Nick Reding - Methland

It’s stories like this, told and retold every day among the farmers at Hub City Bakery or while shopping at VG’s, that had begun to fray the sense of civility in Oelwein by summer 2005. Two years after a consolidated effort to rid the town of meth was begun, patience was waning. The police chief mandated—with Nathan’s and Murph’s full support—that his men pull over cars for almost any reason in hopes of finding meth. He had recently lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance outlawing bikes in town. The hope was that the cooks who brazenly cycled around making meth in their soda bottles would at least do so somewhere out in the country instead of right on Main Street. In reaction, there was talk in Oelwein that Murph and Nathan and the chief were infringing on people’s civil liberties when they ought to be doing something about the meth labs, which regularly caught fire in residential neighborhoods, sending toxic plumes of smoke in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. Meantime, an Oelwein officer named David Bloem was being investigated for assaulting a meth addict named Jason Annis. According to the West Branch (IA) Times , the accident began when Bloem arrested Annis with a meth-filled syringe “sticking out of his arm.” Later, a video camera in the police station appeared to show Bloem shoving Annis to the floor, where he suffered a broken orbital bone at one eye and a compound fracture at his left cheek.

The effect was partly desperation, even panic, and partly a reversion to the overly simplistic version of events, which is that meth, and meth alone, was responsible for all that was bad in Oelwein. The addendum to the postulate is that whoever becomes hooked is weak. There’s something wrong with them, and because of them, there’s now something wrong with us. Even Nathan, whose own contradictions made him adept at looking at things evenhandedly, was quick to talk about the “shitbags” and the “scum”: those whose addiction made everyone else pay the price. After three years as assistant county attorney, during which things had gone from bad to worse (in Oelwein), he found it harder and harder to see the nuances of life after meth.

Nathan’s office is in a squat three-story brick building at the corner of Highway 150 and Route 3, across the street from the Oelwein Public Library. On the first floor of the building there is a small bank. The second and third floors, like so many commercial spaces in Oelwein, are empty. The basement is occupied by a two-man law firm, Sauer and Sauer LLC. The younger Sauer, Wayne, is, in addition to being a partner in the firm with his father, the county attorney. Nathan, every day that he’s not in court, goes to his office there, which is ample, if not extravagant. There is a large desk and three chairs, two of them stacked with boxes of depositions and police reports. On the wall hangs the beard of a turkey that Nathan killed last spring, ten inches long and black and coarse, like the tail of a tiny horse. Next to that is a framed certificate of thanks to Nathan for one of the many cleanups he has organized on the nearby Volga River.

It’s lunchtime, during which Nathan, who is proud of his frugality, would normally go home and eat last night’s leftovers while watching TV. A second reason Nathan hardly goes out to eat is that he is constantly running into people he’s prosecuted. Today, though, is Friday, the end of the workweek, and the May sun is finally out following five solid days of rain. Leo’s Italian Restaurant, just three blocks away, has a special every Friday on the fried pork tenderloin sandwich with mayo and tomato and a side of broasted potatoes. It’s still an expensive sandwich, if you ask Nathan: $5.95. But today it sounds too good to pass up. So Nathan reaches for his suit jacket, walks up the stairs, and heads out the glass door of the building into the warm sun.

Leo’s is packed. Fronted by large windows that look onto Main Street and across at the movie house, Leo’s feels as old as the building, built in 1907, that it has occupied for forty years. The tin ceiling is original, as are the wood walls. Business is good every lunch and dinner, twelve months of the year. At the tables sit farmers in their clean jeans, and technicians from the Tyson plant, along with some men in town to discuss the opening of an ethanol plant down the road.

Taking his place in a red Naugahyde booth against the wall, Nathan is feeling a little philosophical, perhaps because the waitress, Brigitte Hendershot, represents for him the difficulties faced by his town. Brigitte works five days a week. She is fifty-four, and what Nathan calls the salt of the earth. Her son-in-law is a sheriff’s deputy; her daughter works for the state’s Department of Human Services. It is people like Brigitte, says Nathan, whom the meth epidemic hurts the most. They work hard all their lives only to see their towns go to hell and to worry that their grandchildren will fall prey to a drug. In a sinking economy, he says, it’s as though the harder they work, the farther behind they fall. It makes Nathan crazy.

“I think about the credos that I admire: Kant’s call to action for the betterment of man; Aquinas’s belief that every man’s job is to help every other man achieve his ends. When I grew up,” says Nathan, “everything in my parents’ house had to be black and white. No interracial marriage, no booze, no sex, no voting for Democrats. I went to law school, and I thought: How does this narrow-minded horseshit aid in the callings of Kant and Aquinas? It can’t, because it’s too marginalizing.

“But now look where I am,” he continues. “I’ve come full circle, because I see the people that I prosecute as case files, black ink on a white page. There’s so fucking many meth-heads, I can’t differentiate. I don’t get a chance to see them in their homes. I don’t really have time to see them even as people, because that’s not how I’m trained. So how have I evolved?” he asks, rubbing quickly at his nose before answering his own question. “I haven’t. I devolved.”

Brigitte comes over to take Nathan’s order. Her hair is dyed black to hide the gray, and she wears dark glasses that turn darker in the sun when she goes outside. When she leaves, Nathan leans forward onto the table and clasps his hands.

“Let’s try to look at meth scientifically and economically,” he begins. “First, there’s the part of your brain that’s evolved over thousands of years to reward you for doing the things that will regenerate the species. Have sex, feel good, in a nutshell. Then there’s meth, which is twenty times better than sex. So, basically, meth becomes more powerful than biology.

“So you can put a tweaker in prison, and the whole time he’s in there, he’s thinking of only one thing: how he’s going to get high the day he’s out. He’s not even thinking about it, actually. He’s like, rewired to know that everything in life is about the drug. So you say, ‘What good does prison do?’

“Meanwhile, whether he’s in prison or out on the street tweaking, he’s disengaged from the economy. There’s a whole sector of the blue-collar workforce that’s just gone around here. So what we have as an alternative is these state-mandated halfway-house things, where for two months you have to check in and check out each day; you have to hold a job; you have to take piss tests. Fine. But two months,” says Nathan, “isn’t shit. Two months clean on meth is nothing. Why not make it five years? Put money into building and staffing those places and try and keep people straight for years at a time while giving them something to lose—a job, a sense of security.”

Nathan leans back. The pork tenderloin is here. Brigitte says warmly, “Enjoy, honey.” Nathan has known both her and her children all his life.