My parents live at the edge of a small Arkansas town. Their house sits atop a hill, and across the low valley other hills spread out like bruises. The valley has turned brown now with winter, and under the grey days the land lays dormant, the grey wind whistling over mountain flanks.

This is the town I grew up in, the town where both my daughters were born. Eleven years ago I left Arkansas for North Carolina, and the town has slowly changed in my absence. Many of the businesses down main street are boarded over. Restaurants stay open for only a few months before the new owners decide to close, and, a few months later, when new owners buy the place, they will only stay open a few months as well. The recession has hit hard here. The town’s biggest factories have closed — one because of fire, and one because of sluggish, or no, economic growth — and jobs are scarce. The car dealerships are gone, or failing. The movie theater has been closed for three years for renovations, and many people here suspect it will never re-open.

There are no other houses around. The woods close in, thick brush and heavy trees leaning over the road. Grass grows in the middle of the road where tires have not worn a path.

Past my parents’ house the road turns to dirt as the town ends. There are no other houses around. The woods close in, thick brush and heavy trees leaning over the road. Grass grows in the middle of the road where tires have not worn a path. At night, the road turns dark away from the streetlights and house lights and TVs spilling blue light onto the front yards of the quiet houses.

At the bottom of the hill the road ends. Pasture land begins, a small creek running through, brown cattle worrying the winter grass. From the top of the hill you can follow the winding curve of the creek. Across the pasture, more hills rise up, ringing us in.

At night, cars creep up and down the road, lights blacked out. If you listen, as I do when I am here visiting, sitting on the porch in the cold winter wind or the not-quite-cool nights of summer, you can hear hurried conversations, the quiet opening and closing of doors, hands held over interior car lights to shut them out. Lights, visibility, are not welcome here. People dump stray dogs along the road all the time, and they wander over to my parents’ neighbor’s house. The neighbors are kind and gentle-hearted people, and they take in a half-dozen strays a year. People dump trash on the road, and old furniture, and once, last summer, when my step-father was walking down the dirt road with my older daughter, he found an old 12-volt flashlight someone had thrown out. He thought he would fix it so he climbed into the weeds at road’s edge and took it home. When he opened the casing he found four plastic bags of crystal meth.

We came this year close to Christmas, driving west from North Carolina, across the Appalachians and the long stretch of Tennessee where strip malls hold the same stores and restaurants in every city, every little town. Our first afternoon here my father and I drove for hours through the countryside, along dirt roads where the brown pastures spread to either side, small stands of trees stripped of leaves. The winter sun reflected off the metal roofs of chicken houses, the surface of small orange ponds where cattle leaned over to drink, their breath fanning the air before them. My father pointed out places he had hunted as a child, old houses worn down to the foundation, trees growing through the ruins, houses worn by time and wind. He did not mention the other houses we saw, the burned-out remnants of trailer houses and old clapboard houses set back from the road, the charred signature of smoke where fire curled from the blackened windows.

In town, we drove past the old ice plant, where men sawed blocks of ice in the days before refrigeration. He asked me if I remembered it. I only remember the old brick building, already abandoned by the time I was born, vines crawling over the structure, doors and windows gone, and as we continue to drive past abandoned buildings and boarded over storefronts, I wonder if he is remembering the town as it used to be. Even in the decade I have been gone the town has changed dramatically. When the factories failed the jobs ended, and on some small streets there are more houses empty than occupied. Hand-lettered “For Sale” signs hang in dirty windows. Old cars in the yards gather weeds.

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.

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.

Both the second and third houses on the list are less than a mile away from my mother’s house. I could walk to either one of them in less than five minutes. As a child, I rode my bike past both of them a hundred times. They are both small, and run-down. A small shed out back, a dirt driveway, sheets over the cracked windows. There are toys — a bicycle, a football — in the front yard. Both were raided in 2007, and though there are no signs of meth cooking now — no chemical fumes, no clandestine cars streaking in and pulling rapidly away, no furtive glances out the windows of the house — my brother, who has worked in the medical field for most of his life and now counsels teenagers, thinks of health first, of people living in a house where meth was cooked, chemicals soaking into walls and floors and carpeting and curtains. He thinks of children playing in rooms where poison was made.

“My god,” he says. “Those poor kids.”

He is more right than he knows. Thirty percent of seized labs have had children living in them. In some states, over 50% of children in protective services come from meth lab seizures. Even now, the long-term effects of meth on children are unknown. My older daughter was with my step-father when he found the flashlight with the meth hidden inside. When I walked down the road past the spot the day before Christmas, I could hear children calling to each other just a few houses away.

When I walked down the road past the spot the day before Christmas, I could hear children calling to each other just a few houses away.

The fourth house on the list is gone, as is the fifth. They are both empty lots, the fourth a few houses down from my best friend’s grandmother’s house, a house we used to go to after school to watch cartoons we were too old to be watching. It is two blocks from the elementary school, the library, the school superintendent’s office. The church bells ring again. Clouds pass overhead. We hear a police siren in the distance and look at each other, both thinking the same thing. The fifth house is across the street from a church. It is three houses away from the woman who baby-sat my older daughter before we moved to North Carolina. It is across the street from the baseball field where I played Little League, where bats veered through the park lights over the center field position where I stood on so many summer nights, listening to my parents and friends and friends’ parents cheer from the old wooden bleachers.

The last address is two houses away from my grandmother’s house, where she has lived for close to fifty years. Like several of the others, the house is no longer there. From the empty lot my brother and I can see the rest of our family gathering at my grandmother’s house.

My mother came home from work one day to find the propane tank on her grill stolen. The tubes had been cut. The policeman told her it was stolen to cook meth. He told her of rolling labs, where the backs of trucks are used, especially dangerous because of the jostling as the truck turns, as it bounces over shaky roads and the chemicals spill into one another. He told her cookers will set up in the middle of the woods and cook for a few days, then dump all the chemicals, where they seep into the groundwater, into creeks where people swim in summer.

“It’s everywhere,” he said.

I keep coming back to numbers. Over 10,000 drug lab incidents in 2011. Most of them in Missouri and Tennessee and Oklahoma and Arkansas. Almost 12,000 in 2010. 13,000 in 2005. The numbers dropped slightly — only 6,000 incidents reported in 2007 — after the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, but the numbers have risen again.

And these are the small operations. Home-cooking accounts for about 15% of total meth in the United States. The other 85% comes from super labs supplied and operated by Mexican drug cartels. They get ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act made available only with a prescription — from rogue manufacturing plants in Eastern Europe and distribute it everywhere.

Near the center of town, on the wall of a closed-down car dealership now owned by the First Baptist Church, a twenty-foot high mural lists the Ten Commandments. Across the street, near the courthouse, the Methodist Church, which is the tallest building in town, is missing a stained-glass window, plywood covering the hole like an empty socket.

As we drive in late at night on the 21st, the town seems angelic. Christmas lights hang from poles along main street. There are few cars on the road. I have not been home for three years. I point out to my children familiar landmarks — the toy factory I worked in one summer before a round of layoffs, the bus depot where I left for Basic Training only a few months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf War began, the golf course where I worked for several years while failing at college.

The snow comes Christmas Day. Sleet in the early afternoon that soon turns to snow. By nightfall the roads are blanked out, grass and trees thick with snow. Under the snow, everything looks fine.

We have been on the road all day and are bone-tired from the drive, but instead of turning toward my parents’ house, I keep driving, past the hospital both my grandfathers died in, past the new addition at the edge of town and the old addition across the street from it where a high school friend had a basketball goal in his driveway and missed shots landed on his mother’s car, past dirt roads we often turned down on cool October nights with only the dash light on our faces, rabbits fleeing in the headlights before us, past a landscape I watched everyday for close to fifteen years on my way to and from school, the windows of the bus and the fields out the window all frosted over, like they are now, as we drive, past old weathered barns and old and new houses in changing landscape, past the house where I used to live, past rural country churches where the signs say “He is Risen” and “This is the day that the Lord hath made; Let us rejoice, and be glad in it.”

The snow comes Christmas Day. Sleet in the early afternoon that soon turns to snow. By nightfall the roads are blanked out, grass and trees thick with snow. Under the snow, everything looks fine. The town lies quiet as a blanket. The lights come on all along the streets and the snow streaks through the streetlights in myriad prisms. Soft light falls from the windows of the houses, Christmas lights strung up under the eaves. Thin wires of smoke tether themselves to the chimneys down main street, where the old houses used to look rich, but now sag groundward. Still, the snow erases the past, negates the years of neglect around the windows of the houses, makes everything fine again, almost new. If you are driving, or walking through, if you squint your eyes or ignore the empty sockets of the abandoned houses, if you refuse to look for the husked-out shells where fire has wrought its damage when the chemicals got out of control, you can forget that something immense lurks beneath the surface here, something you only talk about in whispers, late at night, in full rooms with all the lights on.

Full dark I walk down the hill to my grandmother’s house. The snow is three to four inches deep. My feet slide under me, the surface slick and suspicious. The church bell chimes the hour. Smoke from chimneys melts into the falling snow, disappearing into the night. I wonder if there will be fires. Wrapped in the cold and snow I walk, the wind blowing in my face, snow settling in my eyelashes and hair. The house grows closer. Inside there will be warmth and light and food and laughter, but for just a moment I wish to keep walking, to hold this silence, hold this place in my heart just a few minutes longer.

My stepfather did not know what was in the little plastic bags. My mother suspected, and called the police. Within minutes the drug enforcement officer — a man I went to high school with — for the county had arrived. When he heard the story he said it must have been a drop-off, and someone would be looking for it.

The next day he set up surveillance cameras in the trees and brush where the flashlight had been. He came every morning to check them. He told my parents he would keep watch. He told them not to worry.

A few days later the cameras took a picture of a man the police knew kicking through the weeds near where the flashlight had been. He was wanted in a county north of ours for drug manufacturing and distributing, but was long gone by the time the police got the camera. The local agent stopped by my parents’ house to tell them the news. When he left, he told them to report anything suspicious they saw in the area. He said there was nothing else they could do.

Christmas night a house burns in an adjacent town. When we drive back to North Carolina, the ashes are still smoldering, melting the newly-fallen snow.