Freetown
Bones secured my release a few days later and transferred my care to our Colorado team housed on-site at Freetown. The paramedics helped transfer me from hospital to runway, where the seven of us, including Gunner, boarded the plane. Three hours later, we touched down and reversed the process. That much activity tired me out, so I slept throughout the trip.
When Bones and I opened Freetown, we knew we needed a secluded fortress. Some place high, protected, and tough to get to. Drug-addicted women who have been emotionally, physically, and repeatedly raped for profit need a safe space to unwind all the knots the evil has tied. Getting free is tough enough without looking over your shoulder.
What had once flourished in the late 1800s with schools and churches and shops and kids playing in the streets became a ghost town when the silver ran out. Situated in a high alpine valley, it’s one of the more beautiful places I’ve ever been. And given newer technology and better roads, it’s now accessible while also hidden. The altitude takes some getting used to when you’re two miles above sea level, but acclimation doesn’t take long. Especially for the young. Most folks who live around there have no idea we exist. We like it that way.
For security, Bones brought in some ex-Delta guys and SEALs and retired Los Angeles SWAT officers. We give them each a cabin. Educate their kids. Free healthcare. And then pay them to put all their training to good use. Which they do. Rather zealously. Not only that, but most are still on some sort of active duty, which requires them to stay current in their training. And because the mountains around us are some of the toughest anywhere, they bring in their military friends and conduct mountain and cold-weather urban training all around us. Sometimes they even let me play along. We share stories at twelve thousand feet.
While Bones plays the happy-go-lucky grandpa everyone loves to love, he walks these mountains morning and night, and there isn’t a footprint or broken twig that gets past him.
These are his sheep. Freetown his pasture.
For lack of anything more creative, we used to just call it the Town. But somewhere in our first year of operation, one of the girls said something to change all that. She’d had a rough go. Through no fault of her own, she was taken from her home and sold as a slave. For two years, she was traded around. Suffered horrors untold. To medicate her reality, she took anything she could get her hands on, numbing the pain of the present and past and future. Took us a while to find her. When we did, we airlifted her to the Town. She stayed in ICU for two months.
Bones took her under his wing, which I thought was amazing when we learned what she’d endured. The fact that she would ever get within arm’s length of another man surprised me. But Bones is like that. Everybody’s grandfather. Or the grandfather they never had. Four years into her stay here, she’d graduated college—with a nursing degree, no less—and taken a job in our hospital. Working with the girls. Nursing them back to life. She met a guy. One of ours. Bones liked him. They set a date. She asked Bones to walk her down the aisle.
During the early years of the Town, many of the girls wanted to climb to the top of the mountain, which leveled out just above fourteen thousand feet. Problem was, most of them were in such bad shape or they’d been beaten so badly that they were months from being physically able to make the trek. So Bones and I bought a chairlift from a defunct ski slope and had it installed. All the way to the top. It sits four across. We also built a cabin. Roaring fireplace. Espresso machine.
We called it the Eagle’s Nest.
A few weeks before her wedding, this girl and her fiancé and Bones and I had ridden to the top and were sitting on the porch, sipping coffee, looking out across a view that spanned seventy to a hundred miles in most every direction. And as we sat up there, she started shaking her head. She said, “There was a moment in my life when I was lying in the darkness, a different man every hour, on the hour, day after day after week after month, and I felt my soul leave. Just checked out of me. Because to live inside me was too painful. I let it go because I couldn’t understand how anyone, much less me, would ever want to live inside me. Too filthy. Too . . .” She trailed off, just shaking her head.
Finally, she turned and looked at us. “Then you kicked down the door. Lifted me up and carried me. Here. And slowly, I learned to breathe again. To wake up and see daylight. And what I found with every day was that something in me stirred. Something I’d not known in a long time. Something I thought was long since dead. And that was my hope. Hope that somebody, someday, would see me. Just a girl. Wanting love and willing to give it—to give all of me. I had this hope that somebody would accept me without holding my past against me. Without seeing me as stained. As the horror. As something you just throw away. But somehow . . .”
She sank her hand into the snow resting on the railing. “Like this.” For several minutes she just cried in the arms of her fiancé. But it was what she said last that changed the name. Looking from Bones to me, she said, “I never thought I’d walk down an aisle in white. How could I ever deserve that? Not when . . . And yet, I am.” She shook her head. “I don’t really understand it, but somehow, in some impossible way, love reached down inside me, took out all the old and dirty—the scars and the stains that no soap anywhere would ever wash out. And love didn’t just clean me but made me new. And maybe the craziest part of that is how I see me.”
She held her fiancé’s hand. “It’s one thing for him to see me as I want to be seen. It’s another thing entirely for me to see me, and I want to see me.” She laughed. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see the freak. The maggot. The refuse. I see the new. Sparkling. Radiant. And I like her. I have hope for her. I think she’s going to make it. She is now what she once was . . . beautiful. A daughter. Soon, a wife. Maybe one day, a mom. If you only knew how impossible that seemed not so long ago.”
She waved her hand across the Town nestled in the valley below. “I cannot begin—”
We sat in silence several more minutes. The temperature was dropping. I stoked the fire. She reached into the air in front of her, made a fist and returned it to her chest. Pounding. “I was there. Now I am here. Love did that.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I am free.”
And in that moment, the Town became Freetown. It worked in West Africa; why can’t it work in western Colorado?
Years ago, I signed over the royalties of my books to fund Freetown. Then Bones and I chose a board out of a select lineup of executives from New York to California—all of whom either have or had children here. While the success of my books was the seed and continues to fund a large portion, these corporate partners write large checks. And because they understand the need to operate under the radar, they don’t seek the marketing glory that would ordinarily come with sponsorship. As a result, people here pay for nothing. If it sounds like utopia, it’s not. The barrier to entry is slavery. And having been enslaved, everyone, to the person, chooses freedom.
Returning here is a bit of a homecoming for me. It’s here and really only here that I possess some sort of celebrity status. Interestingly, these girls know nothing of my artistic career. Know nothing of my books. In fact, not even the corporate partners know. They simply know we have an invested benefactor. Of course they read my books. They’re scattered across the shelves here and there, but they have no idea I wrote them. They simply know me as the guy who kicked down the door. Some don’t even know that. Most think I’m just one of the guards.
Which is fine with me.
Every time I come back, I like to remind myself what we do here. It reconnects the disconnected parts of me. I pull on a hoodie and a hat, shove my hands deep in my pockets, and try to hide as I meander Main Street. I find a bench near the pet store where we give away free puppies, rabbits, and all kinds of birds. There, I close my eyes and just listen for one sound.
The universal sound of freedom.
Laughter.