Who else could read the first sentence of a story entitled I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users and think of home?
Well, the first sentence is:
The trailer parks of Jefferson County, Missouri, are a far cry from the international cartels of Breaking Bad, but this is the real picture of meth in America….
I lived in just such a place.
Although the mobile home I lived in at this location was not quite so nice. As a matter of fact, it was the most ramshackle one in Siesta Mobil Home Park and it undoubtedly melted in the rain sometime between then and now.
The empty pad to the northwest, there, is where the Hittler trailer was. I still have the table they left behind when they moved their trailer.
The tree on the little hill in the back there? My brother tore his finger up falling out of it one day right before we moved, and my mother made him wait with a compress before taking him to the ER because she was showing the trailer to someone interested in buying it. He followed her (and my father’s) footsteps into the Marine Corps, so perhaps she was toughening him up for it.
At any rate, I left the trailer park for the house in the valley down the dirt road in 1987 or 1988, and I left that house for good before the meth problem really took off. Kinda like I left the projects before the crack epidemic hit. Why, it’s almost like people don’t take my leaving very well.
(Link via Instapundit. Colorful youth courtesy my parents.)
