Nick Reding - Methland

I told Nathan of Jarvis’s opinion. He was silent before saying that, every day, he saw the pain that the turnaround caused some of the people in his town. His girlfriend, Jamie, labored as a social worker in order “to clean up the pieces.” In the end, though, people had to understand that, as Nathan put it, “you have to plow some dirt in order to raise a crop.”

By late spring of 2006, Oelwein was entering Phase II of Larry Murphy’s town revitalization plan. Murphy liked to say that most men, when they turn fiftysomething, build a new house, buy a new car, or chase after a new woman. He, on the other hand, preferred to spend his time rebuilding a town. And Phase II involved literally tearing down parts of Oelwein in order to start over.

This would not be easy. Even Oelwein’s demographics were against it. The median age was forty-one, making it one of the oldest communities in Iowa, and one with a poor employment base. There were lots of other things to spend money on in Oelwein, where 20 percent of the children lived in poverty, and 80 percent of the kindergartners were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. The town’s median income, according to a 2005 EPA report, was half the state average. As Murphy saw it, Oelwein had an empty dance card. If it didn’t doll itself up quick and find a partner, he said, the dance was going to be over.

Phase II would begin by improving a seven-block area of downtown. The plan was to pull up the streets and build new sewers, water mains, and gutters to aid with the withering and destructive effects that an average winter had on Oelwein’s century-old streets. In addition, Murphy wanted all new streetlamps. He wanted shrubberies and trees, which he hoped would boost morale around town. He wanted new sidewalks, too; the old ones were buckling and breaking in places. All this, Murphy reckoned, would cost a shade below four million dollars.

Second, Murphy wanted to encourage businesses to relocate to Oelwein by building a new septic system. The old one, installed a hundred years ago and augmented in the 1950s, was already in violation of sanitation codes. It couldn’t even keep up with the use of a shrinking population, not to mention the hoped-for industrial and population growth that something like a call center would engender. What the city council wanted was an overflow septic system of twelve million gallons. It would be both environmentally sound and highly cost-efficient, with sewage beds of common reeds that could naturally compost waste initially treated by the old system. That compost could then be used as fertilizer on farmers’ fields. Building the new system would cost nine million dollars.

For an entire two-year mayoral term, Murphy and the city council labored to come up with the money. As Murphy said to the council one night, either they push full steam ahead or else they slide inextricably backward. Those were the two choices faced by Oelwein in a global economy. Murphy essentially leveraged the next election on how much he could raise, selling people on the theoretical hope that business would eventually come to Oelwein, if only the improvements were made. He applied for Vision Iowa grants, which netted Oelwein $3.4 million. He and the council members, including former mayor Gene Vine, whom Murphy had unseated, lobbied for real estate tax assessments for the sixty-five commercial business owners in Oelwein. Murphy spent three weeks talking to each owner individually, going again and again to their homes and to their stores, asking them to agree to the passage of an ordinance that would essentially increase taxes with no guarantee of increased profits. He begged the townspeople to pass a referendum calling for a higher sales tax, which passed in late 2005, and a school bond referendum worth $2.5 million. Murphy and the five council members secured another $3.4 million in private donations from some of Oelwein’s wealthy old families.

What’s remarkable is that Murphy and the city council got the money they needed for the planned improvements and more—enough to build a new library with Internet access. Raising the money was in some ways the easy part. The hard part would come next, when Oelwein would either be buoyed by an economic resurgence or sink further. Once ground was broken for the street revival project in May 2006, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Maybe in twelve months the shops would fill up, the call center deal would go through, and the long-empty Donaldson plant, with 160,000 square feet of prime industrial space behind the roundhouse, would find a new tenant. Maybe Logan would continue to keep the meth users under control and would prevent a new crop of batchers from moving in. Maybe In dependence wouldn’t use Oelwein as its ghetto. Echoing the Kantian philosophical tradition that pervades that part of the Midwest, and through which Murphy, like Clay Hallberg and Nathan Lein, understands the world, Murphy said that his only wish was to provide the genesis that Oelwein so sorely needed. Oelwein in the spring of 2006 was in the midst, as Kant describes it, of acting to the limits of its knowledge and its environment. From there, only a leap of faith would carry the town forward, no matter what actual advances it made. If Oelwein failed, then a subsequent generation would have to address the same issues. At the very least, said Murphy, Oelwein, just for trying, would regain the very thing that had been missing these many years: its dignity.

Ever since Nathan had moved back to Iowa in 2001, he’d wrestled with what he referred to as the Girl Problem. The Girl Problem was formed when he’d fallen in love with Jenny, the woman from Indianapolis whom he’d met in law school and who moved with him to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked as a judge’s clerk, she as a public defender. There, they lived together while Nathan’s parents smoldered with indignation, for to them, cohabitation before marriage is a sin. Because Nathan’s parents would not be damned by God, they would be damned if they spoke to their son. In a roundabout way, it was the Girl Problem that brought Nathan back to Oelwein, putting him in a position to help his hometown rebuild itself. In another way, the Girl Problem represented a once-intractable dilemma, like meth in Oelwein, that seemed suddenly to be solvable.

Nathan might have been mad as hell about his parents’ treatment of Jenny, but his anger didn’t change the fact that he had been raised to respect their judgment. Add to that the idea that any hope of ever being involved in the central feature of their collected lives—the farm—would vanish if his relationship with his parents disintegrated, and Nathan was caught between two very powerful gravitational forces: anger and honor. He assaulted the problem with all the intellectual tools of his training in philosophy, to no avail; it was like a fortress whose walls would not be breached. He appealed to instinct, and this proved murkier still, for he did not see himself as the marrying type. And yet the idea that he and Jenny might never legalize their love did not minimize the obligation he felt toward the woman who had moved to Iowa to be with him. As the problem churned in his gut, he grew more and more withdrawn, more inward. For a year, it went on like this, with no answer. The war between his instinct and his desire settled into the trenches, where it threatened to destroy his life, not via entropy, but by attrition.

Then, in 2002, Larry Murphy had called and offered Nathan the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. He moved to Oelwein, and Jenny stayed behind in Waterloo. He still loved Jenny, he said, and she him. But the one-hour drive between the two towns felt longer all the time. Slowly, wordlessly, Nathan began spending more time at the farm. His parents never talked to him about the fight they’d had, and the familiarity of the silent understanding they’d reached reinforced the pull of his family. The very fact that nothing needed to be said made him feel the weight of his place back in the fold. With Jenny, he said, everything had been about discussion, about argument. When he and Jenny talked, it was like two lawyers debating. Though he understood the emotional liabilities of silence, Nathan found he preferred not talking to arguing. Nathan saw other women, including a DHS caseworker, though he couldn’t commit to anyone. He bought a tiny, two-bedroom house on in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. And then, in June of 2005, Nathan’s half brother, David, died of heart failure in San Francisco at the age of thirty-eight.