In Kansas, we lived half a mile from the federal prison—the
notorious Leavenworth that everyone thinks of when they hear Leavenworth—which looks like a state capitol melded to the Death Star. Some of the prisoners were employed by a program to repopulate the plains with buffalo—at the time my family lived there, they’d just started, and there were three buffalo trotting around
the prison.
The prisoners—skittish, scowling men in green jumpsuits—also worked in the grocery store: they hauled bags, plunking them into the trunk of our gargantuan Oldsmobile.
Life was in the prison’s shadow; I was too young to understand how scary that was. The roller rink—classic 1970s roller-disco style—was across the street from it. We had our second-grade end-of-school-year party there. We skated to “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation, and Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You.”
On Google Street View, I traced the route I walked from home to school, clicking my way down Cherokee Street to David Brewer Elementary School. Except for the part through Brett Friedrich’s backyard, which was so vast that they needed a riding mower.
Every day we walked past a hulking Winnebago, parked in a driveway. It was still there, forty years later, on Street View. The green stripes had faded in the sun.