As a writer, I should have words to describe to you what I've endured over the last eight months. And while I can relate to some of you what it's like to wake up early, work a demanding eight hour day knocking the socks off of the corporate world with all of the intellect and energy I've ever had, only to turn around and work late into each night using my hands and my heart, and every single ounce of my waning determination, to help two other super-humans erect a haunted attraction, my words would merely tell the story of someone driven, not of the pain, the fear and the sacrifice.

I don't pretend I know about hard work. I've watched the men in my life literally work themselves into crippling pain. Mike, Dwain, and Donny worked and worked, and worked and worked. I couldn't imagine what it's like to work like they did, and do - Mike is STILL working, and let's just say he needs some time off. I've had it easy, and I'm grateful that I was able to share a hammer, a drill and a saw with a Terminator like Aaron Barnum and a maniac like my business partner Ian Miller, and together, throw ourselves - literally - headlong into the most demanding work I've ever endured, including construction, carpentry, steel and iron work, painting, set decoration, lifting and moving, code research and adherence, ADA compliance, the political arena, financing, personnel management, contracts, accounting, and knowing your customer.

I don't pretend I know about fear. I don't pretend I know about sacrifice. My grandfather, who passed through the veil a year ago, went to Germany and was blown up. When he woke as a living corpse among piles of burnt and twisted pieces of human meat, he managed to walk through bombed out villages, over muddy and rutted roads, through gunfire and shell explosions, not to mention roving wolfpacks and black SS death squads - alone - until he reached his platoon. Medics patched him up, gave him some ammunition and returned him to fight in a war against genocide and mass domination. He liberated broken, filthy human skeletons from death camps where they awaited extinction. He witnessed fields of corpses frozen like logs, filled by the bodies of Germans and Americans after battles untold. He was awarded the bronze star for crossing through a machine gun alley of German soldiers in order to gather radio equipment that kept his group from being split off, hunted and shot dead by the advancing Wehrmacht. He never told us stories. He never discussed the farm boy he left on the beaches of France. And even when pressed, he never spoke ill of the Germans. He once told me, "We knew they were fighting for their country, just like we were fighting for ours. We didn't like Hitler, and not all of them did either. They were just like us, and we tried to treat them that way." 

So what is sacrifice and fear to me, when I was doing something I loved? I lost sleep, I lost weight, I stopped writing and reading, I stopped taking photos and I stopped chasing trains. In fact, I stopped being 'me'. And yet, here I am less than a year later... and how could I compare it?

Yet, I did endure. I did my best not to complain. I continued through illness and injury, through uncertainty and anxiety. I muted my 'self' so that I could lend a hand in creating, what we hope is, a flag bearer for the state of Iowa. 

The ideas continue to flow. There are more props to build, more sets to create, more actors to train, more chemicals to mix for more recipes to test out, more projects to propose, finance and execute. We have competitors that don't necessarily like us and we're currently exploring, at best, tentative relationships because we want Des Moines to be a regional destination for haunted attractions, fun houses and escape chambers. And with our success, and the success of our competitors, our city has a chance to attract other larger organizations, different businesses, more citizens, bigger communities, better-represented cultures. We want to see Des Moines become the shining beacon of a growing Midwest.

And all we had to do was stop being us for a year. The year is over. We are us again. But we're not, and we will never be. The nightmare is over so that it can finally begin for real.