Nick Reding (3 page)

And yet, he did.

The notion that bad things don’t—or shouldn’t—happen in small towns is not uncommon. What Tim Gilson’s disbelief suggests
is that nowhere is that conceit more prevalent than in the small towns themselves. By 2005, meth was not just challenging
Oelwein’s sense of itself; it had destroyed it. Gilson had much from which to draw for his incredulity. That same year, an
analysis by Slate.com showed that U.S. newspapers had used the title “Meth Capital of the World” to describe no less than
seventy different American towns, cities, states, and counties, from California to Pennsylvania. Several meth-related murders
had become national news, most notable the murder of a nine-year-old girl in Cruthersville, Indiana, who’d inadvertently found
a neighbor’s meth lab and was subsequently beaten to death.

Throughout its history, America has panicked over narcotics perhaps more often and more extravagantly than any nation in the
world. Measured by its habitual recurrence, drug addiction is our defining morality play. The first act dates to the late
1700s, when alcohol consumption was blamed for everything from sloth to moral incertitude in the new and largely rural nation.
Ever since then, most drugs and drug epidemics have been associated with urban life, whether expressed by the Prohibition
raids of Chicago and New York speakeasies, LSD in San Francisco in the 1960s, or Wall Street’s and South Beach’s cocaine excesses
of the 1980s. What set meth apart was not only the idea that one could make it in the bathtub, but also that the people doing
so were poor or working-class rural whites. In that way, the meth epidemic appeared to have neither analog nor precedent in
any time since the Revolution.

In truth, all drug epidemics are only in part about the drugs. Meth is indeed uniquely suited to Middle America, though this
is only tangentially related to the idea that it can be made in the sink. The rise of the meth epidemic was built largely
on economic policies, political decisions, and the recent development of American cultural history. Meth’s basic components
lie equally in the action of government lobbyists, long-term trends in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, and
the effects of globalization and free trade. Along the way, meth charts the fears that people have and the vulnerabilities
they feel, both as individuals and as communities. The truly singular aspect of meth’s attractiveness is that since its first
wide-scale abuse—among soldiers during World War II—meth has been associated with hard work. For seventy years, the drug more
commonly referred to as crank has been the choice of the American working class. It’s in this way more than any other that
the story of meth is the story of Oelwein, Iowa, along with that of Roland Jarvis and Tim Gilson and Jeremy Logan. It is also
the story of the remarkable, even heroic lengths to which people and communities will go in order to fix themselves.

Some of the deeper meanings of this drug’s hold on America had been evident back in 2004, in Greenville, Illinois. Since the
farm crisis of the 1980s, many of the farmers there had long since foreclosed on their land. People left in large numbers.
According to Sean and James, in nearby Hagarstown, Illinois, there is but one resident who remains. By 2004, many of the employment
opportunities in Greenville and the surrounding area were half-time, with no benefits. Out by Interstate 70, just a couple
hundred yards from Ethan’s Place, there were no fewer than seven major chain motels, none of which contributed more than a
few minimum wage jobs to the town’s economy. Greenville, once a proud, vigorous farm town, now depended in part on reluctant
passersby moving between St. Louis and Indianapolis in order to survive.

Soon enough on the night that Sean and James played pool with each other, they were talking about job opportunities. There
were construction gigs closer to St. Louis, in Belleville, Illinois, or even farther still, forty miles beyond the Missouri
line, in St. Charles, sixty miles from Greenville, one way. There was a night-watch job across the street from Ethan’s at
the Super 8, a position held at the time by a forty-year-old divorced mother of two who was heading to Chicago to try her
luck. And there was some work at Wal-Mart. James, who’d entered the Army a grunt and left it six years later a proud staff
sergeant, was not enthused by these options.

Sean just laughed. He knew what he was going to do: make meth. The money was good, the drugs were good, and it garnered him
access to all kinds of women who, once they smoked a foil or two, would do anything for more. Sean clearly didn’t give a shit
about the consequences. The way he saw it, life in Greenville was a prison anyway. It was better to live well for a time and
go back to jail than to pretend to make ends meet on two hundred dollars a week and no health insurance that Sean said a job
at Wal-Mart would get him.

That night, it was unclear whether James was buying it. But it was impossible not to wonder at what point he would start seeing
things through Sean’s eyes. After all, they’d immediately been able to overlook their immense surface differences: black skin,
white skin; shaved head, military crew. On a deeper level, there existed a stronger, and ultimately more enduring, foundation:
they were united by history. Life in Greenville had, in the course of their lives, changed fundamentally. And yet here they
were together, finally home. If James planned to stay, how long could it be before crank, and Sean, seemed like his best option?

That’s not a question I will ever be able to answer directly, for in all the times I’ve been back to Greenville, Illinois,
I’ve never seen James or Sean again. The nights I spent talking to them in 2004, though, drove me in my attempt to understand
meth in small-town America. Along the way, I began to understand how greatly life in those towns has changed in the past thirty
years. Oelwein is a simulacrum for Greenville, and by extrapolation, for the great expanse of the rural United States. Beginning
in Oelwein, one can follow meth’s currents backward to the thousands of disparate sources from which it flows. From May 2005
until June 2008, I went back many times to Oelwein; I went to California, Idaho, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, and Missouri,
to big cities and small towns alike, in an attempt to put the events in that small Iowa town into some kind of large-scale
perspective. Eventually, the story I’d once viewed through the lens of homespun crime became one that stretched from the Czech
Republic to China to Washington, D.C., and involved not just addicts and prosecutors and public defenders, but also congresspeople
and governors and U.N. officials; neuropharmacologists and macroeconomists; rural sociologists and microbiologists; and drug
lobbyists and pharmaceutical company executives.

What it took three and a half years to fully understand (nine if I count back to my trip to Gooding, Idaho) is that the real
story is as much about the death of a way of life as it is about the birth of a drug. If ever there was a chance to see the
place of the small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it. Put another way, as Americans
have moved increasingly to the coasts, they have carried with them a nostalgic image of the heartland whence their forebears
came, as worn and blurry as an old photograph. But as the images have remained static, the places themselves have changed
enormously in the context of international economics, like an acreage of timber seen in two photos, one in spring, the other
in winter. Really, what James and Sean were confronted with that November night back in 2004 was nothing short of finding
a place for themselves in a newly unfamiliar world.

PART 1

2005

CHAPTER 1

KANT’S LAMENT

N
athan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, is twenty-eight years old. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy
from Luther College in Iowa, a law degree from Valparaiso State University in Indiana, and a master’s in environmental law
from the Vermont Law School. The latter two degrees he completed in an astonishing three years by attending Valpo, as it’s
called, in the fall, winter, and spring and then transferring credits to Vermont in order to get his master’s after only three
summers’ worth of study. Meantime, Nathan, a white farm kid from rural Iowa, financed all of it by working as a bouncer in
an all-black strip club in the industrial wasteland of Gary, Indiana.

Nathan is six feet nine inches tall and weighs 280 pounds. He moves with surprising grace around his tiny, four-room house
in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. What evidence there is of the great burdens of Nathan’s life is limited to a habit of slowly raising
his hand to his face and then rubbing the tip of his nose in one quick motion, as if to remove a stain that only he can perceive.
Perhaps knowing that his size will lend extra weight to what ever he says, Nathan fashions his sentences from the leanest
fibers. It’s a habit that underscores the gravity of the contradictions by which his life is defined.

Despite his size, Nathan—a card-carrying Republican—drives the same white diesel Volkswagen Jetta that he has been driving
for 177,000 miles, or the rough equivalent of seven circumnavigations of the globe, most of it logged within the confines
of a single Iowa county. To court up in the town of West Union, he wears a gray suit, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a ring
on each thumb. His hair is dark blond and is short on the sides and longer on top, where Nathan, aided by the stiffening properties
of hair gel, arranges it in a way that looks like neat, stubbled rows of winter wheat. The name Lein is Norwegian; beneath
a wide forehead, Nathan’s eyes are sled-dog blue. On one window of Nathan’s Jetta is a sticker for the hallucinogenic-hippie
band Widespread Panic, whom Nathan goes to see whenever they are within a reasonable driving distance, which for him means
about 400 miles. Nathan has been to nineteen shows to date. In the trunk of the Jetta, there is a hunting vest in Mossy Oak
camouflage, the pockets of which are stuffed with shotgun shells and wooden turkey calls; a cardboard crate of police reports
and depositions; and a twelve-gauge semiautomatic Winchester X2 shotgun.

It’s mid-May 2005, and in the wake of a front that blew out of Regina, Saskatchewan, and overshot the Dakotas, the sky above
Oelwein is gray and roiling. As there is more rain in the forecast, Nathan’s father will be planting corn till long past dark
on the farm where Nathan grew up, twelve miles outside town, hoping to get the year’s crop seeded before the soil is too wet
to plow. Meantime, there are plenty of chores to be done, most of which revolve around the fifty or so Lincoln long-wool and
Corriedale sheep that Nathan’s parents raise: sweeping the pens, freshening the water, feeding hay to the rams and ewes. Changed
from his suit, in ruined duck-cloth bibs and size 15 work boots, Nathan pilots the white Jetta north along Highway 150. He
passes Grace Methodist, somber and maroon-red in the long, sunless dusk, then turns west on Route 3. The late-day smells of
cut grass and wet pavement are underlain with the sultry, textured scent of pig shit. Twenty miles distant, the western sky
is bruised black and green in a way that has the Amish urging their Clydesdales onward at a trot along the shoulder of the
road, the plastic rain-doors already zipped tight on their buggies.

The house where Nathan was born and raised is a white-clapboard three-bedroom that sits on a slight rise in the prairie at
the end of a gravel road. It was built in 1910. The yaw in the place is visible, two or three degrees measured foundation
to rooftop, northwest to southeast, as meaningful a testament as there is to the prevailing ferocity of the prairie wind.
The views are stunning, as much for the austere grandeur as for the suffocating sense of desolation. From the driveway, mile
after mile of newly planted corn and soybeans spread in every direction, interrupted now and again in the shifting line of
sight by an evergreen shelterbelt or an anemic finger of timber. The maples and oaks, like the farmhouses, have taken their
chances against the weather for as long as anyone can remember. Out here, it seems, stubbornness is just a part of the landscape.

As is frugality. Inside the farm house, Nathan’s mother and father stand in the kitchen, next to the sink. The rest of the
room consists of a tiny four-burner stove, one bank of white wood cabinets, an Amish table with two chairs, and a small refrigerator.
Stacked in piles throughout the room are dozens, if not hundreds, of agricultural bulletins, almanacs, magazines, and foldouts
that the Leins pore over in an attempt to anticipate sheep and crop prices—
Wallace’s
Farmer
,
Today’s Farmer
,
Sheep
magazine, the
Corn Producer
, the Iowa Farm Bureau
Spokesman
. There is no Internet and no computer, no fax machine or BlackBerry. The only nod to modern technology aside from the wall-mounted
phone is a small TV on the counter, on which Nathan’s father watches (and talks back to) the two hosts of
Market to Market
every Friday night on PBS at eight P.M.

Every decision made by the Leins—how much seed to buy, and from whom; when to harvest; how long to hold the crop—is arrived
at from a process of superimposition of dated economic information onto subtle, veinous changes of seasonal matter. What to
do tomorrow depends on this week’s weather relative to last year’s yield, or on how today’s futures markets at the Chicago
Board of Trade relate to anticipated trends in Australian or Canadian wool production. In this way, the Leins are less like
farmers and more like mystics clinging to belief in a hazy vision born not just of weather and organic chemistry, but of a
hundred other unseen and uncontrollable forces. To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand
the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year’s worth of corn or
beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.

Nathan’s father, James, is sixty-nine years old. His hair is short and black, and his glasses are broken. Standing somewhat
off-kilter from a bad back, in a red and blue work shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he looks fifty. His mother, Donna, who is seventy,
has shoulder-length brown hair that is going gray. Dressed in jeans and a light gray wool sweater, she, too, looks younger
than her years, though the arthritis from which she suffers is readily apparent in her hands, which are bent and knobbed at
the joints like a bird of prey’s claws. And though neither parent is short (James stands six feet, Donna five seven), it’s
unclear whence Nathan got his tremendous size. Ducking as he entered the kitchen, with its low ceiling and peeling linoleum
floor, Nathan immediately fills the room, even as his parents seemed to shrink. The weight of his presence makes it odder
still that the Leins barely take notice of their son, who now stands next to the refrigerator. It’s as though Nathan has just
briefly come in from the barn for a glass of water; no one says a word. Then, with a nod, Nathan goes outside to see about
the sheep. With a storm coming and the tractor awaiting his father’s return, there’s no time for talk.

Farming is still, as it has always been, the lifeblood of Fayette County—and by extension, of Iowa. Nathan goes to his parents’
place at least three times a week. During spring planting, from late April till mid-May, he’s there every night, as he is
during the hay cutting and baling season of late summer, the corn harvest in the fall, and when the ewes lamb-out in the winter.
Thanks in part to this, the Lein operation is a successful one. The fecundity of the land helps, too. With soil that boasts
a corn sustainability rating (CSR) of 75 to 85 out of 100, the land in Fayette County has remained exceptionally rich for
the 150 years that people have farmed it. Annual rainfall here averages three feet, and farmers here, unlike those in many
places in the United States, needn’t bother with irrigation, thereby saving themselves untold thousands of dollars each growing
season. Though they have a 50 percent rotation of soybeans, the Leins make their bottom line most years off row crops alone,
raising hay just to keep the sheep fed. Selling wool, lambs, and the occasional ram or ewe is predominantly a labor of love—or
what Nathan’s ascetic parents consider an indulgence, and one for which the Leins have won prizes as far away as Maryland
and Colorado. All together, it’s a formula that James and Donna Lein have applied with good success for almost forty years.

Unfortunately for many farming families around Oelwein, the Lein place is an anomaly. Since the early 1980s, three out of
four farms in Fayette County have gone out of business, in a trend reflected everywhere in the rural United States. In their
stead, many family farms have become add-ons to the ever-increasing holdings of private corporations like Cargill and Archer
Daniels Midland (ADM). That, or free-falling land and corn prices have forced smaller places like the Leins’ into bankruptcy,
making them easy targets for the few families who control the bulk of land in rural counties like Fayette. With their land
sold and no jobs, large numbers of people have left the farm belt in the last two and half decades. Oelwein is typical: between
1960 and 1990, the population fell from eight thousand to just over six thousand, a decline of nearly 25 percent. Along with
this came a decline in education and employment. Of those who remain in rural America, only one in ten men over the age of
twenty-five have at least two years of college education. Unemployment averages one and a half times that of the urban United
States. That is to say that the lifeblood of Fayette County, as in most farming areas, now sustains far fewer lives than it
did just twenty years ago.

Out of respect for his parents, Nathan does not use the word
poverty
when describing the circumstances of their lives, though any qualitative analysis would hardly fail to label his parents as
poor. Only one side of the Leins’ century-old farm house has siding, despite the ruthless weather systems that pound northern
Iowa. As a child, Nathan wore clothes from Goodwill. Christmas was for praying, not for gift giving, less for reasons of religious
stricture, Nathan says, than for the financial constraints endemic to a seat-of-your-pants farming existence. Donna, whose
parents were new German immigrants from over by Waverly, Iowa, has lived here since the 1960s. In 1968, Donna’s first husband
was killed in a car accident. She married James, the first-generation auto-mechanic son of a Norwegian day laborer, in 1972,
after having kept the farm going by herself for four years. Back then, with crop prices good, the average size of a farm in
Fayette County was still 250 acres—that’s all it took to make a living. Since then, the 480-acre Lein place has become an
artifact of a different time. Many neighbors farm ten times that much land, and planting is done with quarter-million-dollar
machinery, guided by GPS. Meanwhile, says Nathan, the equipment his father uses has been largely relegated to museums.

Whether Nathan will take over his parents’ place one day is one of the defining questions of his life, and one that, for now,
remains sorely unanswered. No one understands the ins and outs of the Lein place like Nathan. Nor is there anyone for whom
that ground has more meaning. Land is something you crave or you don’t; if you’re born with a desire for it, you intrinsically
understand why people like the Leins break their backs every day, at the ages of sixty-nine and seventy, to keep it. Doing
so is less a question of vocation or aesthetics than a question of blood.

The farm is why Nathan came back to Oelwein after law school. During the three years he was away, Nathan grew his hair and
used his college training in philosophy to try to undo the strict bounds of his religious training. Once loosed into the wider
world, Nathan—in an effort to bury the discomfort of his narrow and isolated upbringing—did, by his estimate, every drug known
to man, including methamphetamine. Even as he readied himself for a life built around the binding element of law, he worked
his way step by step through the foundations of his life, attempting to destroy everything as he went. What he couldn’t destroy
was the need to return home or the connection to his family’s land. In coming back, Nathan figures, he missed the last best
opportunity he would ever have to get out of Iowa.

Nathan saw his home in a wholly new light on his return in 2001. He’d left as a sheltered, ultraconservative Lutheran and
come back with a well-honed passion for environmental activism. Locally, that passion was aimed primarily at what he deemed
irresponsible water-use laws that both unfairly favored farmers and ranchers and polluted rivers like his beloved Volga, a
tributary of the Upper Iowa. Fiscally, Nathan remained conservative, though his social agenda was that of a classic grassroots
liberal. In lieu of building more jails—one of Iowa’s leading economies in the last ten years—Nathan advocated investment
in state-mandated rehabilitation. He stopped attending church himself, but joined church-sponsored social change organizations.
He read Aquinas and Kant, bought a VW bus, and organized trash cleanups on public lands. For a while he lived in Waterloo,
an hour south of Oelwein, with the girlfriend he’d met in law school, and of whom his parents disapproved for, according to
Nathan, her ample breasts, small stature, and short hair; her Jewish faith; and her roots in a city (Indianapolis), among
other things on a long list. There was a falling-out, and Nathan, convinced he’d go the way of his estranged brother, who
was living in San Francisco, gave up hope of ever taking over the farm. He consoled himself with the fact that his passion
for environmental change was deeply out of whack with the prevailing sentiments of the old-guard farmers up around Oelwein,
upon whose credos he’d only a few years before staked his claim to the family business. Still, he was lost and confused by
his life, drawn to a place—home—in which he felt intellectually and spiritually confined. Nothing felt familiar. Moved to
do something, Nathan did nothing.