Nick Reding Paints Small Town’s Struggle In New Book ‘Methland’

The small town of Oelwein, Iowa, is home to 13 churches, a refurbished Main Street and a new library with free high-speed Internet. It is also home to Roland Jarvis, a former meatpacking worker who burned his house down in 2001. Jarvis, who had a methamphetamine lab inside, was hallucinating that he saw black helicopters hovering overhead and, in a panic, dumped chemicals down the drain. The home went up in flames, and Jarvis was burned so badly that he begged the police to shoot him. Author Nick Reding tells Jarvis’ story — and that of Oelwein and the infiltration of methamphetamine — in his new book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. Jarvis had third-degree burns over 78 percent of his body and spent three months in the burn unit in Iowa City, Reding tells NPR’s Melissa Block. And yet, Reding says, the first thing he did when he got out of the hospital was smoke meth. “He taught himself how to light a lighter with what was left of his hands and hold a pipe in his mouth,” Reding says. Jarvis’ addiction encapsulates what has happened to many small towns in America. Reding says meth is a drug of the American working class, because it gives people “inordinate amounts of energy.” “You don’t have to eat, sleep or drink water, so if you’re somebody who works on a manufacturing line or does farm work or meatpacking work, for instance, it’s a drug that can come in handy, in terms of helping you to work harder,” Reding says. Reding says that the agricultural …
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