The national news media had arrived, eventually. The story beckoned because of the sheer vastness of it—the almost comically large number of incidents taking place in a locale that brought with it a ready-made atmosphere. To journalists and professional storytellers, crimes are always more interesting when they happen in folksy, safe communities than when they happen in big cities; there’s a reason that Twin Peaks was set in a small Washington State logging community and not in New York.
But there were other reasons why the Accomack fires were so appealing to the American public at large. Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash—were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers—women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music—did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.
And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia. Underrepresented in television shows and media. Left behind when industries changed or factories moved. Residents in places like these represented the “real America” that national politicians always seemed to talk about when they wanted votes. The America that had just recently caused President Obama to found the White House Rural Council, to “promote economic prosperity and quality of life in rural communities.” Obama had recently been elected into office for a second term, but the vast majority of people in rural places—61 percent—hadn’t voted for him. The United States was still recovering from a crippling recession that had bitterly divided the nation in terms of where its money should go. Should the country continue farm subsidies, which sent billions of dollars every year to less-populated counties? (Between 1995 and 2014, Accomack received nearly $68 million.) How much money should go to supporting affordable housing in rural areas? In 2010, the government-backed 502 Direct Loan program, which provided funds to buy or rehabilitate rural dwellings, was funded at $2.1 billion; three years later the number was $828 million.
This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.
The people who did stay in rural places got older. The median age of a United States citizen was thirty-seven in the 2010 census; in Accomack it was forty-four. There were counties out in the western part of the country—big, cowboy counties—where the median age now approached sixty, populated by residents who didn’t want to leave but who knew they didn’t have the amenities to make younger folks stay. “It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with the folks in rural America,” U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack had just recently said in a December 2012 speech. “Rural America, with a shrinking population, is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we better recognize it and we better begin to reverse it.”
Rural America was a theoretical place that took up a large, romantic space in the American imagination. The people who lived there had cultivated the nation. They had fed the nation and nurtured its soul. Thoreau had to go find the countryside to write Walden. The poet Elinor Wylie had to go find the countryside to write “Wild Peaches” in 1925. In fact, she had to go find the Eastern Shore: “When the world turns completely upside down,” she wrote, “you say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore.”
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
The imagery was beautiful, it was wistful, it was evocative, it was eerie. But what did it mean in real life? What did it mean in the modern world? What things were worth holding on to and what things had to be relinquished? America fretted about its rural parts, and the arsons were an ideal criminal metaphor for 2012.
CHARLIE ROSE was about as national as you could get, a newscaster with CBS This Morning. He’d sent down a reporter from his show to get the story on the ground. “Someone is waging war on rural Virginia,” Rose said to his viewing audience, from behind his desk in New York. “Their weapon of choice is fire. Chip Reid is in the town of Tasley on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Chip, good morning.”
Chip Reid, a reporter with CBS This Morning, had come to Accomack with a camera crew. He interviewed the pizza maker at the Club Car Cafe and asked lunching locals how the fires had changed their lives. He visited the Parksley fire station with Phil Kelley, who had been dispatched as a local fireman representative. Before the cameras were even rolling, Reid and Kelley drove around together, Kelley in a carefully selected sweatshirt with the fire company’s logo, and Reid in an expensive-looking, tundra-ready parka. Kelley pointed out the locations of some fires and explained the equipment and terminology of firefighting, and Reid made Kelley feel comfortable by conducting a pre-interview, a casual conversation to ready Kelley with the kinds of questions he could expect to be asked when the camera was on.
“The arsonist is almost like a ghost,” Kelley offered, thinking of the way nobody had seen him slip into or out of any buildings yet. Reid’s eyes lit up, as Kelley remembered, and he told Kelley that the ghost metaphor was a really good one. Then the camera man started to film.
“What’s your biggest worry?” Reid asked Kelley on air.
“My big worry is, of course, my people first,” Kelley said. “I mean, there’s no need to risk somebody’s life for an abandoned building. But then, how far is this going to escalate?”
“When you arrive on these scenes, what goes through your mind?” Reid asked.
“Total amazement,” Kelley said.
“Amazement?”
“Amazement. No one’s seen him. It’s like,” he paused, trying to pretend it had come to him just now, naturally. “It’s like a ghost.”
“Like a ghost?” Reid said.
“Like a ghost.”
Nobody would deny that it was an awful time to be a firefighter—relentless late nights and permanent dark circles under the eyes. But it wasn’t all bad. They’d suddenly become heroes; famous in a way people from Accomack never expected to become famous and in a way most of them never would be again.