Where Are You, TrailerParkMan?

I have a fascination with the pre digital age, the age before I was born and the age I was born into. I have a book, an atlas, a small book for a book of maps, that was published in 1984. One of it's maps shows the Rocky Mountains as a ribbon of rocks that lays vertically and somewhat parallel with the west coast, maybe a thousand miles inland. Just about 60 miles east of the foothills of that mountain range, roughly in the middle of the country, is one border of the plains that should largely define our country. Horace Greeley's home got burned down during riots in NYC (or so shows the movie Gangs Of New York); i figure he decided, "enough of this" and the famous quote, Go West Young Man was made. Greeley is the city he built.

It stinks here. If you are traveling north from Denver you'll pass Frederick or Longmont and you might think you hit something or one of your kids dropped a deuce in their diaper or the food in the cooler's gone bad; you'd be wrong (I hope), you're just nearing the smelly seat of one of America's meat centers. Pig farms, veal farms, sheep farms, beef operations, they're all within a 30 mile radius of Greeley and it all smells bad and heaven help you if you've got a weak stomach on a warm summer day.

There are lots of trailer parks here in Weld County. Hell, there are lots of trailer parks all over the west, but none is quite as broke dick as the Shire, located off Highway 85, running parallel with Interstate 25 and about 25 miles east of it. Lots and lots of industrial buildings, abandoned concerns, grain silos and railroad tracks. Because of the farming and the meat factories, there's lots of immigrant and migrant workers out here. The most struggling of the lot live here, in a tiny, tiny lot off of a frontage road off of 85; guaranteed that if the INS did a raid of the mobile homes here that at least 15 trailers would be emptied out in a day. There's lots of Mexicans out here; folks in Loveland and Fort Collins call this the barrio and little Mexico. I call it home.

Who Are You, TrailerParkMan?

Yo, I'm Chris; older, tall, lanky guy, walks funny, bad teeth. I's born on the east coast, outside of boston, ma, to a rough 3rd generation irish catholic neighborhood, a suburban neighborhood where we sat in the gutter during the summer rainfall, playing in the water; the protestant family next door seemed to have nicer of everything than everyone else on the street but my Grandmother told us they ate babies in their basement so watch out...

I remember trees, 30, 40, 50 foot trees, a grape trellis in the backyard of the folks behind our house, the shanahans, the butlers, the huge-for-a-kid intersection of Lewis Ave and Franklin St., the stable 4 or 5 blocks away in Medford, over the Mystic River, where I used to ride; the Mystic where my uncle Fred brought me to, borrowed a dollar and got nasty drunk on the banks, talking about entropy and leaning into my face with his cigarette breath.

We were told in high school that the kids who went to the voc/tech school weren't told they'd go to college but we were, like it was a secret we didn't want to get out. I had to unfreeze the water pipes with a hair dryer cause we were on welfare when I was 13. No college here. I later dated a Harvard librarian. Sweet.