Nick Reding - Methland

Clay had been sober for over eighteen months. It lent him, he said, increasingly clear insight into things, some of which was quite painful. Part of that insight was that he’d been, as he put it, cutting his nose to spite his face regarding medicine. So instead of fighting two battles he couldn’t win—namely, against the insurance companies and against what he saw as immoral hiring practices at Mercy Hospital—he’d rolled up his sleeves and gotten back to basics, working on a contract basis in a couple of rural emergency rooms. The money was good, the excitement level was high, and the rewards were immediate. Rather than having too little time to treat someone living through the prolonged hell of meth addiction or cancer, Clay could concentrate on just getting someone through the afternoon, or keeping him alive till morning. It was the medical equivalent of the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy that had saved Clay’s life: one day at a time.

Despite these developments, in the harsh, fluorescent reflection of Clay Hallberg’s continuing sobriety, his life did not look the same to him as it had when he’d been drinking. Some aspects were worse than they’d ever been, said Clay. His blood pressure had gotten so out of control that he began fearing for his well-being. What was becoming clear to him in his sobriety, too, he said, was that his marriage needed some serious attention. Or rather, it had long ago to him begun needing attention, and he was just now able to see this. The man who promoted Whorfian linguistics and the fluid communicative harmonies of music had found he’d lost the ability to speak meaningfully to his wife of twenty years. When they talked, he said, they made no sense to each other.

One evening after dinner at Las Flores, Clay and I went across the street to Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. More than any other place in Oelwein, Von Tuck’s captures the town’s desire for upward mobility by taking the drinking tradition of the northern Midwest and elevating it to a level of finery unseen anywhere else in town. Even a sober doctor can feel at home there. Top-shelf whiskeys line Von Tuck’s polished bar, it’s not loud, and the bartender is nice even if he doesn’t know you. It was here, while drinking a Diet Coke and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights, that Clay described his most recent epiphany.

“I’m a bastard, okay?” he said.

I waited a moment, thinking there was more. There wasn’t.

“That’s it. That’s the deal: I’m a shit, and now I can stop.”

This insight wasn’t visited on him in a blinding flash of light, said Clay. There was no collision, the likes of which had killed his mother three years ago. This leap of understanding did not, like the Clydesdale, bolt unseen from the highway ditch in the middle of the night, crushing the vehicle of Clay’s intellect, shattering the emotional windshield through which he’d long viewed himself. It was not a euphoric realization, not like taking all his neurotransmitters and putting them in a shot glass and swallowing them at once. Biochemistry, hydrology, genealogy, physics, Egyptology—the truth was so much more real to him than any of that had ever been.

His blood pressure, he said, had gone way down. “I’m like a fucking lizard, it’s so low,” he said. He was focused in the ER, not worrying about making mistakes, or about trying to save people who hadn’t even walked in off the street yet.

“I drove myself to drink,” he said. “I probably drove everyone around me crazy. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m not anyone but me. When you’re a shit, you think you’re other people. You think for other people. All I have to do is not that. The rest’ll work out.” He lit another cigarette. “The thing is, I could never believe that. I didn’t know how. But now I do.”

A few more businesses had opened in Oelwein by that December, including Lou Ann’s Quilt Garden over by J & L Sports, across from the building where Marie Ferell had been bludgeoned to death by Tonie Barrett back in 2005. Lou Ann ran quilting classes out of a building that she and her husband bought, spurred on by the promise of tax breaks that the city council had passed the year before. Now Lou Ann not only had her shop but also rented the two apartments above it. Her quilting retreats were booked three years in advance, mostly by middle-aged women who went with Lou Ann to Minneapolis or Chicago or Kansas City to quilt, see movies, and eat at good restaurants for a few days at a time. The Quilt Garden made for some nice cross-traffic with the nearby Morning Perk, which had expanded its coffee and breakfast business with an adjacent knitting and collaging shop.

Out at the Industrial Park, the Oelwein campus of Northeast Iowa Community College and the accompanying Regional Academy for Math and Science (RAMS) were nearly complete. Classes were scheduled to start in the fall of 2008. With the call center still hemming and hawing about whether to set up shop in India or Oelwein, Murphy had begun construction of a Tech Spec Center, as it was called, just east of the RAMS building. Meantime, the old 160,000-square-foot Donaldson factory, across the street from the Cop Shop, had two brand-new occupants after being empty for nearly two decades. One was a wind turbine company called Sector 5; the other was a battery manufacturer called East Penn. Between them, they employed nearly one hundred Oelweinians at hourly rates of fifteen to twenty-four dollars, which is way above the county average.

In reward for his efforts, Larry Murphy had been elected to his fourth mayoral term on November 2, 2007. Murphy’s renewal efforts were far from done; if anything, his conviction had redoubled, and he was more consumed than ever by his town. Next on his agenda was to expand what he’d come to call the “downtown streetscape” to twelve blocks from the present seven. This would include more sewer and water improvements, new plantings and repaired streetlights, and converting more abandoned buildings into attractive new commercial spaces. Murphy wanted trails in the parks and two city-run indoor swimming pools to help his “community wellness” agenda. He also wanted the twelve-block area to have more efficient geothermal heating and cooling, in order to cut energy costs. He wanted to begin several more housing initiatives, which was still a euphemism for razing abandoned and low-income rental properties. To this end, Murphy was pressuring Nathan to run for city council. Land ordinances had, under Murphy’s direction, been enforced by the police. If Nathan became councilman, Murphy would have an ally in supporting his initiatives.

The idea that Nathan would run for city council was obviously another step toward grooming him to “someday run this town,” as Murphy once told me. Nathan was undecided. For one thing, he insisted that he was an intensely private person and that politics would never suit him for that reason alone. For another thing, Nathan liked to say that he disliked almost everyone he met, though to see Nathan smile his way through a crowd is to be certain that quite the opposite is true. In fact, his insistence on playing the cantankerous outsider is precisely what would give Nathan a chance in the April election and beyond, if he—as Clay Hallberg posited—ever decided to run for state congress.

It is worth noting that Nathan’s is an inherently rural sensibility, insofar as he cultivates a quiet dissatisfaction with the outside world from a self-conscious remove. The defensiveness in his insistence that he “doesn’t like people” is as palpable as the yearning in his habit of saying, “This is just Oelwein; it’s not New York.” Watch Nathan work a meet-and-greet at Von Tuck’s Bier Haus in the preelection season as he weighs his desire to run for city council, and you’ll know that, far from not liking anyone, he likes everyone, and wishes not to be made vulnerable for it. It’s his longing for approval and inclusion that makes him distrustful.