9
" 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. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
10
" By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
12
" Not merely because they happened in the dust and heat of the United States south and southwest, but because these crimes were viewed by much of the American public as a reaction to the Great Depression. “Gaunt, dazed men roamed the city streets seeking jobs,” writes historian E. R. Milner in The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. “Breadlines and soup kitchens became jammed, foreclosures forced more than 38 percent of farmers from their lands . . . by the time Bonnie and Clyde became well-known, many felt that the capitalistic system had been abused by big business and government officials. Now here were Bonnie and Clyde striking back.” They were products of their times, and they defined how generations of Americans would view and interpret lovers who broke the law. And when they died, they died together in a rain of bullets, faithful to each other until their end. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
14
" How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand starts in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don't feel like they're disappearing to the people who are living there.
I went to Accomack County and I found endless metaphors for a dying county in a changing landscape. There were endless metaphors that went the opposite way, too: rural life as a fairy tale, better than the rest of the country.
The reality is probably somewhere in between. The people who lived in Accomack were happy to live in Accomack. It wasn't small, it was close-knit. It wasn't backward, it was simple. There weren't a hundred things to do every night, but if you went to the one available thing, you were pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you knew. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
15
" Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
17
" To talk about arson is to talk about buildings burning down. To talk about the term 'pyromania' is really to talk about the unfathomable mysteries of the human brain and the human heart: Why do we do things? Why do we want things? What moves us, and stirs us, and why are some people moved by the things that the rest of us find inexplicable or abhorrent?
Some arsonists go into treatment and are cured, though those are often the arsonists whose fire setting was a by-product of another mental illness. Some arsonists take well to the therapy, pronounce themselves cured, and then leave treatment and immediately burn down another house. No one really knows why. Because, despite all of the research and studying that scientists have put into understanding arsonists over the years, there's a piece of the puzzle that remains inexplicable:
Some people light things on fire because they feel like they have to. "
― Monica Hesse , American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
