But driving past the city limits the population sign tells me more people live here than ever. They have moved to new subdivisions on the edge of town, away from the center, much as happens in some inner cities. I think of all the pictures and stories I have seen from Detroit in the last few years, the ruin-porn, the endless coverage of a dying city. The fires. The emptying of the inner city. The rampant drugs. I am far from the Rust Belt of America, but the same circumstances have been recreated here: factories closing down, people fleeing for better opportunities. And those who stay are forced to try to make a living where there is no living to be had.

Summer nights we circled town like the stars swimming through the big sky river, or stood on the rural bridge where kids dare each other to jump after a few beers.

The town has always struggled to find work. It was founded in 1828, when a man named Walter Cauthron opened a general store near the Petit Jean River. In the 1800s the only industry to be found was farming, a general store, a cotton gin, a blacksmith for shoeing horses. Most of the land in the area was devoted to raising cattle or crops. The town itself consisted of a main street with a few store fronts, until the railroad came through in 1898 and the population began to rise with the newfound industry. The railroad bought the surrounding land and sold it in farming sections. More people came. Not long after the railroad arrived, the Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium was built on Potts Hill just south of town. The new jobs brought more people. As did the tuberculosis. Many of those released from the sanatorium stayed in the town, either to start a new life or to work at the sanatorium and help others suffering from the disease.

During the Depression and World War II, the town struggled again. Crops failed under the clouds of dust that blew east from Oklahoma. Men were drafted for service and women moved away to work in the factories. They stayed gone until the fifties, when the town formed the Industrial Development Committee to attract industry and bring jobs to the area. In the fifties and sixties, new plants opened. Retirees returned, attracted to small town Southern life. More factories moved in. The tuberculosis sanatorium closed, but re-opened as a home for the developmentally disabled.

I was born in the early seventies. I remember the country’s bicentennial. Parades down main street. A state football championship in the mid-eighties, about the time Reagan threatened to close down the state-run institute where my mother and step-father worked, and we contemplated moving to the suburbs of a larger city. Summer nights we circled town like the stars swimming through the big sky river, or stood on the rural bridge where kids dare each other to jump after a few beers. Someone got busted for pot, drinking too much or driving after drinking too much. They were arrested for little things like breaking into the swimming pool on hot summer nights or throwing a beer bottle at a road sign. In health classes we watched videos about the dangers of drugs, Nancy Reagan had started the D.A.R.E campaign, and we heard about crack in the inner cities, which seemed so far removed from us in our small Southern town we never worried about it.

By the time houses began to explode all over the Pacific Northwest, they were using the word epidemic.

We did not know that out West, methamphetamines had spread through the streets of Portland and Seattle and the cities in Northern California, heading east. It was first synthesized in 1919 in Japan. During World War II millions of tablets were handed out to forces on both sides to fight fatigue and hunger. In the fifties, Japanese industrial workers used it to increase productivity. In the sixties, crystal meth became popular with truckers on long hauls, with bikers driving cross-country (they carried it in their crank cases, from which the name “crank” derived). In the thirties and forties, meth was sold in a number of popular over the counter drugs, and prescribed for various treatments ranging from narcolepsy to alcoholism to obesity. By the seventies, it was a controlled substance. By the nineties, people, lots of people, were making it in their homes. Instructions on how to manufacture meth proliferated on the Internet, and can still be found there. So can pictures of what happens to people who use it. In the late eighties, police in Oregon began keeping records on meth use when they started seeing the same people return to jail again and again, slightly altered each time — less teeth, less hair, more scratches and lines on their faces. They began finding more and more home labs. By the time houses began to explode all over the Pacific Northwest, they were using the word epidemic.

As my father and I drive, there are fires everywhere. People burning trash or leaves in their yards, leaning on rakes, nodding as we pass by. The weather is warm for this time of year, hovering in the mid-fifties. A good time to burn leaves, to stand outside under the winter slanted sun, watch the hawks circling high on drafts of air, nod to cars as they come by. Driving along the country roads we see a hawk swoop down on a field mouse, carry it off in its talons. We see wild turkeys crossing the road, a roadrunner, hundreds of squirrels, a doe bending to drink at a small creek winding through pastureland. We see children fishing along a small creek in the almost-warm afternoon.