Leaving Franny’s camp on Monday we stopped in the neighboring town of Liberty, NY for a quick lunch — only to discover water pouring into the car underneath the dashboard on the passenger side. I may not be one of the Tappet brothers but I know that’s not a good thing. After eating half an Italian sub while Peggy had a slice of pizza, all the while listening the an endless tale of woe by the guy in the next counter over (his wife had thrown him out the trailer, monthly disability checks were less than he used to make driving a forklift in a week, his father-in-law just plain didn’t like him) I found a gas station with a garage and had the problem quickly diagnosed. A hose running from the air conditioner was supposed to drain water and was clogged up, causing the small flood in the front seat. We elected to have him address the problem while cooling our heels in the garage’s waiting room.

There we encountered another sad example of local destitution: a young couple with a two-year-old child who were waiting for their own car to be fixed. They had their groceries with them — Fruit Loops, Oreos, large bottles of soda — and seemed unusually agitated. They were both rail thin, with bad teeth and seemingly no volume control: whether talking about the car or which soap opera to watch on the garage’s TV, they shouted at each other in an unenunciated mush of reproach that sounded to me like a parody of the family in Napoleon Dynamite. I lived in a number of redneck towns growing up, though none quite as destitute as Sullivan County seems to be now, and pegged them for a somewhat familiar brand of local loser. Until I got a look at the young mother’s bruised, scabby legs and realized the awful truth: They were meth freaks.

Not to sound naive. I certainly encountered a lot of speed freaks in my youth, at rock concerts and on the streets of San Francisco, especially in the Haight. And I have been reading a lot of press coverage about the nation’s meth epidemic, including the cover story in this week’s Newsweek but I thought of it as…out there. Like Oklahoma. But one look in this woman’s eyes — she asked Peggy for money after she said hi to her toddler — told the tale. The little girl was adorable: blond haired and blue-eyed, she could have come off a Sunbeam bread bag. She was also seemingly unmonitored by mom or dad. They kvetched like Job about everything while their daughter ran in and out of a rather dangerous environment.

Though probably not as dangerous as the one she faces at home. Of all the horror stories about meth addiction — a scourge that is literally sweeping rural America, like a white-trash crack epidemic — the worst are about the children. Neglected, abused, exposed to the worst sorts of depravation they are part of a new generation of the damned. The closing line of my last post, re the Pillowman, seems callous in retrospect. That play concerns an author who writes stories about children being abused, having witnessed the same thing happening to his brother. They’re both dead by play’s end, as those meth freak parents may be in short order. But the girl will live on.

Postscript: In Slate’s Press Box today Jack Shafer challenges the Newsweek piece saying, among other things, the magazine gives no figures for how many lives meth has actually claimed. I guess that all depends on how you define living.