It was the sixteenth day of a twenty day trip. Between the gorgeous vistas of the national park, the accumulated dust of our third rate motel room without air conditioning, and questionable, tourist-ready local culture, is it really any wonder that I needed it? I don’t have much of a defense for the deplorable act, but had you been in my shoes, you might have done the same. Judge not, lest ye be judged, or so I’ve heard it said. “Don’t bring it with you,” Wyllis kept telling me. “You’re going to get caught.” It sounded like the kind of advice I’d get from my grandmother. Wyllis was wrong. I could get it through. I had a plan. The only possible way it could fail is if there was a sniffing police dog at the airline inspection point, and really, how often have you seen one of those? It was foolproof. I was going to take the weed, and not much, mind you, in my very own pocket. Putting it in either my stowed bag or my carry-on was an out and out bad idea. My stowed bag was out of my control for far too long, and it is anybody’s guess who or what might be rummaging through it at any given moment. My carry-on was going to be x-rayed, and nothing says suspicious like one of those half-sized Ziploc bags that surely are manufactured exclusively for the illegal drug industry.
 |
| As if having Scooby Doo on the bag isn’t enough of a give away! |
But my own body, they weren’t going to x-ray that. And marijuana isn’t metal. The detector wouldn’t pick it up. A dog, yes, I admit, was the snag. My roommate suggested getting Wyllis completely stoned before we got to the airport, making sure that he was engulfed in large enough clouds of THC haze to keep the smell on him, and sending him through the inspection point first, sans actual weed, to see if a “surprise” dog would pop out of a hole or something, but I dismissed that plan as ludicrous. If there was a dog, it would just be sitting there. So, as I figured it, all I had to do was get in line. If I saw a guy with a dog on a leash, I would get out of line, head straight for the bathroom, and proceed, with great lamentation, to send the pot to whatever greedy sewer rats were waiting below. The plan was ready to go. I was confident. Then George called. We all know that George is more paranoid about drugs than any man on Earth. He once told me it was a bad idea to grow a single pot plant in my house because the FBI fly around in helicopters with special scanning machines that can see the specific heat signature that a solitary marijuana plant leaves. Of course, George also told me that there is a specialized receptor in the brain that activates only when it encounters THC, thus proving that man is meant to smoke pot.
Why else would such a receptor exist? Anyway, despite George’s lack of credibility, he hit me with something profound (if, perhaps, not necessarily true – I never did actually validate it): Airports are technically federal territory. Federal law regarding illegal drugs is harsh to the tune of a year in jail for basic possession (according to George, that is). This, I should note, is information that was given to me the day before I was flying out of town. In retrospect (especially considering the twisted path this tale will leave me on) I should have just gone for it, but I had suddenly lost my nerve. I left the weed at home and flew without incident, little knowing what
new incidents were slowly fermenting in the wake of this poor decision.
It was towards the end of our first week of the trip and I had been hiking, with my friend Wyllis, throughout the stunningly gorgeous Acadia national park which lies along the seaboard of Maine.
 |
| Only weed could make this cooler. |
Now, lest you think me one with a problem, I will say that I didn’t need marijuana to have a great time out there. The landscape was really so beautiful that I hadn’t the least problem appreciating it sober. Yet, there was something missing. That wonderful twist to the brain. That eye behind your eye, roaming in and about the countryside, that is active even when you are standing still. That sophomoric giddiness of being completely high while deep in untouched nature that only good marijuana can offer. I wanted some pot. Is it a crime? Well, yes, I suppose, technically, but that’s beside the point. Needless to say, I was, evening after evening, trolling the night scene of Bar Harbor (the town we were staying in), hot on the scent of any hippie-looking types that would or could be purveyors of the plant. Now, little to my fore-knowledge, it turned out that the northeast coast was suffering from a massive shortage of marijuana. I don’t know any details. I’m not a black market economist. The result, though, was that, try as a might, I couldn’t get any weed. And I was asking. Oh, I was asking. Even asking the wrong people. People with collared shirts on. You know its bad when you are asking a guy in a polo shirt if he can score some herb. Then, out of left field, a glimmer of hope. I call it a glimmer because that is really all I could see of the light that was shadowed by the 190 pounds of Maine-ite female who was standing in front of it...
Continued in
Part II
