Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  The point is that we invariably come back to testing as a means of understanding drug use, even though assuming these tests lead to truth puts one on shaky ground. You simply can’t prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation are easily questioned. Consider how the National Survey on Drug Use and Health concludes every four years how many meth addicts there are in the United States. First, surveyors ask employers to give their employees a questionnaire on drug use. The survey asks employees whether they have done amphetamines (not specifically methamphetamines) in their lifetime, in the last year, and/or in the last six months. First, it seems unlikely that drug addicts will take this completely optional test; will answer truthfully if they do take it; and will even be at work in the first place—as opposed to home cooking meth. Further, since methamphetamine is just one of a broad class of stimulants in the amphetamine family, an answer of yes to a question about using one amphetamine can’t be taken as an answer of yes to using another. And yet, for the study’s purposes, anyone who says they’ve done any kind of amphetamine in the last six months is considered “addicted to amphetamines,” and—in a way that is impossible to understand—a certain percentage of these responders is deemed addicted to crank. It’s in accordance with this system that NIDA proclaimed—and John Walters celebrated—meth’s demise in 2006.

  But a drug’s availability, according to Dr. Koob, is the key to its power. And whether or not the Oelwein police were busting labs, clearly there was still a lot of meth around town, since Nathan hadn’t noticed a drop in his cases. Lab busts removed the drug’s most obvious elements: the smelly homes, the fires, the sickened children. Removing labs, it turns out, isn’t the same as removing the drug, or the problems for which that drug serves as some sort of answer. Where meth was coming from now; how it was getting to Oelwein; and why the Combat Meth Act hadn’t stopped it—these were the new questions that had to be answered.

  Sitting in Las Flores that night, I was reminded of a talk I’d had a year before with Phil Price, who had since retired as the special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. At the time, Price was simultaneously investigating eleven execution-style murders of Mexican nationals, all committed in empty mansions in quiet Atlanta suburbs, all meth-related. In discussing the murders, Price had foreseen the Combat Meth Act’s ultimate weakness, long before it was passed.

  “Look,” he’d said in his thick North Georgia accent, “I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but the Combat Meth Act will only take the little bit of the meth business away from the dipshits with the Bunsen burners and the Budweiser chemistry set and give it to the only people who’ve known all along what to do with it: the Mexican DTOs.

  “For a while,” he went on, “people will applaud the government, and things will get remarkably better. But mark my words: it’ll get worse from there. Because none of this is about a drug. It’s about a system of government and an economy. The Combat Meth Act will only serve to highlight our immigration policy, and what a holy crock of shit it is. But no one will see that. All they’ll see is a short-term victory against meth. By the time the crank comes flowing back,” concluded Price, “the government and the media will be long gone, and we’ll be stuck worse than ever.”

  PART 3

  2007

  CHAPTER 11

  ALGONA

  During the three and a half years I went back and forth to Oelwein, I told myself that I was searching for the meaning of meth in small-town America. That is certainly true. But I think I was also looking for the meaning of a small town in my own life and in my family’s history. And what, if anything, had changed so profoundly that when I would tell my father what I was seeing in Iowa, he was made to wonder if he would even recognize the place whence he comes.

  Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth. But it has become something else, too—something more sinister and difficult to define. Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. 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.

  The truth is that, in the weeks I drove around Illinois, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri, any town in which I stopped for a day or two would have satisfied the criteria as a setting for a book about meth—meth was a part of life in all of them. It’s fair to say I focused on Iowa beginning in 2005 not because of the record number of labs in the state or because I was quick to develop a relationship with Clay and Nathan, but because Iowa is the place where my father’s branch of the Reding family had lived since the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, my father’s life fits into the conundrum of methamphetamine’s link with the rural United States, not just because he comes from Algona, but because he worked forty-two years in the industry that I have come to see as a force behind the difficulties faced by places like Algona and Oelwein: Big Agriculture.

  My great-grandfather Nicholas Reding came to Algona from the Franco-Prussian principate of Luxembourg in 1868. With him he brought his second wife (the first had died) and the fifteen children from his two marriages. After learning that the local schoolteacher would be educating his children in English, my great-grandfather became a teacher himself, founding his own school specifically so he could educate his children in German.

  Louis Reding was the youngest of Nicholas’s children, born in 1899. Louis spent his whole life in Algona, where he worked as a tractor partsman at the International Harvester shop. He died in 1979. Alice, my grandmother, was born in Lu Verne (pronounced “Laverne”), Iowa, twelve miles south of Algona. Alice was one of four children of a woman who must, by the fertility standards of the Reding clan, have seemed just a hair shy of barren. Alice was five feet tall; she worked as a teller at the Iowa State Bank for fifty-one years. She died in 1989, at the age of eighty-eight.

  My father, Nicholas Reding, named for his grandfather, was born the youngest of four in November 1934; his sister Roz is the oldest, followed by twins, Jan and Joe. My father was small as a boy, with blond hair and dark brown eyes. During the Depression and war, it was often up to my father and his brother to kill pheasants, pigeons, or squirrels for supper. In the winter, they market-hunted jackrabbits, by which it is meant that they went out into the fields at night in the backs of trucks and killed the animals as they were temporarily paralyzed by the headlights. My father and uncle filled keg-barrels with the rabbits they shot, for this is how canneries in Sioux City and restaurants in Fort Dodge came about their meat during the rationed years in World War II. In the summer, they fished for perch and catfish in the East Branch of the Des Moines River—which flows 320 miles away, past the cabin in Ottumwa where Lori Arnold once lived.

  My father went to Iowa State in Ames in 1952. He was seventeen. By then, his hair was well on its way to turning black; he was small, like his mother, and weighed just 110 pounds his freshman year. If it weren’t for his three scholarships, he would never have been educated beyond high school. A baseball scholarship paid for his room, a chemical engineering scholarship paid for his board, and a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship paid for his books. There is a photo of him as a freshman, standing a head shorter than most other members of Iowa State’s varsity baseball squad. That photo has always had a complicated effect on me. On the one hand, I feel a tremendous amount of pride that my father ever made it out of Algona, Iowa. On the other hand, I feel a comic sense of disbelief, for my father, standing on the end of a line of tall, strapping young men, looks impossibly young and small. It’s surprising that he even made it through the brutal winters, never mind that he was able to swing a thirty-four-inch wooden bat at eighty-five-mile-per-hour fastballs without being blown over. What’s more incredible still is the remarkable life he would go on to lead.

  By his sophomore year, my father had grown
to five feet nine and had gained thirty pounds—hardly the stuff of legend, but enough to be starting in center field for what at the time was a powerhouse of a collegiate baseball team. Iowa State was the runner-up that year in the College World Series—my father was the MVP. He set a National Collegiate Athletic Association record for the number of stolen bases in a game—six, including stealing home—that stood for many years. At the end of the season, at the age of nineteen, he was drafted in the first round by the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals at a time when the rivalry between them was one of the most enduring and storied rivalries in sports.

  My father, though, didn’t believe playing sports was a reliable road out of poverty. Despite being drafted again by the Yankees following his junior year, he stayed at Iowa State to finish his chemical engineering degree. In 1955, he was offered a job with Monsanto, in St. Louis, Missouri. He arrived in the city with two shirts, two pairs of shoes, two ties, and one suit, and he moved into a boarding house. He met my mother at Monsanto, where she was working as a secretary. My maternal grandmother, Mildred Viola Nicholson, two decades removed from her years in Ebo, Missouri, took an immediate liking to my father. She saw a kindred spirit in a boy from the country who’d come to a grand and important American city in hopes of making his way. Mildred’s first husband had left her, my mother, and my aunt, and Mildred had worked all her adult life as a single mother, first as a maid and then as a cook in a downtown cafeteria called Miss Hulling’s. When my father became ill with influenza in 1956, my mother and grandmother took the bus every morning and every evening for three weeks to care for him at the boarding house until he was well again. My parents were married in 1958.

  My father spent forty-two years working for Monsanto, retiring as vice chairman in 1998. In the decades he was there, Monsanto became an agricultural power house, acquiring seed companies, patenting herbicides, and most markedly, pioneering the field of biogenetic crop engineering. So powerful was Monsanto that in 1996 it formed a joint venture with Cargill. It’s in this way that the rise of Big Agriculture out of the small towns of the rural United States mirrors the story of my family and of my father’s life. It’s in this way, too, that the complexity and the overriding humanity of things becomes evident. Monsanto, in one telling, played a part in destroying the way of life in the small-town United States—the very place from which my father and my grandmother come. In another telling, Monsanto’s industrialization of farming wasn’t ruinous, but rather it revolutionized a remarkably difficult vocation through technology and science—in other words, Monsanto, along with Cargill and ADM and ConAgra, streamlined and modernized the raising of crops.

  Initially, during the 1970s, the increased efficiency of American farmers proved a boon for small-town America. OPEC, rich with a surplus of so-called petrodollars, was funding industry throughout the world—primarily in China, the Soviet Union, and Latin America—in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do today. Anxious to modernize their industry and infrastructure, these nations spent less money on food production, prompting U.S. farmers to—at the now-infamous behest of the secretary of agriculture—“feed the world” and “plant hedgerow to hedgerow.” U.S. food production was pushed to record highs. By the close of the decade, though, the gas crisis had abated, OPEC was lending less money, and U.S. farmers who’d overextended themselves in order to grow grain to sell to Argentina or the Soviet Union had to foreclose on their land. The farm crisis of the early 1980s was born, and followed by a massive rural out-migration.

  Rural sociologist William Heffernan has focused much of his work on the period from 1970 to 2000. Heffernan refers often in his work to the effect “the formation of the three major food chain clusters” had on American farming—and as a direct result, on rural America. One of the clusters that Heffernan identifies is Cargill-Monsanto. According to Heffernan, by 1996, two years before my father retired, Cargill—with the help of Monsanto and its stable of seed companies—controlled massive shares of almost every food-related market. It was among the top five beef and pork packers, beef-feedlot owners, turkey-farming operators, and ethanol producers. It was number one in animal-feed plants and grain elevators, and number two in flour milling, dry corn milling, wet corn milling, and soybean crushing. Cargill was also moving aggressively into the transportation business, namely river barges, railroad cars, and trucking companies, as well as acquiring grocery store chains. As a result of this centralization, says Heffernan, “most rural economic development specialists discount agriculture as a contributor to rural development.” That’s to say that, whether you’re talking about Oelwein, Algona, or Ottumwa, Iowa, between 1980 and 1995, the lifeblood of those towns ceased to provide the same life that it had offered for over a hundred years—roughly since my great-grandfather arrived from Luxembourg.

  Heffernan’s analysis shows an astonishing sea change in a very short period. Just a quarter century ago, as Heffernan points out, “when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of three or four.” Meaning that each dollar generated by James and Donna Lein in Oelwein would exchange hands three or four times before leaving the community. Today, notes Heffernan, that number is down to one. Historically, farming communities were models of rural economic health, and mining communities like those in the Appalachians were an indicator of a crippling system of centralization. Today, farming and mining communities are indistinguishable, says Heffernan. Oelwein and Algona are statistically related to Elk Garden, West Virginia.

  Much of the trip from Oelwein to Algona is on Highway 18. 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 the 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. In fact, west of Mason City, Iowa, it’s generally twenty or thirty miles between gas stations, and an hour or more between towns that have their own high schools. It is truly one of the more nostalgic stretches of American road—one that seems frozen in time, though of course that’s simply no longer true.

  Ostensibly, I went to Algona to find my father’s house and the makeshift baseball field where he and my uncle Joe used to play. Because the high school didn’t have a ball field of its own, the Algona Bulldogs during the 1940s and ’50s played all their games away. My dad said the provisional diamond was somewhere east along the railroad tracks, near where the pheasants used to sun themselves on cold days while picking at waste grain dropped from the freight cars headed to Chicago via Oelwein and Waterloo.

  Riding around town with my father giving me directions by cell phone, I went to his childhood home, a three-bedroom wooden-shingled farmhouse built in 1919. He wanted to know every detail: the color of the wood and the roof; if there was still a porch; and if the mulberry tree was still in the front yard. After I gave him my report, it became apparent that the only thing that had been changed in nearly sixty years was the color of the small front porch—from green to gray. State Street, Algona’s main drag, was also much as he remembered it, with the exception that the Iowa State Bank is no longer in existence, though the redbrick building that housed it still stands. Unchanged as well would appear to be the Reding habit for propagation stretching back to the first Nicholas Reding. According to the waitress who brought me a french-dip sandwich and cup of coffee at the town’s café, her sister is married to one Reding and her cousin to another. “By spring thaw,” she said, “you won’t be able to turn over a single rock in this town without a Reding crawling out from under it.”

  After lunch, I called my dad again to help me find the old ball field. It was a fool’s errand, for the prairie in every direction was under eight inches of snow, beneath which was a hard layer of ice. Still, I wasn’t coming back to Algona any time soon, and I wanted to be near
the place my father had once cherished, where he’d learned to hit and field and steal bases with Uncle Joe.

  As I walked east along the tracks as they bordered Highway 18, it was clear and blue and frigid in the wake of the storms that had passed over the region in succession for a week. I could see, it seemed, forever, and forever seemed to be a sheet of white, frozen snow blown into topographical drifts. I have always found mountains to be beautiful. But I’m not moved by them in any way. The same is true of the ocean, and of beaches and large rivers. The Hudson and the Mississippi valleys are marvels of natural grandeur; they are magnificent, but not humbling. Prairie is humbling. The isolation—false as it may be, what with farmhouses every few hundred or few thousand acres—is at once exhilarating and terrifying. The sight of it that day, of all that open country, was gnawing at my stomach. The very idea that tiny Plains towns from Iowa to Montana are given names like Harvey and Melvin and Maurice, Dana and Bode and Britt—first names, familiar names—underscores the utter humanity of an attempt to exist in a place never meant to sustain our ill-fated and ultimately impossible desire for permanence. And yet here we still are, living and dying in Algona and in Cylinder, hunkered down in Fort Charles and Fort Dodge, having a french dip and walking down the tracks, looking forward to standing around the wood-stove at night with Nathan Lein and his girlfriend Jamie Porter. The argument of some sociologists, namely that we should pick up and leave, call a spade a spade, clear out the towns of the Plains rather than artificially support them on farm subsidies, put the land into a national park and re introduce the buffalo: this argument makes a certain kind of sense. Nathan Lein’s parents wonder every night how they’ll make it through another winter. And yet where else would we go? What, really, would we have ourselves do, if not this?