Nick Reding by Methland: The Death, Life of an American Small Town

weather permitting, Jarvis and his kids would fish for a few unsupervised hours,
     hoping to catch some bullheads and bluegills to fry for supper. Sometimes he would accompany the kids back to their mother’s
     home for that purpose. He and his ex-wife were, he says, still on pretty good terms, given what he’d done to their lives.
    Jarvis speaks in a metaphorical language of addiction, honed over decades of repeating the same scenes in his mind like tapes
     on interminable loops. Tweakers are rats, crank is cheese, cops are cats. At the end of each story, all three end up in the
     same house, the same motel, or the same barn, where invariably something either very bad or very funny, or both, has just
     occurred. The venues for these stories are small towns and middling cities, from Oelwein to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Often
     the stories are compendiums of rural kitsch that, though they unfold over the course of many years, appear to stretch the
     year 1987 into several decades. In them, everyone drives a Corvette or a Trans Am and wears Porsche driving glasses. For Jarvis,
     it’s the memory of the cars, more than that of the days at a time spent having sex with teenage girls, or of the houses he
     bought and sold, or of the thrill of outwitting the cats, that remains the enduring emblem of how once—a long time ago, and
     however briefly—he’d finally arrived.
    Jarvis’s mother has been listening from the kitchen as he speaks. Seen through a pall of cigarette smoke, backlit by the rays
     of sun pouring through the kitchen window, with her greasy black hair worn back off her steep, leather-brown face, she looks
     like a nineteenth-century Apache in a sepia-tone portrait. For the past few hours (if not the past few years), she and a neighbor
     have been playing gin rummy and drinking cans of Hamm’s beer. Looking at her son now, she calls out, “Tell the man the truth,
     Roland.”
    Summing up his years as a batcher, Jarvis says dutifully, and loud enough that his mother can hear, “It was all a big mess.
     I lost everything of any value.” His face, however, tells another story. For, as he remembers, it’s the first time in hours
     that he has smiled.

CHAPTER 3
    THE INLAND EMPIRE
    A s the weeks that I traveled around the Midwest, the Southeast, and California turned to months in the summer and fall of
     2005, I was beginning to see meth in America as a function not just of farming and food industry trends in the 1980s and ’90s
     but also of changes in the narcotics and pharmaceuticals industries in the same period. It would take a few more years of
     watching what happened in Oelwein, and in the United States at large, before I completely understood what I was seeing. That,
     for instance, as economies had dwindled throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest, they had aligned a certain way in Southern
     California, and that the electrical current sweeping between these two increasingly unrelated American places, the coast and
     the middle, would presage what came to be called the “meth epidemic” thirty years later. So, too, would it take a while to
     see that the changes that linked Long Beach and Los Angeles with Oelwein were in fact changes tied to the emergence of the
     global economy. And that meth, if it is a metaphor for anything, is a metaphor for the cataclysmic fault lines formed by globalization.
    Back in 2005, these things were just coming into focus as I went to Ottumwa, a town in southeast Iowa. It was in Ottumwa that
     the Midwest’s principal meth wiring had been installed, and to which the drug’s early advancement into Oelwein could be traced.
     If Oelwein was shaping up to be the face of meth in modern America, and an indicator of life in modern, rural America in general,
     then in Ottumwa there was a picture of Oelwein’s skeletal forebears. And eventually a picture of Oelwein’s future, though
     that part of the story was yet to evolve.
    Like Oelwein, Ottumwa had for most of its