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Notes from the Shadows: Writing the Meth Man’s Rattlesnakes


S.T.A. following the Amador County Sheriff's Office
in California 

“Get away from that gun!”

When you’re a reporter following two Sheriff’s deputies into a meth camp along a river, and one suddenly starts drawing his .40-caliber — shouting for a stranger to get away from the 9-mm he’s reaching for — time slows down.

My life changed on a rainy afternoon in Washington D.C. when I landed a grant to study the nexus between methamphetamine addiction and crimes against the innocent. What lay ahead was 18 months of following law enforcement officers through their unguarded moments, then breaking off for trips into the Rust Belt, into the Deep South, to the dry edge of Terry Badlands. And what also lay ahead was my own home, the California Gold Country, with its grassy, ironbound grace – its hard-grizzled land flanked by windbreaks and swept in studded rises of sage and greasewood. The disease was there too, like some invisible shadow drawn over its erupting planks of granite, or the rocky buttes on its western skyline. I’d seen loss and disintegration on those quiet cattle ranges, and now I’d see how meth was devastating other pieces of rural America: settings like the place that made me.


El Dorado County's river border.

And it was in the Gold Country on May 27, 2011 that I witnessed the draw-down. I’d been following two members of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department along a bank of the Consumnes River. A house had been burglarized and the deputies noticed a weed-snapped footpath snaking away from it into the woods. They decided to follow. The trail opened up into a glade near the water, a kind of spider hole in the trees littered with five warped, windowless campers. A half-fallen house was up the way, its bowing eves pressed by branches, its webbed tarps strewn like tent doors. I saw Deputy Lance Bryant peering at another camper hemmed in by piles of scrap metal. We could hear a generator buzzing from its corner, cutting over the faint garble of an old radio inside.

The deputies approached the open door. Bryant tapped it open with his fingers, calling out, “Sheriff’s Office.” He leaned in a little. “Sheriff’s Office, we just need to talk –” And then his 40.-caliber was up. His voice pressed, “Get away from that gun; get away from that gun. Back off that fucking gun!”

The sergeant behind him was drawing his Glock.

I didn’t have a view of the two parolees inhaling crystal meth over a card table; but I’d soon learn that the shock of seeing a uniformed officer appear in their door, probably coupled with the gas-scramble signals flaring in their brains, prompted the nearest man to slightly move for a loaded 9-mm in front of him. Bryant was shouting orders at the parolee, but his limbic system misfiring, the searing stimulant blitzing his focus. His hand remained trembling over his weapon.

I felt a light breeze move through the oaks.  

Alone at a bar a few days later, I sketched out that moment when the parolee’s thought-process rebooted right before bullets cut through the camper side. I thought I had a writing strategy. But did I? The same question went through my head weeks earlier in Calaveras County, when I’d stepped out of a deputy’s passenger door to see a woman charging off her front deck. She was bone-thin and crying in the heat. A tainted batch of meth going around Burson was coursing through her bloodstream. She staggered and slowly sunk down in front of the deputy. “They’re up there in my crawlspace,” she sobbed. “They say they’re going to cut me into pieces and put my head in a box.”

I was trying to write about that, just like I was trying to write about the two crank-cooked mountain men I’d watched searched behind Jamestown, with their beehive beards and soiled overalls, face scabs and skin craters, brows dusted in camp smoke, as if they were sun-mummified skeletons just watching from under the pines.   

And now the standoff in the meth camp. Another note from the shadows.

Attempting to capture it was overwhelming me; but I didn’t know that until a day when I was riding with Deputy Bryant again. He’d been contacted by dispatch about a possible case of child abuse. The tip came from a school teacher working in the mountains near Camino. Bryant called the woman on his cell phone. The details this mandatory reporter conveyed were numbingly familiar to the deputy: A nine-year-old boy was coming to class unwashed, underfed, visibly withdrawn – possible flea bites. Bryant listened, nodding. But what the teacher said next caught him off-guard. A concerned parent, who lived next to the boy and whose son played with him, had learned child’s mother was living with an older, meth-addicted, half-crazed sadist. The man had taken to terrorizing the boy with full-grown rattlesnakes he kept in the house. According to the neighbors, if the child said or did anything the meth man found annoying, he’d hoist the snakes from an aquarium and dangle them near the child’s face. Sometimes he’d just drop them on the floor, coiling and hissing and inching near the boy’s feet.


A meth lab in California's central Gold Country 

It takes a lot to surprise a deputy, but this one looked dazed. Within a minute had the neighbor on the phone. “The guy’s using needles in there,” the man told him. There was a weariness in his voice that even I could hear. “His mom is too.” The man took a breath and added, “Look officer, if we were talkin’ in person, you’d see I’m sleeved-up and I’ve been to jail. I know what I’m talking about here.” He was quiet for a beat. “I’ve done plenty I’m not proud of; but even in my worst moments, I could never have dreamed of treating a child like that. He’s a good kid — shy, but a real good kid.”

We sat in the cruiser waiting for a backup unit. When it pulled alongside us both deputies rolled down their windows. “I’m pretty sure this guy has three-to-four live rattlesnakes in his house, maybe crawling around on the floors,” Bryant said. “And he’s flagged in our system as an officer-safety risk.”  

The other cop turned to hock a brown comet of tobacco. “Got any other good news?”  

And so, we went. And how does one write about the mode of existence in that house? Meth pipes on a rancid carpet are easy to capture. Syringes hidden behind vials of snake venom aren’t too challenging. The droning rattles in a box have faint rhythms you can follow. Even the boy’s mother, unable to make eye contact and lost in her own self- loathing, had a face one could render. But that boy: Could you really bring to life the trauma in his eyes? And could you really frame the sadist who put it there – that snake-clutcher pumping permanent venom into a child’s thought-world? Could you conjure his hairy, freckled chest, those wild eyebrows over taped glasses, all of it tightening into some vague, half-feral expression?

Could you do it? Maybe.

But could you get the fear in that boy’s eyes?

I didn’t think so anymore.

It was a turning point. It was the moment I knew the naked uselessness of my stock and trade. For five years I’d hammered out crime reports blunted by industry wisdom, defanged by codified standards. I could whip court hearings and warrant affidavits into long banners of copy; but my writing couldn’t bear witness if I aimed at human catastrophe. I’d fallen in step with an army of reporters giving my profession one of its self-inflicted wounds: The bruise of uninspired caution; the cut of fatal timidity. More than 400 newsroom jobs had evaporated that year alone. Group-think wasn’t just about promotion now, it was about protection. Writers were rushing into the bunker conventionalism. If the result was stories eliciting little more than “Oh, that’s awful” over a reader’s coffee and bagels in the morning, than that was still better than chancing notice.

The more I thought about the meth man’s rattlesnakes, the more it brought the neutering of a newspaper’s voice into focus.


S.T.A. worked as an embedded reporter with
law enforcement in five California counties. 

Personally, I had no excuses. Early on I’d had a mentor who showed what a journalists could do by taking big risks in their storytelling. R.V. Scheide was a reporter at The Sacramento News & Review back then, and his long-form pieces like “A Mother’s Prayer” were mesmerizing. The words were scapular. The passages felt transporting. In his best moments, Scheide could make pain spill right off the printed page. R.V. taught me that it’s not enough be a great investigator if you can’t channel those findings into words that touch people on a human level, in a way that resonates in their empathy and haunts their peace of mind. Experimentation, and being willing to fail, were everything.

The breakthrough came for me while profiling of a young bull rider in the Gold Country. I was following him around a rodeo the night the lottery matched him up with Sugar Rapid, a four-legged juggernaut who’d been decimating cowboys from one side of California to the other. When it was time for the rider to face his speckled brahma, I climbed up onto the rusty bull chute next to him. I listened to Sugar Rapid huffing under the leather flank strap. I felt tremors vibrating through steel bars as he kicked them. Everything above was August dusk and glaring arena lights. I knew the only way to capture it was to go for writing as risky as the riding.  

That story, originally published as “The Cowboy Life,” later called “White Knuckle Honeymoon,” garnered the first statewide attention I’d received.

But four years later, working on my drug project, I’d forgotten everything I’d learned that night. The grind of typing story after story, day after day, week after week, deadline after deadline, had lulled me into the trade’s preferred style. I was using the approach that many the industry wanted — a reflex to the generic, an allergy to nuance and color, a fear of connecting with readers through immediacy or emotional resonance.

Now, trying to write the meth man’s rattlesnakes, I understood the cost. During the 18 months I’d been on my project, a number of officers, detectives, prosecutors and victims’ advocates had inched out on a career limb for me. They were taking risks themselves, sometimes putting me closer to the nightmare than their supervisors would have guessed. It was all in the hope I’d eventually write something unflinching about the despair and slow-burn disintegration they witnessed every day.

I wanted to, but I was paralyzed. I realized the only way to move forward was on a path less chosen, the one Ernie Pyle had veered down in Italy during World War II, the one Tom Wolfe had wandered along in San Francisco in the 1960s, the one that brought David Simon to giving voice to teen crack-slingers at the height of Baltimore’s drug war. It’s the path hoping factual details and dangerous writing can collide in way that probes the soul of a person, the soul of a neighborhood, the soul of a nation. It’s taking reality and using the full force of the English language to thrust that truth, like a jagged spur, through the center of a reader. It involves gambling and a constant willingness to fall down. But it was the only option I had left. I felt like I was sitting on the edge of that bull chute again, iron bars rattling in my palms, hooves and hindquarters below ready to kill, and my career — my sanity — hanging in the balance. I had eight seconds ahead of me; and when the gate finally banged opened, snapping like a shotgun blast, I was either going to ride or reel; but at least I was back to taking chances.

 
* “Shadow People: how meth-driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America” was published in book form in April of 2012.