Billy Langdon’s “few months stay” at Betz’s stretched into three years—it seemed the job hunt was taking a while because most of the brain-dead factory jobs that used to employ undereducated, semi-illiterate ignoramuses like himself still stuck around here had gone south of the border. He didn’t mind terribly much as he and Stacy were getting by just fine dealing yuck. “This was the way to go, babe! Sleep all day/sell all night. Get paid for getting high!” was the motto he parroted while sampling the goods, which was perpetually.
But the couple learned that selling drugs was not all fun and games. At the start, they just sold to friends who just happened to pop by more frequently, because users tend to congregate when the drugs are plentiful, and hopefully, thus offered up for free.
They also soon discovered that a lot of their new best friends were hoovering up their powder without offering to pay, or with the empty promise that they’ll drop by with money on Friday, which by Friday, became forgotten. They caught on quickly that they could buy a pile from out of town, bag it in grams, eighths, and quarters, and then, when asked if they had any party favors, reply, yeah, how much do you want to buy? with an emphasis on the word buy and demand cash up front.
But this created another problem. As word spread about their little operation, more and more people who stopped by were not friends, but were friends of friends. And then, friends of friends of friends. This, of course, becomes worrisome when large amounts of drugs and money are involved, so Billy and Stacy went pistol shopping. They settled on a Winchester .45 Special at a price that would have bought a couple of crystal door knobs for the Belle of New Haven’s joint in San Jose. The revolver—with its 4-inch cylinder, rifled barrel, and double-action trigger—plus Boomer tied up outside, should protect them, should one of their customers go all aboard the crazy train.
Billy and Stacy showed little concern for theft or violence now, or for the front porch that had collapsed (PLEEZE USE BACK DOOR! the hand-scrawled note taped to the door instructed), or for the roof that was leaking a little heavier, or for the walls that still needed patched and repainted. He never got around to these remodeling projects as he had promised.
2
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little water in my ears,” was Jack’s stock answer to Julia’s questions as to why he was responding more and more with a huh?, what?, or can you repeat that, please? She also noted that the volume on the tv was creeping a little higher. He had just tossed the Fatboy schtick in an Appaloosa ditch, gotten home, and was set to eat and watch the late-night news. “How’d your two computer jobs go, Ju?”
“Great! I set up Dick Dinwitte’s email account and got forty in cash, then fixed Janet Piper’s dreaded blue-screen-of-death. She’s gonna drop by with the money on Friday,” she boasted. Julia had crash-coursed PC hardware/software/periphery troubleshooting the past two years, taking breaks only for human necessities, it seemed to her husband, but it was rekindling her soul that the big guy upstairs tried to extinguish when he took his big piss on it.
He was relieved she seemed to have a purpose, again–a reason to pull open the bedroom curtains before noon. She began doing tech work for friends and then for friends of friends. Then friends of friends of friends. She had a client base and although she wasn’t making nearly the money she made before, this was cleaner, easier—she loved it! Getting paid for what you like to do after getting the boot from manual labor was a blessing. In disguise.
“Did you ask Z to turn the monitors down a little in the studio? That your ears have been ringing on the way home, lately?” Julia asked, a little louder than she used to.
“Yeah, but it fell on deaf ears, pardon the pun. He said he ‘fixed’ the volume because he noticed some of his people were fucking off too much during their air shifts. His exact words were, ‘Christ, Fat, how the fuck are our listeners gonna feel the noise if this place is like a library! Energy, man! We can’t just turn the music up just for cues and outcues--we came from LA to rock, so we are going to fucking rock! Everybody! No goddamn excuses!’ Of course, he had just returned from his Stolichnaya supper. Jag-off.”
Julia poked her head into the living room. “Well, one thing I learned from getting fired and having no union coming to my rescue--document everything. I should have. Screw it, let’s eat. I have to rise and shine early--gonna get Deena Webber’s new computer up and going for her new b & b, she’s calling the Captain’s Keep. She and her husband bought the big place outside town and are fixing it up. Been empty for as long as I can remember. Come in and eat. Dinner’s ready.”
“Huh?”
“DINNER’S READY.”
3
Dallas City, Illinois, has a uniqueness that most American small towns don’t, especially in the less ostentatious Midwest--two castles (the high school and Blackstone that leads out of town, east), plus a stately two-story Colonial built in 1850 with massive columns and an iron veranda that leads out of town west, towards Fort Madison. Its early history reads like a tale taken from Melville’s Moby-Dick, but one that research proves (mostly) true:
Captain Johannes von Poppel was born in Königsberg, Prussia, an important port city and trade-center in the 18th and 19th centuries, in 1813, to generations of a sea-faring family. He, too, took up the sailing trade, but with loftier ambitions than just commerce with other European nations--mapping out a course to the North Sea, out to the Atlantic Ocean, America, und Manifestes Schicksal!
He delivered his first cargo of European luxuries to the port of New Orleans in 1839, returning to Königsberg with the ship’s bowels stuffed with slave-picked cotton. He grew very, very wealthy and built his wife a palace on the Baltic seafront as pretentious as the one occupied by King Frederick William III.
The captain’s schicksal of ending up in Dallas City, Illinois, was as unplanned as Eugene Rathbun’s or Jack Mayhew’s a century, and a century and a half later. While docked in New Orleans waiting for the oceanic Arctic winter from Nova Scotia to Scandinavia to end, and with his frau’s hankering for cloth spun by silkworms, von Poppel plied the Mississippi before it, too, froze solid by January. Getting cotton up the first leg north to New England textile mills, then returning south with an abundance of Yankee-made manufactured goods, also proved to be a lucrative trade for him.
Von Poppel was on a northward route when his ship ran aground on a barely exposed sandbar jutting from the eastern end of Polk Island, near what was becoming Dallas City. He must have liked what he saw because in 1849 construction began on a home reminiscent of the Southern plantations that inspired him to replicate. Maybe he, too, felt the pull here.
Building his home on the river was a choice; uprooting everything from the old country, wasn’t. The German revolutions of 1848–49, a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, broke out in many European countries and were becoming threatening to the status quo.
The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation and a growing hatred for the upper classes. This drumbeat began in the mid-1840s when the working class sought radical improvements to their working and living conditions forcing monarchs and the wealthy into exile to escape political persecution. Those like Captain von Poppel, who emigrated to the United States and settled from Wisconsin to Texas became known as Forty-Eighters.
The Captain and his wife spent the winter of 1849-50 in Königsberg, packing the ship with as many valuables as room could find, and made final plans for the New World: by the time they arrived in Dallas City by late summer, their antebellum mansion north of der Mason-Dixon line would be completed. He would keep his river trade; they would become Americans. Start a family.
It was not to be.
The ship disappeared in the North Atlantic off the Nova Scotia coast in April of 1850; her crew, Herr und Frau von Poppel and their trinkets of lavishness, lost at sea. It was rumored around the unincorporated village of Dallas City (supposed facts that had traveled by word-of-mouth down from Halifax fishermen) that it had been smashed to bits by a monstrous-sized leaping blue whale. (For any Melville fans: the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is a marine mammal reaching a maximum confirmed length of 98 feet and weighing up 196 long tons. It’s the largest animal known to have ever existed.) Alas! Unlike his brother-at-sea, Ahab, Captain von Poppel was killed by a massive sea creature that he wasn’t even chasing!
The mansion was indeed finished as promised, but sat empty until the whiskey distiller in town, who also became quite rich, bought it in 1857. It was rumored that the plantation-style-inspired house became a stop on the Underground Railroad, sneaking slaves up from Missouri up towards Canada, and that watery square-toed boot prints would materialize on the stone floors, sometimes.
4
Julia drove up the long driveway paralleled with oaks with sweeping massive branches that seemed to welcome her inside, and parked at the fountain in front. She had only seen the place from the highway and was impressed by its up-close immensity. Before heading for the office, the owners, Ben and Deena Webber, gave her the tour:
“We bought the place a few years ago as our retirement nest egg and it was a rat’s nest. Literally,” Deena said, inviting Julia into the foyer. “Yes indeedy, she’d been empty for decades, ’cept for a pack of flea-bitten rodents that called this place home and had made sawdust out of a lot of the woodwork. So getting rid of them was the first order of business. Ugh, they creep me out.”
Her husband saw his opening: “Norway rats. Big old Norway rats, Julia. Rats the size of dachshunds,” Ben interjected, trying to get his wife’s goat. “They’re also called sewer rats, or just old plain brown rats.”
“Ben, stop,” Deena chided, not finding the topic or his descriptors funny.
Her goat seemed only half gotten, so Ben continued: “Norway rats live along fences or railroad tracks and under low vegetation and debris--all prominent features out here. The mess inside the place gave them a warm and comfortable joint to hang when the weather was bad,” he said, looking Deena’s way to gauge her reaction, then smiled and winked at Julia.
“Ben…”
He hit his stride before Deena hit her limit.
“Rats will eat nearly any type of garbage, but they prefer high-quality foods such as meat and fresh grain. Rats require a half to one fluid ounce of water daily when feeding on dry food. Rats have keen taste, hearing and sense of smell. Rats will climb to find food or shelter, and they can gain entrance to a building through any opening larger than a half an inch across. Rats can also ---”
“Benjamin Alan Webber!”
He knew the length of his leash, so he turned back to all seriousness. He cleared his throat and continued. “Peeling wallpaper, falling ceilings, cracked plaster, busted windows--we tried to restore her as good as we could, back to the way she was,” he said, his face showered in rainbows from the chandelier’s crystal pendants. “By the way, sorry for the teasin’, Dee. Love ya.”
“Forgiven.”
He continued in fake piety. “But like I said, she was in pretty bad shape. These are the original casings and trim, although we had to replace a lot of the staircase spindles that had been gnawed away by our PACK OF FAMISHED NORWAY RATS!” His pinched-faced impression with front teeth sticking out mimicking a rodent fake-chewing on the bannister was pointedly in his wife’s face. Gentle Ben Webber, DCHS class-clown and renown prankster, just had to get one more rat gag in.
“Sorry, dear, but you’re no Jim Carrey,” Deena deadpanned, which seemed to take the wind out of his sails. She continued. “Anyway, the Captain’s Keep has original floors, fireplaces, and brickwork. In the sitting room here, the period furniture, decorative pieces and art we bought at auctions. We painted this room hunter green because it’s a relaxing color that’s easy on the eyes, and creates a sense of peace and balance. The baby grand’s for singalongs.”
Clomping down the main hallway, heels click-clickety-clicking off the stone floor, Deena pulled open the heavy original French doors. “This is the only addition we made to the place,” she explained, pointing out the cement courtyard in line with a scenic view of the river. “The entire thing can be enclosed with glass-paneled walls and a glass ceiling, so our guests can use it year round for gatherings, weddings, get-togethers, hanging out. As close to nature as we can get in bad weather.”
“Speaking of hanging out, I gotta go hang out in the fields. Love ya, Dee. Good to see ya, Julia.” Ben shot his guest a discreet Jim Carrey rat-face and walked towards his truck to go fertilize.
Back inside, showing off the upstairs, Deena pointed out that the doors to each guest room were original, and that the clawfoot tubs in the bathrooms dated back to the 1880s. “That’s a lot of bathwater,” Julia said in mock disbelief.
Deena stopped at the display box that Ben had built and placed on the second story landing. “These are artifacts we found during the restoration. A little mini-museum of things we’ve unearthed around here.”
Inside the glass case were shards of dinnerware with Wedgewood baked into them; old medicine bottles whose active ingredient was either cocaine or cannabis; rusty tins of early mass-produced food products; arrowheads, beads, and a few bone fragments. “We found the Indian stuff in the backyard when we were digging the foundation for the courtyard.”
Julia, a fan of objects new and shiny, showed polite interest, but was biting at the bit to get on with things. She didn’t really care for old things, except for her husband.
“And that’s it,” Deena said, at last leading them back down to the main floor. “We’re calling our bed and breakfast the Captain’s Keep in honor of the builder of the place. She stepped into the kitchen to fetch a plate of made-from-scratch blueberry muffins, fresh from the oven, and a pot of fresh-ground coffee as Julia unboxed the CPU, monitor, cords and cables and got down to business.
5
Benjamin Webber was one of the largest landowners in northern Hancock County, both physically and in size of acreage, of some of the richest soil in the world— only patches of farmland in Argentina, in southern Ukraine, and along the Yellow River in China can match the fertile ground that covers much of the northern half of Illinois, state soil experts say. The ground is as dark and rich as Starbucks coffee due to glaciers that covered much of the region before they began retreating about 12,000 years ago. As the ice melted, strong winds lent the land a jolt of fertility. Massive dust storms spread mineral-rich river basin soil well over 100 miles, laying a fertile layer of topsoil ideal for corn and soybeans.
Illinois got yet another ecological boost because the glaciers killed off the state’s one-time woodland terrain–that was replaced with prairie grasses, which fed even more crop-friendly nutrients into the soil, explains a scientist with the Illinois Department of Agriculture. It can take hundreds to thousands of years to create an inch of topsoil, which is why it is often referred to as a non-renewable resource--and is thus valued at between $6000 and $8000 an acre in Hancock County at 2020 land prices.
Ben was born and raised and lived on the same farm his grandfather bought back in 1921 for $1145. Enjoying a want of nothing, he was a millionaire several times over just like the Wall Street suits who slaved away in big-city high-rises, but without the stress of big-city living. Bowing to the Man? Not him, by God.
At six-foot-four, 265 pounds, he was known as Gentle Ben, the nickname culled from an old tv show about a boy and his pet grizzly bear from the 1960s, and the moniker fit just right--from the crop of chest hairs looking like a wheatfield poking through his work shirt, to his full brown beard and long curls of uncombed locks poking out from underneath his Pioneer seed cap--and because he was probably one of the nicest guys in town. Everybody liked Ben Webber, a member of the volunteer fire department, a DCHS school board member, church deacon, and a friend.
His first kiss was the one planted on Deena lips in second grade under the fire escape; she was the only girl he ever kissed besides his mother, and you know what? her’s are still as sweet as they were back then in Miss Donovan’s class. They married in 1976, the 100th anniversary of the United States, at First Christian Church. A kegger at the farmhouse and a honeymoon to Cancun followed. Unfortunately, children did not.
Deena got pregnant three times but carried no child to term because of gastroschisis, a birth defect caused when the fetus’s intestines extend outside the body and tear, essentially starving the developing baby in its mother’s womb. (It is probably no coincidence that incidences of gastroschisis appear to be higher in areas where surface water atrazine levels are elevated, especially when pregnancy occurs in the spring, the time when the broad-leaf herbicide used to stop pre-and postemergence broadleaf and weeds is applied. More on that, a few paragraphs from now).
The couple seemed unaffected being kidless, at least publicly, as they joked and laughed and helped others of all ages; perhaps their altruism was because they were denied children of their own. Or maybe they were just good folks since childhood. They seemed to take the unburdenness in stride, spending winters in Arizona, touring the world. Living large.
When the ramblin’ wreck of a mansion on the outskirts of town came up for auction for taxes due, Deena pushed her husband to buy it. A bed-and-breakfast will be a good investment, with the Mormons rebuilding the temple in Nauvoo after nearly 200 years. That should draw the faithful from around the world--the faithful with no decent place to stay within fifty miles, she reasoned. Besides, she was bored. And besides, she had always fantasized about living like Scarlett O’Hare from her favorite movie.
Fiddle-dee-dee, Ben Webber could never tell his Dee no.
6
Methihkweedweed
Farmers have long endeavored to protect field crops from disease, pests, and unwanted plants—beginning the last century or so, agricultural chemicals have been used predominantly because they produce certain effects with less effort. While the West was won with guns, the Midwest—breadbasket to the world—might have been won with poisons.
Post-World War II advances in technology saw the advent of chemically synthesized agricultural chemicals, which brought about an increase in crop yield and an efficiency in farm work. A weeding time of 50 hours per 10 acres in 1949 dropped to approximately 2 hours per 10 acres in 1999, showing that herbicides had made the weeding work more efficient. However, many of these agricultural chemicals are highly toxic to humans; some cause immediate danger during use, some are highly residual in crops and soil.
DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was developed as the first of the modern synthetic insecticides in the 1940s. It was initially used with great effect to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases among both military and civilian populations. It also was effective for insect control in crop and livestock production, institutions, homes, and gardens.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility for regulating pesticides before the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, began regulatory actions in the late 1950s and 1960s to prohibit many of DDT’s uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide’s declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring stimulated widespread public concern over the dangers of improper pesticide use and the need for better pesticide controls.
In 1972, EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks. Since then, studies have continued, and a relationship between DDT exposure and reproductive effects in humans is suspected, based on studies in animals. In addition, some animals exposed to DDT in studies developed liver tumors. As a result, today, DDT is classified as a probable human carcinogen by U.S. and international authorities.
Atrazine is the common name for another herbicide that is widely used to kill weeds, mostly on farms. Pure atrazine–an odorless, white powder–is not very volatile, reactive, or flammable. It will dissolve in water. Atrazine is made in the laboratory and does not occur naturally.
Atrazine is applied to agricultural fields or to crops; it is also used near highways and railroads. Particles of atrazine may enter the air after it is applied to the soil and may also be washed into the soil by rainfall, thus contaminating surrounding areas, including waterways. Some atrazine may migrate from the upper soil surface to deeper soil layers and enter the groundwater.
Any atrazine that is washed into water will stay there for a long time because breakdown of the chemical is slow. This is one reason the poison has been found in water collected from many drinking water wells in the midwestern United States and in streams, rivers, and lakes near fields where it has been applied, with higher amounts found in spring and summer months.
Children may be exposed to atrazine if they play in fields where atrazine has been applied or in streams receiving runoff from those fields and should be encouraged not to play in these fields or bodies of water. Low amounts of atrazine have also been found in carpet and house dust in homes in the Midwest.
Paraquat, also known as methyl viologen, is an organic compound classified as a viologen, an alkylating salt that is one of the most widely used herbicides. It is quick-acting and non-selective, killing green plant tissue on contact. It is also toxic to human beings and animals, and has been linked to the development of Parkinson’s disease. The use of paraquat is banned in several countries.
In the United States, paraquat is available primarily as a solution in various strengths. It is classified as “restricted use,” which means that it can be used by licensed applicators only. The estimated use of paraquat in US agriculture is mapped by the US Geological Survey and shows a doubling from 2013 to 2017, the latest date for which figures are available, and now reaches 10,000,000 pounds annually.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, ingesting paraquat causes symptoms such as liver, lung, heart, and kidney failure within several days to several weeks that can lead to death up to 30 days after ingestion. Those who suffer large exposures are unlikely to survive.
In the 1970s, a controversial program conducted by the US government aimed at stopping the flow of marijuana into America included spraying paraquat on Mexican cannabis fields from helicopters. When the pot contaminated with the toxic viologen began to show up in US markets, the program was halted, government officials declaring that the poison-laced weed killer was harmless to American imbibers.
On March 9, 2016, EPA Administrator Scottt Pruitt met with Dow Chemical CEO, Andrew Liveris, at an energy industry conference in Houston. Twenty days later, Pruitt announced his decision to deny a petition to ban Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide from being sprayed on food, despite a review by his own agency’s scientists that concluded ingesting even minuscule amounts of the chemical can interfere with the brain development in fetuses and infants.
No surprise, since Dow, which spent more than $13.6 million on lobbying in 2016, has long wielded political power in the nation’s capital. When President Trump signed an executive order in February, 2016, mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations, he handed the pen to Dow’s chief executive, who was standing at his side. His company wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics urged Pruitt to take chlorpyrifos off the market. The group representing more than 66,000 pediatricians and pediatric surgeons said it is “deeply alarmed” by Pruitt’s decision to allow the pesticide’s continued use.
“There is a wealth of science demonstrating the detrimental effect of chlorpyrifos exposure to developing fetuses, infants, children, and pregnant women,” the academy said in a letter to Pruitt. “The risk to infants and children’s health and development is unambiguous.”
For 15 years, Florida citrus growers have struggled with a tiny Asian insect that has devastated crops and threatened the state’s standing as the nation’s top orange producer. Industry leaders thought they had a solution: aldicarb, a potent but dangerous pesticide that the EPA began phasing out in 2010.
But bringing back aldicarb for oranges and grapefruits wasn’t a sure thing. Citing safety concerns, the EPA said in 2018 it would not endorse a similar proposal submitted to Florida’s agriculture agency. In 2019, a pesticide company gave it a try. It retained lobbyists who had worked on congressional agriculture committees. Members of the House Agriculture Committee joined the effort, questioning the EPA about the pace of its decision-making.
“What would it take to get a ruling on the pesticide by the end of 2019?” a congressional staffer asked an EPA official in an email.
The agency didn’t act quite so quickly, but it did execute an about-face: a year later, just eight days before President Trump left office and 10 years after the EPA started phasing out the pesticide, the agency approved the use of aldicarb on Florida oranges and grapefruits.
This came after the agency neglected to conduct a full Endangered Species Act analysis for potential harmful effects. It came after the agency provided little opportunity for public comment. It came after the EPA changed how it estimates whether people might ingest unsafe amounts of aldicarb. It came after the EPA’s findings that a single granule could kill birds and mammals. It came even after determining that high levels of aldicarb can interfere with a human enzyme that controls messages sent to nerves.
In a paper published in 2020, U.S. Geological Survey experts reported that water collected from monitoring wells in eastern Long Island’s agricultural area contained low levels of these chemicals roughly 40 years after aldicarb was last used there.
“There’s this perception by the general public that regulators are protecting the public from environmental dangers. But that’s far from the reality,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization focused on safeguarding land, water, and the climate.
Besides insecticides and herbicides, the modern farmer might also need fungicides (agents for controlling diseases that damage field crops), rodenticides (agents for controlling rats and other rodents), plant growth regulators (agents to promote or inhibit the growth of field crops), attractant (agents that attract mainly harmful insect pests by odor or other means), repellents (agents for having repellent action on harmful mammals and birds that damage field crops), and spreaders (agents that are mixed with other agricultural chemicals to enhance the adherence of these chemicals).
So, how is your food and water tasting right about now?
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