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.