Contradiction is a natural occurrence here, one of many byproducts of various cultures clashing with capitalism and each other for centuries. Josephine has plenty of religion. At the same time many are obsessed with sightings of the supernatural and Bigfoot, the latter of which surfaced every couple of years until camera phones became ubiquitous. Downtown there are head shops near Christian supply stores, and a Doomsday survivalist emporium beside a beer boutique that sells growlers.

At a dive with shaded windows by my motel, a bartender says wealthier residents, mostly transplants in pastel golf shirts from Cali, live in the Highland Street area overlooking the main drag. One migration tied to opportunities in the healthcare and retail sectors, which account for the most jobs in post-timber Josephine, spiked in the mid-2000s, around the time Fortune named Grants Pass an ideal place to retire. The magazine’s praise rang like a real estate listing:

A mild climate and one of the lowest wind velocities in the nation, fishing that has attracted the likes of John Wayne and George H.W. Bush, whitewater rafting on the Rogue River, and a new hospital with an adjacent cancer center.

I’m looking around every boulder for signs of foul activity fit for a troubled county. Peering in from outside, Josephine is best known for stories about its inability to aid 9–1–1 callers, and for cuts in rural patrols that have left places like Slate Creek, where Tom Roach and his longtime partner Melinda Starba were evicted from their home, with no police coverage on weekends and even many hours during the week. There have also been token shockers, like the thief who was found hiding out in a shed near a grade school not long ago. Though the perp was in possession of a stolen rifle, there were no jail cells to accommodate him.

Critics of the county government allege that Sheriff Gil Gilbertson has inflated crime rates in order to nudge voters toward passing a tax increase for safety services. Violent crimes, they note, have hovered in place, though property crimes have indeed skyrocketed since 2012. Whether real or embellished, the predicament is one Gilbertson plays up to local press, giving comments like “Our county has become a magnet for criminal activity.” After his deputies neglected to respond to family calls to check on an alone 73-year-old woman who was later found dead, the sheriff told reporters: “Had I had a dispatcher on, there would have been an immediate response.” It mirrored a general warning he gave to the public months earlier:

If you face a potentially volatile situation … You may want to consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.

As one indicator of the truth between fact and exaggeration, a 2013 survey by the Oregon Values and Beliefs Project found that more residents of Southern Oregon are worried about crime than are worried about jobs. It’s a somewhat telling number in a region that includes the statistically depressed likes of Josephine, where the unemployment rate, depending on the study, was somewhere between 11.2 and 13.8 percent during the last comprehensive counts in the aughts, before the clearcutting of services. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, compiling data from 2009 to 2013, puts employment of 18- to 34-year-olds in Josephine at just 53.3 percent, more than 10 points behind Oregon and the nation as a whole.

Stats withstanding, cutesy Grants Pass is a throwback drag with mom-and-pop and antique shops on one end and big box stores on the other. In addition to typical dining options such as Applebee’s, there are also enough ethnic joints to keep tourists from San Francisco and Seattle stuffed; on day two, I have some of the tastiest Thai soup I’ve ever slurped. Even as this corner of Oregon sees timber subsidies slide, core businesses hold on. The bridal store fills nearly an entire block, with a scene out of a homecoming-themed wedding comedy playing out in the windows. For balance, there’s also a pawn shop stocked with fired guns and dented laptops, a military recruitment complex, sleazy motor inns galore, and more than half a dozen head and vape shops. Yin and yang for blocks — according to a woman at the Chamber of Commerce greeting hut, the most popular athletic pastimes are game hunting and Frisbee golf.

Grants Pass still has music stores, plus other Old-World staples that have largely disappeared from similarly sized American cities. On my second morning here, I’m browsing in an independent bookshop when a jock on the radio interrupts the music to report that nearby Hidden Valley High School is on lockdown. I ask the clerk if she heard what I heard. She didn’t, but doesn’t seem to be surprised either. However common such threats are to natives though, it sounds like news to me, and so I race to the scene.

Motoring south toward Hidden Valley I pass Lincoln Savage Middle School, where an uninvited guest once held a class of sixth-graders hostage at gunpoint. That situation, back in 1995, was defused by a wrestling coach who disarmed the madman. Today’s potential danger is a scraggly 14-year-old who, by the time I arrive, is handcuffed with his head down at the foot of the school’s driveway, his greasy mop and soiled T-shirt pressed against a sheriff’s cruiser. Turns out he only had a knife. Just another weekday.

I snap some pics and retreat before the deputies can approach my rental, as I still have quite a bit of research left to do, and can’t risk being exposed yet. Nevertheless, on the return ride I get an earful from Sheriff Gilbertson, who is in the fight of his political career with Dave Daniel, a Grants Pass city cop and former Oregon State Police trooper. Digging through the sheriff’s campaign filings before flying to Oregon hadn’t led me to expect this kind of media blitz from Gilbertson, since the sheriff had submitted a certificate pledging to raise and spend less than $3,000 on the election. But here he is, pitching me in a commercial on a Top 40 station while I’m heading to the motel.

I will protect your constitutional rights … I will continue my passion to protect our citizens and our community, against any threat, foreign or domestic, and I adamantly commit to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The juvenile pen in Grants Pass was shuttered in 2012. So after cuffing the blade-wielding delinquent at Hidden Valley, Gilbertson has no choice but to lock him up in neighboring Jackson County. With Josephine’s major crimes unit closed and more than half the staffers purged at headquarters, it’s become a trope among gadflies, from political committee meetings to Facebook groups, that the only functions left for Gilbertson are issuing handgun licenses and running foreclosure auctions. It’s a sentiment shared by members of the North Valley Community Watch, whose full-page ad I see in the Grants Pass Daily Courier back at my preferred dive bar later in the week. The jaded former county cops who got the ax and citizens comprising the group are claiming the “need for new leadership in the sheriff’s office.”

Gilbertson, they say, “retaliates against citizens.”