This Used to Be My Playground

Today a big grain elevator exploded in the town near my hometown. The place: Vernon Center, MN! All one block of it! I was there, just...weeks...ago! It's where I visited the farm with the Japanese garden.

The summer before I started college I actually worked at a privately owned grain elevator, perhaps Vernon Center's main local competition. I worked there because my step-dad did, in true Springsteen fashion, and I worked there with my best friend Ben. Our job was to sweep out the hottest, dustiest corn bins known to man. These silos were so fucking huge, and you could not breathe, even while wearing a mouth mask. We also shoveled the rotten wet corn and soybeans, which smelled WORSE than shit somehow. One horrific day we were sent into the soybean silo tunnels, like the pale Morlocks we had become, and scooped out buckets full of shit beans that came up to our waists. There were biting gnats and flies up in our faces, and blessed was the guy whose turn it was to stand outside, lifting up the shit buckets and dumping them into the front end of a skid loader. We wore blue jeans, listened to walkmans, and suffered for almost ten weeks before we both couldn't take it anymore and quit. The we drove down dusty gravel roads, too fast, with the windows of my 78 Oldsmobile Delta 88 open and the local classic rock station cranked as load as it would go. To this day I think of that job? stint in Hell? whenever I get annoyed with my current crazy job.

To learn more about the grain elevator explosion, and get colorful qoutes from frightened locals, go to the link below:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5688315.html

They thought America was being attacked!