Greely

The year after my high school graduation, I joined a ten-month national service program called Americorps. In the final three months, we were stationed in a small city an hour north of Denver. This was a land never anything at all, a place untainted by hope, a patch of gravel that grew with neither grace nor intent until a town called Greely was born. One day, a terrible beast found Greely, a monolithic slaughterhouse which sat down in the middle of the town and demanded its people feed it. Day and night, it eats, teeth gnashing and grinding as it devours trucks by the handful, cracking them open to slurp up their bloody insides before spitting the shells back onto the road. When its stomach becomes too swollen with gore, it will heat up, boiling the biological soup until it becomes a vapor. With a great bellow, the gaseous blood erupts from the wide-barreled chimneys, raining down upon the desiccated town like ash. It is from this phenomenon that Greely earns its one and only reputation: stench.

I quickly became depressed. Hateful. Every morning, when we were forced to hold hands and pray before work, I cursed God. I detested the lumbering slaughterhouse workers and their don’t-tread-on-me hoodies, hated the steaks they would bring us on lunch breaks, and the cheers that followed. My mind wandered back to California. I imagined that there, the people were kind and soft-spoken, the air always salty and fresh, the cows free and alive. The surfers, oh, how noble they must be. This became the object of my obsession. I would watch The Endless Summer daily, listen to the Beach Boys, or a surfing audiobook while I labored. The afternoon stench would fade away as my mind wandered to half moons dancing among the ripples of a quiet sea, cool, powdery sand between my toes, timeless nights which gave way to a teal and orange sunrise.

Just two things stood between me and my pro surfer dreams: one, that I had never surfed before, and two, that I was several states from the nearest ocean.

Bisecting the town, raised by a gravel track ballast, was a railroad. It was the only place in Greely that I enjoyed, and the only one I hold any fond memories of. I would go there to run, pretending that I wasn’t going to turn back. Sometimes it would rain while I ran. I would take my shirt off and hoot and holler as the raindrops hit my skin, as the storm washed away everything but the iron beneath my feet and the breath in my lungs. Sometimes I would run into the night. I would see small pockets of amber warmth peeking through the tarped shelters that surrounded the railroad on the city’s outskirts. I saw a man, bearded, smiling, still, golden. One day, I ran so far I found a forest, and within that forest was a river. My own miniature ocean, one where I could practice swimming to prepare for my future as a surfer. The next day, I came back with board shorts. The second I jumped in, I was gone, swept away instantly by the raging current. I was met with an incredible force, ragdolled and subjected to the whims of this miniature ocean I set out to conquer. In the torrent, I was met with an incredible calm, and I never feared for my safety. The river carried me along, swiftly and gently, until it deposited me on a small bank a couple of miles later. In the final weeks of the trip, while my coworkers shed tears over leaving Greely and the connections they made, my disdain for the place never died. I wanted nothing to do with this town nor the people who lived in it. Though I traveled back to California, I never went out surfing. I found the beaches to be frigid, and the people to be rude. Since then, my dreams have traveled to Hawaii, where the water is clear, palms dance in the twilight, where the people are pure of heart, and where summer is truly endless.