May 28, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   The historic home, one on a row of old, venerable houses on Main Street, appears quaint to a passersby.

Main Street doubles as a state highway, so there is no lack of admirers. Yet look a little closer, maybe take a stroll in front of the house or step inside, and the rustic charm soon dissipates. The front door, the siding, the white picket fence, are all covered in soot from the passing vehicles. That same traffic is audible, at all hours of the day and night, from every bedroom in the house. It’s an apt metaphor, the owner of the house told me, for what it’s like to live in a scenic country town—attractive at first glance, but dirty and noisome when more carefully examined.

The owner, who recently contacted me to tell his story, moved to this rural town several years ago to take one of a limited number of white-collar jobs there. It wasn’t just the rural setting—with its lower housing prices and less expensive cost of living—that attracted a young married man with several children and no little amount of debt. As devout, well-read Christians, he and his wife yearned for the kind of small, tight-knit community described in Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. So the two purchased that historic home and he began his career in earnest.

Yet all has not been well in this country community. “I’m not sure whether the incomplete happiness of this life is enough to explain the dissatisfaction I feel or whether the modern way of living really does make it all that much more unbearable,” he writes. These are strange words to read from a man who would seem to be fairly resilient. He grew up in a military family and previously worked in the fishing and agricultural industries.

“All our troubles here seem reducible to the road that runs through our front yard,” he explains. It was off that highway that a young mentally disabled man approached his wife while she was outside with her kids. He warned her that “bad people” were in the town “kidnapping and raping children.” The man admitted that he had himself previously been abused by these people. Not long after, a male stranger in a car asked one of her sons to open the gate. The child refused. At the time, several locals assured her, “that kind of thing doesn’t happen here.”

Since then, neighbors have acknowledged that their children, too, were approached by strangers in parked cars, including one who asked a child: “Do you want some candy?” Another was threatened with physical violence. Then a few months ago, a four-year-old girl from a nearby town was abducted in the middle of the night from her home by a man who slept next to her and masturbated. She was later found taped up in a box. “There is a real and definite threat locally, and I am not sure if it’s related to human trafficking, rage, boredom, or something else…. I am having nightmares and other health issues associated with this problem,” said the man’s wife.