In other places, away from town or on certain streets, everything seems dead. The world has not ended on December 21st, but the town seems deserted, abandoned, and it is only a short step to imagining all the houses burned or emptied. That night, the temp drops below freezing, and on the local news I hear that cold nights near Christmas carry the greatest chance of fire because of all the lights and electrical outlets overloaded, the paper strewn everywhere, the roaring fire.

The news says nothing of chemicals cooking.

Common ingredients in crystal meth include acetone, used in nail polish remover and paint thinner; lithium, which was used as a fusion fuel in early Hydrogen bombs; and toluene, which can be used as an industrial solvent, inhalant, or octane booster in racing fuel. Also used are Hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid and anhydrous ammonia, along with red phosphorous, the stuff that ignites matches.

All of the ingredients are highly flammable and unstable. Taken alone, or in a cooking environment, they can cause respiratory problems, skin irritation, migraines, death. When police clean out a meth house, they wear respirators, Tyvec suits, eye goggles, shoe coverings, and gloves (many police officers who cleaned out labs in the sixties and seventies, before the dangers were known, now suffer health problems directly related to inhaling cooking fumes). Since 1998, in Missouri, only a few hundred miles north of my hometown, police have seized 12,354 meth labs, 251,000 pounds of solid waste, and 118,000 pounds of toxic waste.

In other places, away from town or on certain streets, everything seems dead. The world has not ended on December 21st, but the town seems deserted, abandoned, and it is only a short step to imagining all the houses burned or emptied.

In 2011, the DEA registered over 10,000 meth lab incidents, where either chemicals or cookware were found. Besides the sometimes as high as 20% of meth labs that explode, thousands of houses are sold without the buyers being aware the house was formerly used for cooking meth. Few states have laws that require lab houses to be cleaned. There has been no national study on how clean is clean, and in those states that do have laws, cleaning a house where meth was cooked may be as simple as airing the house out for a few days and repainting the room used for cooking.

From 2004 to 2009, the DEA found 1789 meth labs in hotels. I use the word “found,” because those are only the ones they found. That’s out of three million rooms rented nightly. For five years. The hotel owners are often reluctant to report the labs because it will mean a costly clean-up. I will think of this statistic when we stop at a hotel in Tennessee, the state with the second-highest number of meth lab seizures. I will wonder if they have repainted the room and aired it out.

Christmas morning, before the snow comes, before we gather in warm houses to eat and drink and laugh, my brother and I take another drive through the streets of town. We are seeing sights, as my father and I did a few days before, but the sights we are seeing are not for pleasure, this time. I have a list of addresses where police raided drug labs, and as we move slowly through the grey morning, my brother reading the addresses and me reading the street signs, I think of how close the scourge has come, how easily we can be reached. The church bells ring the morning and geese fly overhead and here we are, driving through a town we grew up in, have loved and hated and every shade of emotion in between, looking for drug houses among the houses we have driven past all our lives.

The first house is no longer there. The data I have lists a discovered lab at the address in 2004, but there is no house, only an empty lot, grown over with weeds. On another day I might have gotten out of the car and searched for clues, but I don’t need clues — I know what has happened here.