Double Flee A

I live close to one of only five supermax jail facilities in the country, a friend of mine owns one of the fastest cars it is legal to drive on the street, and I didn't have anywhere to be. Yesterday I put all those things together and hoo buddy is that a recipe for a good time.

Oak Park Heights is a sleepy little community about four miles from Stillwater. There are boats in driveways, mainly to access the St. Croix river, which is less than a mile away. You see shiny tongs with the stickers still on them hanging on gas grills, careful landscaping, all the trappings of the good life. And like everywhere else, you don't see any people because they're all inside watching television. The American dream is alive in Oak Park Heights. All this and a prison, too. And it's not just any prison.

It's isn't ostentatious in appearance, that is, until you look past it, down its edge and into the distance. When you see the razorwire extending in so many, many layers like a shimmering coast of pain, you know you've come to the right place. Or the wrong place.

Just over a hill either way you approach it, the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Oak Park Heights sits in a little valley which is exactly the size and shape you'd want for a really great game of capture the flag. The trees have long since been cleared away, naturally, and now there's not anything else to hide behind, but the little dell is topographically storybook perfect with open stretches ending in long, graceful curves. It's impossible not to imagine planners standing on a nearby hill with drawings, looking down into it nodding, and then smiling, shaking hands.

I didn't get pictures, but they got plenty of me. Cameras these days are small, so if you can see it and it's state of the art, you're looking at a really nice camera. I saw many of these. I've heard it said that you can't feel cameras on you the way you can feel eyes, and I'm telling you that, in some cases, anyway, that's bullshit. We drove in, read the signs telling you that your rights as an American ended once you came up the driveway, and drove off. We wanted to drink a beer and feel the wind in our receding hairlines, and we wanted to do it right now. But we'd made the trip so we went around the side to see if we could get a better look at the yard.

A few miles away, in Stillwater, there's a really big prison. That prison has rock walls and so forth around it that obviously represent many years of laborious busy-work. It's got a lot of iron and an institutional/gymnasium feel; it's a real slammer. Not the supermax. That thing looks like it came pre-assembled out of a large and very dangerous box. It's not beautiful, but it's striking, I think because it sits in such a pretty place, and yet it represents the ugliest part of existence imaginable. We contemplated this momentarily.

If there's anything cooler than seeing a badass supermax prison, it's driving away from it at 130 miles an hour. Fuckin' voom. Even other fast cars shrink away from a European M3 with a supercharger.

All in all it was a good time, but I ain't ever goin' back there.

For more information about the kind of people who call that place home sweet home, check out this wikipedia article.

posted by dale @ 6:07 PM