Member-only story
If you’ve spent any quality time in the Hoosier state recently, you may have noticed that very few people are masking or social distancing. It’s true that things looked bleak in September: Last month’s new infection rate was our second highest ever, hospitalizations were through the roof, and an average of around forty people per day were dying of one variant or another of the novel coronavirus. Yet if you were to walk the streets of any Indiana town today, you’d see that our folk are still about their business, eating in restaurants, breathing on each other, giving hand jobs in public restrooms, and other normal Indiana stuff. This might lead you to believe that COVID 19 is no longer a problem here. And you’d be right. Despite the numbers, we have eradicated it completely. This is the story of how we did it.
To the west of here lies a village called Marengo. In Marengo there is a cave. The locals call it "Marengo Cave." Marengo Cave is a U.S. National Landmark, so the main mouth of the cave is open to the public at designated hours, but there are smaller mouths in the area which one could slip into, even accidentally.
Such was the fate of 42-year-old Jimmy Dingle, a Marengo resident and casual methamphetamine user who, after his fifth DUI, stole a child’s bicycle so as to ride around blasting Eminem from a boom box duct-taped to the handlebars and look for jobs that would hire people with five or more DUIs. He…
