Swink
Winter will come soon to this town of some 700 people in eastern Colorado, a time of cold and snow and the winds that blow and, of course, those amusing little icicles that form at the end of the nose.
When the days grow short and that first storm howls across the prairie, Swink High School senior Cord Williams knows exactly what he’ll be doing.
“Sledding,” he said.
Uh, Cord, it seems kind of flat out here. If you stand on the hood of your car you can see Kansas 90 miles to the east. Sledding?
Williams smiles and gives a brief glimpse into his world.
“Don’t need hills,” Williams said. “We just tie a rope around a car bumper and hang on. You get dragged. You know, there’s not a lot of traffic on the back roads.”
And as classmate Chris Stork put it: “Out here you make your own fun.”
Swink rests on the rich soil about 60 miles southeast of Pueblo, sandwiched between the larger farming towns of La Junta and Rocky Ford, although don’t confuse either of those towns with a metropolis.
Last Monday, for example, the Rocky Ford Daily Gazette had this news note on the front page: “Rocky Ford police cited Sally Kelly, 57, La Junta, for making a left turn from the wrong position at Main and Swink.”
Swink is that kind of a place. If you’re driving along U.S. 50 and obey the in-town posted speed limit of 35 mph, it will take you 41 seconds to pass from one end of the town to the other.
And you would have missed a place where things move a little slower and people are a little nicer.
Dianna Milenski is the principal of the junior-senior high school, which has a total of 190 students in grades seven through 12. Milenski graduated from Swink High, as did her mother. One of Milenski’s daughters graduated from Swink three years ago and her other daughter will graduate in May.
“You’ve heard ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That’s Swink,” Milenski said. “Families know each other. Our kids know a lot of people are always looking out for them.”
Swink’s CSAP scores are consistently higher than the state average. And in the past five years, tiny Swink High has sent two students to Harvard University. Others have gone through the Air Force Academy.
“We don’t have locks on our lockers,” Stork said. “There’s no reason to. We tend to trust each other out here. We respect each other. We look out for each other.”
You get that feeling when you turn off the small highway and head down Columbia Street to the high school and elementary school. The road is covered from curb to curb with names – in huge letters made with whitewash – of Swink High students.
As they do every year, the townsfolk gather the night before the football team’s homecoming game. The town provides the whitewash.
And you don’t have to be the star quarterback to get star treatment.
“Here’s the big football weekend, and someone painted my name in huge letters on the street,” Stork said. “I’m on the golf team.”
Williams is a football and baseball player at the school and like many of his classmates, a hunter. “We’re just like kids anywhere, I guess. We listen to the same music. Some country music. A lot of rock ‘n’ roll. Some rap.”
Sitting beside Williams is classmate Kelby Siegfried. He lives on a ranch. His parents breed and sell donkeys. He turns and stares at his friend.
“Rap?” Siegfried asked.
“OK,” Williams said, smiling. “No rap.”
Unless you count the baseballs that leave the high-school field, soar into the prairie sky and rap the side of one of the four grain silos that sit just beyond the left-field fence.
Sitting in his Swink High office, Pat Lesar tries to paint a picture of the town. He has worked in the Otero County school district for nearly four decades, including the past six as superintendent. He’ll retire next June.
“At first I didn’t want to stay,” he said. “You wonder what keeps you in a place like this. After all these years, I think it’s this: Everyone in this town matters. And we take care of our kids. People in the school and people in the town know each of the kids personally. We treat them special. I think that means something to them.”
It means something to Morgan Schlegel. She’s a junior. She wants to become a kindergarten teacher.
“I can’t imagine living in a big city,” she said. “All those people, the noise, the sirens. We hear a siren out here now and then, like when someone’s haystack catches on fire.
“But after college I want to teach in a place like this. I’d love to come back here.”
Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.