BELLVILLE, Ohio — Andy had picked up a copy of Saturday's Buffalo News before we hit the road this morning, and I glance at it as he steers the RV down Interstate 90 across the rolling farmland of eastern Ohio. There is only one story about Timothy McVeigh on the front page.

It describes briefly the final preparations for his Monday morning execution, including how prison officials will move him from his cell on death row to the special holding area in the death house, where he will stay until minutes before the guards arrive to shuttle him into the execution chamber, and measures to accommodate the 1,400 people from the media expected to cover the event. I am surprised by the scant newspaper coverage just two days before.

I scan the rest of the front. The top story is about trees planted in memory of two teenagers from one Buffalo high school who were brutally murdered. I learn that their deaths, unrelated, are two of the 35 homicides so far this year in that city of 300,000. In all of 2000, there were 39. For some reason more than half of this year's murders occurred in the month of May. Another story recounts the aftermath of the recent elementary school slayings in Japan, and a feature discusses the local application of Megan's Law, requiring a public registry of area sex offenders.

An unsettling, if typical, assortment of bad news. Violence against children. Locally, nationally and abroad. Even the story on McVeigh, though it does not mention the 19 children killed in the bombing, carries the specter of this particular brand of horror.

What I am finding as we travel through this corner of the country is that people we have met think of McVeigh as just one symptom of a larger disease. The school shooters and the sex offenders and the violent criminals of various sorts are other symptoms. Same illness. The differences lie only in degree.

"It has to do with an obvious change in the fabric of our society," Wes Kaufman tells me. "I have to believe that it has to do with the breakdown of the families and the fact that a lot of children are not raised with a solid foundation of belief, where they are brought up in a church surrounded by a supportive group — beyond their immediate family."

Wes is a marketing rep for an insurance company, and he tells me this as we sit on a bench next to a restored train station, now a rest stop for bikers, in Bellville, Ohio, where he and his wife Joyce have lived for 15 years and raised her three kids with frequent visits from his son. She stands to the side as we talk, smiling at him. They are both wearing T-shirts bearing the logo of St. Paul Lutheran Church, where they have been active members since they moved to town.

I ask him what the secret is. How do you keep families and communities healthy, together? There is something in his gentle face and the careful, serious way he responds to my questions that convinces me he knows the answer.

But he responds by acknowledging how difficult it can be. "My wife and I were talking last week about how busy you can get, just how many activities you get your kids involved in," he says, "so that you never have that interaction as just a family, like we had when I was younger. We had dinner together every night."

I ask Wes if the execution affects him personally in some way.

"I feel the decision by our country and our legal system to execute someone affects us all in some way, yes."

When pressed further, he admits to having wavered in his stance on the death penalty, but has ultimately come down against it. "I don't feel I have the moral right to decide whether someone dies for what they have done," he says.

He is particularly distressed by the number of people who want to watch McVeigh die. There are those with nothing but a morbid curiosity, he admits, but there are also the victims' families. "There are some individuals who believe this will bring some resolution and help them deal with the tragedy they have been through ... but it's hard for me to understand how that would help, how, if you've lost a son or a daughter, it would help you to see someone else die."

It is hard to imagine anything bad ever happening in Bellville, Ohio. It is a bedroom community of only a couple thousand people, many of whom work an hour away in Columbus. It is a serene and lovely town, with tree-lined streets and small Victorian homes, their lawns neatly clipped and their porches adorned with planters, statuettes and American flags. A white gazebo stands in a grassy square near the two-block stretch of downtown.

"We call it a bandstand," Joyce Kaufman had said when Andy and I stopped to speak with them on the sidewalk near their house. They had approached us, seeing the RV with New York plates and assuming we were lost.

It is a town that seems to be actively warding off the evils of the outside world. In front of several lawns, we notice blue signs, about three feet square, that proclaim, "We stand for the Ten Commandments" and then list the commandments beneath.

It seems a million miles from Mansfield, where we had stopped earlier, although the two are only about 10 miles apart. A city of 50,000, Mansfield has a worn, working-class, industrial look about it. Billboards, empty buildings, laundromats, Porky's Barbecue. We stopped at Deschner's Pizza to see if they would let us hook up our computer to e-mail a story and some photos to our office in New York. They agreed, and while there we spoke with one of the employees, Jen Swartz, a young, pretty girl with her short brown hair pulled back in a bandana. She took off her apron and sat down to speak with us for a few moments.

Jen had heard a lot about the execution on the news, and especially from friends at St. Luke's Lutheran Church. A pastor she knows hold prayer rallies about it, praying for McVeigh's soul and those of the victims. Jen, who works with three- to five-year-olds in a local Head Start program, wasn't sure how she felt about it herself.

"What makes us any better as a society if we say he should be put to death when he killed someone? We're just doing the same thing he did," she said.

I asked, since she admitted to having mixed feelings about the death penalty, if she felt an execution was more justified for someone like McVeigh, whose crime resulted in the deaths of so many. Not at all, she said. "A life is still a life."

Later, after a mushy, bland supper at an "Amish Family Restaurant" called Der Dutchman, we finally stop for the night at a campground in Mount Gilead, about 40 miles north of Columbus. Mount Gilead? A mountain in Ohio is something I will have to see. The owner, a chubby, middle-aged man named Chris, trots out to the RV with his flashlight and welcomes us warmly before climbing in his truck and guiding us down the dark, gravel road between the other vehicles, many of which look as if they have been here a long time. They have porches and lawn furniture and colorful lanterns strung from the eaves of their pop-up canopies. Something about this scene makes me wonder briefly if we have wandered into a nudist colony.

Chris selects a parking spot for us and gives us all the instructions we could possibly need. He seems so glad that we have come. Although I lug a heavy bundle of firewood from the front office to the RV (having to drop it several times and catch my breath), Andy is unable to start the campfire we had fantasized about during the day. We have no kindling and without a flashlight, we can't find any in the dark. It seems to be official that we are terrible campers. We sit inside and bask in the glow, through the window, of our neighbors' cheery fires.

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