The Bookworm: Methland

Methland, by Nick Reding. 269 pages. Bloomsbury. 2009.

In my telling, meth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it. The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come.

After reading a review of Methland when it was first published, I immediately put it on my mental “books to buy” list. At the time I was deep in the throes of Midwestern longing and wanted whatever connection to the heartland I could get. I was also curious about the consequences the so-called meth epidemic was wreaking on the land I loved. I read the news of meth lab busts and heard hearsay horror stories about methheads freezing their testicles off, but really had no clue what was going on. I hoped Methland — a piece of literary journalism written by a fellow Midwesterner — would not only clue me in but also provide a much needed link to my homeland, however unflattering.

Well, I did not get around to buying Methland until last January, six months after returning to IC. Though I no longer needed the Midwestern pick-me-up, I still wanted to read it.

Having had meth “follow” him wherever he went on assignment in rural America, Reding felt that telling meth’s story to a nation almost totally clueless to its prevalence was a “moral obligation.” “Meth was indeed everywhere,” he wrote after playing pool with a meth addict at a favorite bar near where he grew up, “including in the most importance place: the area from which I come. There, it stood to derail the lives of two people with whom, under only slightly different circumstances, I could easily have grown up.”

Reding drove to small towns throughout the Midwest, South, and California’s Central Valley, talking to police, doctors, and city officials about meth. It was a problem everywhere he went. For his book he searched for the right place to showcase, a place that served as a simulacrum of what meth was doing to rural America. He chose Oelwein, Iowa, after making his first visit there in 2005.

Between retelling the history of meth — how it became synonymous with the blue collar work ethic lionized by Americana, the evolution of its manufacture and distribution, and how it infested small towns ravaged by the farm crisis and corporate consolidation of the meat packing industry — Reding tells the story of Oelwein between ’05 and ’07. Attaching himself to locals, Reding highlights the drug’s effect on the community and chronicles efforts to reverse Oelwein’s misfortunes.

Not only did Methland tell me everything I could ever want to know about meth, the way Reding expertly weaved the stories and lives of those he came to know gave the drug and its effects a surreal potence. Reading parts of Methland was akin to watching an A&E exposé on serial killers or neo-Nazis: it gave me the impression I should never leave home without packing a Glock. Seriously: meth makes people crazy. Reding summarizes the drug’s scientific influence in mostly layman’s terms, but it is still a little hard to follow. The gist of it is that meth offers users a sensation exponentially better than sex because it shifts the reward system of our brain’s biology into overdrive. After meth, nothing makes users happy, so they go to great lengths to stay high, including making it themselves in dangerous “Beavis and Butt-head” operations in household kitchen sinks and bathtubs. At one time, Oelwein even outlawed the riding of bicycles down Main Street to crack down on “single batchers” mixing chemicals in bottles attached to bikes.

The way Reding describes Oelwein is far from flattering — which, he wrote in an afterward, peeved many of the residents (who did not read the book) and others across the country who felt “it was somehow sacrilegious to report on the small-town version” of big city problems. Methland does not mesh well with the quintessential image of small town America. It is the reason, Reding feels, many American’s never believed something so vial could infest the Pleasantville’s scattered across the country, including those who call them home. But Methland lays in plain sight the ills small town folks like to conceal or overlook. As one old woman, a stalwart of Iowa’s proud levelheadedness, said to the crowd gathered at Oelwein’s public library to comment on the book, “If you haven’t read this, you have no right to comment. And if you’ve read it and think a word of it’s untrue, you have your head in the sand.”

Reding’s writing was, at times, a little awkward, and the book is riddled with typos. A few research errors also made me question Reding’s thoroughness. Apparently, in the first hardcover edition, Reding said Iowa City was Iowa’s largest city. Also, on a trip to Algona on US Highway 18, he writes:

In an era of interstates, Highway 18 is a throwback, and little more than a well-kept country road running seven hundred miles from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, across Iowa and South Dakota prairie, all the way to Mule Creek Junction, Wyoming. Along its path, Highway 18 passes through twice as many Indian reservations (two) and national grasslands (also two) than towns of more than ten thousand people.

It takes little effort to find that US Highway 18 starts in Milwaukee and passes through Waukesha and Madison, cities which have a lot larger populations than 10,000.

Also, notice in the quote how he wrote “Iowa and South Dakota prairie”? Throughout the book Reding describes the rolling farmland of Iowa as prairie. Prairie this, prairie that. Endless prairie dotted with farmsteads. I hate to break it to you, Reding, but IT’S NOT PRAIRIE ANYMORE! It’s farmland, created when the prairie was plowed. I cannot begin to explain how much each use of “prairie” pissed me off.

Overall, though Methland was a very informative and enlightening read. I highly recommend it to anyone curious about the state of rural America.

New words I learned: All definitions are courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Venous: “of or relating to a vein or the veins.” De rigueur: “required by etiquette or current fashion.” Impropriety: “a failure to observe standards or show due honesty or modesty; improper language, behavior, or character.” Simulacrum: “an image or representation of someone or something.” Cauterize: “burn the skin or flesh of (a wound) with a heated instrument or caustic substance, typically to stop bleeding or prevent the wound from becoming infected.” Bacchanal: “an occasion of wild and drunken revelry.” Compendium: “a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, esp. in a book or other publication.” Eleuthera: “an island in the central Bahamas, over 100 miles (160 km) long; pop. 9,000. It was settled by the British in the 1640s.” Principate: “the rule of the early Roman emperors, during which some features of republican government were retained.” Succor: “assistance and support in times of hardship and distress.” Farrier: “a craftsman who trims and shoes horses' hooves.” Histrionics: “exaggerated dramatic behavior designed to attract attention.” Percheron: “a powerful draft horse of a gray or black breed, originally from France.” Pyrrhic: “(of a victory) won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor.” Preternaturally: “beyond what is normal or natural.”