael built those,'' she says. ''Like everything else, Michael did the repairs and home improvements around here.''

Thirty-five years old, Smith is a self-described tough woman. She has no use for tears and she doesn't want sympathy. But she is quick to vent anger at the man who stole her children's father.

She picks her pack of generic cigarettes from the kitchen table and lights one before she begins to speak. Her voice takes on a bitter edge when she talks of Goodwin, who is serving a seven-year sentence for aggravated drunken driving.

''I hate him for what he did to us,'' she says. ''He should rot in prison. We're left with nothing because of an idiot that decided to drive drunk and crash into my husband head-on.''

Hoping to recover some financial relief, Smith sued Goodwin and the two bars that served him beer the night he drove drunk.

Because neither bar had insurance, Smith received $1,000 apiece from them.

Yellow ribbons mark the tree where Michael Smith died along Route 35 in Harrison after being hit head-on by a drunken driver. Smith died within minutes of the crash; the drunken driver, John Goodwin, was uninjured except for facial cuts. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Goodwin's insurance company paid $100,000. One-third went to Smith's attorney and the rest is to be split among her, her three children and Angeline, a daughter from Smith's first marriage.

Smith estimates she will get about $36,000, a little more than her husband would have earned in a year. Though it won't last long, the settlement money will allow her to pay the $3,000 she owes on a new well and build a small addition to her house.

And after nearly three years, she can order a gravestone for her husband.

''They're not cheap,'' Smith says of the headstone. ''It's costing me $1,800, and there was no way I could afford to pay for one until now.''

The cost of the gravestone is more than the amount Smith and her children receive each month in Social Security survivors' benefits. The monthly $1,500 they get barely pays for necessities, like food, electricity, the phone and the family van payment.

To stretch the money, Smith buys food in bulk and generic brands. Clothes are bought at secondhand shops or with money from the children's grandparents. Trips to the mall, movies, restaurants or the roller-skating rink are rare.

''Forget trying to pay for a dinner in a restaurant,'' Smith says.

Her children know they can't play after-school sports if they need to buy costly uniforms or equipment.

''It took me several months just to save $50 so Chris could join the archery team,'' she says.

Since her husband's health benefits disappeared, Smith's kids haven't been to the doctor or dentist in three years. Smith herself needs a hysterectomy but she can't afford to have one. She's still paying a $5,000 bill owed after she needed emergency surgery a few years ago to stop her uterus from bleeding.

''We've got a lien on the house now because of that bill,'' she says. ''I send the hospital $50 a month. It's going to take me forever to pay them.''

Mostly, she worries about one of her kids getting sick.

Rhiannon, the youngest, suffers from bronchitis. When she has trouble breathing, her mother rigs a makeshift plastic tent over her bed.

''I put a humidifier in there so she can breathe,'' Smith says. ''I don't know what I'd do if she had to go in the hospital.''

Smith has worked at jobs as a part-time store clerk or cashier to help supplement the survivor's check she receives each month. But with no high school diploma, her pay is only slightly more than $5 an hour.

''Minimum wage is the best I'm going to do,'' Smith says. ''If an employer can choose between me and a college-educated kid or even a high school graduate, who do you think they'll hire?''

Throughout her 14-year marriage, Smith never had to consider working.

''Michael wanted me home with the kids,'' Smith says. ''He worked hard, 12-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.''

Michael Smith, killed by drunken driver John Goodwin on Sept. 2, 1994, was a father of three who often took his children camping, fishing and panning for gold. ''We'd just celebrated our 14th anniversary the day before,'' his wife says.

A few months before the crash, Michael Smith had received a promotion in his job at Bancroft Contracting in South Paris.

His boss, Al Bancroft, considered Smith one of his most valued and loyal workers. Smith had a variety of skills and never groused about working long days or traveling around New England to pour concrete, repair machinery in paper mills or power companies.

''He was a real good part of this company,'' Bancroft said. ''He had aspirations and was a real self-starter, the type of employee we hate to lose.''

One by one, school buses leave Smith's children off in front of their home on a Friday afternoon.

Alisa is the oldest and first home. A lanky blonde teen-ager, she drops herself in the living room rocking chair. She is reluctant to talk about the death of her father.

''I don't really think about it,'' she says, staring at her sneakers.

''What about all the chores you've got to do now?'' Smith asks her daughter.

''Yeah, I can't do anything,'' Alisa replies. ''When she works, I have to come home from school all the time to baby-sit.''

''She does the laundry, cooking,'' Smith says of her daughter. ''She's had to become like a mother.''

The added pressures took a toll on Alisa emotionally last year. She sought comfort among a new group of friends, who encouraged her to sneak vodka into school.

She got suspended five days, grounded for a month at home and lost her phone privileges.

''She hasn't done anything like that again,'' Smith says of her daughter.

''I wasn't getting a whole lot of attention,'' Alisa says sheepishly, staring at her mother. ''I didn't really get to talk to anybody about my father's death.''

A school bus rumbles to a stop outside, dropping Rhiannon and Christopher off. They make their way inside.

Christopher Smith reaches for his prized possession: one of his father's racing trophies. Christopher sometimes lies on his father's grave and talks to him. ''I tell him, 'I miss you and love you a lot. I wish you were still here to take care of us.' '' Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail, Rhiannon sits next to her older sister. Her blacktop sneakers dangle from the chair. Christopher, a brown-haired boy with brown eyes the color of his father's, sits on the couch.

Christopher likes to write and has written several stories about drunken drivers. Most of the people in the stories die.

''It's scary,'' says his older sister. ''He's always writing about death.''

On this afternoon, he eagerly recounts what he and his dad used to do together.

''I miss a lot of stuff,'' he says. ''He'd take us camping and fishing. He was good. We'd always catch something. He'd take me out to the swamp, too, to look for frogs.''

''I miss the camping,'' Rhiannon adds.

''We used to go to Old Orchard Beach for a week,'' Lori Smith says. ''That's history now too.''

Rhiannon pulls at her ponytail and talks in a timid voice about the man who took her dad away.

''I wonder if John Goodwin was mad at us and that's why he killed my father to hurt us?'' she asks.

''No, he was just an irresponsible drunk,'' her mother says, momentarily lost in her anger. ''I still can't go down that road without getting the willies,'' she adds, referring to the stretch of Route 35 where her husband died.

Most often Smith avoids the roadway that is about 15 minutes from her home. But each year on Sept. 2, the anniversary of her husband's death, she makes a pilgrimage to the scarred tree where he died.

''I tie a yellow ribbon around the tree,'' she says. ''There are two there now. I'll put another one up soon.''

The room is quiet as the children listen to their mother and remember the night their father last kissed them goodbye.

The phone rings, interrupting their memories. Christopher jumps off the couch to talk to a friend.

''I'll meet you at the cemetery,'' he says.

His bike broken, Christopher begs his little sister to borrow her bicycle. Rhiannon agrees and Christopher runs out the door, hops on his sister's pink bike and heads up the road. His cheeks flush as he presses the pedals, racing toward the North Waterford cemetery, less than a mile down the road.

Reaching the wrought-iron gate, Christopher jumps off the bicycle and walks to the white cross that rises among the gravestones.

He proudly recites the words on a small plaque that is pressed into the ground at the foot of the cross: ''Michael Richard Smith. 1955 to 1994.''

A toy plastic motorcycle rests on the wooden cross. Christopher picks it up. ''My dad used to have a motorcycle,'' the boy says, gently placing the toy back on the wooden marker.

Sometimes, as he does now, Christopher lies down on top of his father's grave, his head resting by the cross.

''I talk to my dad. I tell him, 'I miss you and love you a lot. I wish you were still here to take care of us.' ''