by Shawn Inmon
Not being tested by peer pressure had its downside. I didn’t know if I was firm in this lifelong decision. I hadn’t yet been faced with a smoldering joint a foot and a half from my face.
Said joint wavered a bit in the air, sending a genie of smoke toward my nostrils. It smelled a little skunky, but it had a certain beckoning appeal.
So did a life without addiction.
I grinned, shook my head. “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”
Bobby shrugged, blew lungfuls of smoke upward to join the hazy cloud near the ceiling. He passed the joint back to his right, and with that, I knew I meant what I had vowed and believed. I was never going to smoke or drink.
None of the guys slouching around the couch cared either way. The peer pressure I had seen on After School Specials was absent.
One of the four guys on the couch was my brother Mick. He was ten years older, a few inches shorter than me, with a full Irish red beard and a hairline already moving the wrong direction. He accepted the joint, took a drag, then passed it on. “Figured since you were sixteen now, you might have started smoking.”
“Nope.”
“I won’t have to worry about you raiding my stash, then, right?”
“For sure.”
After an evening of stoned conversation, smoke, and munchies, the apartment cleared out. That left just me, Mick, and his wife Joann. I don’t know how thrilled Joann was to have her new husband’s teenage brother staying with her for an indeterminate period, but so far she appeared to be a good sport about it.
Mickey deftly rolled a new joint, then leaned back against the cushions. “So, what do you want to do this summer?”
I’d like to meet a girl, but that’s probably not going to happen. “I don’t know. Maybe get a job? I need to make some money for school clothes, and I really want to buy a car. I’m sick of riding the bus.”
Mick nodded. Mom had bought him a brand new ’65 Mustang fastback when he was sixteen. We both knew she wouldn't make that mistake again.
“I can hook you up. I do odd jobs for the guy that owns this building. He owns a bunch of apartments in town, so people are always moving in and out. He needs someone to get them ready for the new tenants. How does that sound?”
That sounds like a lot of cleaning up after other people. It also sounds like being stuck inside a series of crappy little apartments all summer.
It sounds like school clothes, and perhaps a car. "Sure. Sounds good.”
“He pays five bucks an hour, under the table.”
That actually did sound good. Minimum wage was $2.30, so raking in double that amount, with no work experience of any kind, was more than I had any right to expect.
I spent the month leading up to the Bicentennial celebration painting tiny apartments' walls an avocado green color. After three weeks or so, that institutional green colored my dreams as well as every waking moment. I had made a couple hundred dollars, but between my comic book and candy bar habit, there was no way I was going to earn enough to buy a car when I got home.
Shortly after July 4th, Mick sat me down and proposed a new adventure. We were sitting around that same L-shaped couch, this time eating mac and cheese and listening to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Greatest Hits on the stereo.
“Are you liking painting apartments?”
I shrugged.
“Well, I’ve got something new coming up, and if you want, you can be a part of it.”
My brother. As long as I had known him, he had “something new, something big” coming up. I couldn’t remember any of those things ever working out. Still, he paid for me to come to Alaska every summer. I owed him a lot just for getting me out of Mossyrock three months out of every year.
“What?”
“Before I tell you, you’ve got to promise to keep it under your hat. If you tell Mom what I’m about to tell you, she’ll never let you come up here again.”
I nodded. Keep something from Mom? I’ve got that skill down pat already.
“What is it?”
“I’m going to go camp out up in the Matanuska Valley. It’s a place that I’ve got scouted out. “
Mick and I had gone for drives up through the back roads of the Matanuska Valley. It was gorgeous. It was also the kind of place where you could drive for many miles and never see another human being.
“Scouted out for what?”
“I’m going to do a little grow operation. The Matanuska Valley is one of the best places on earth to grow crops. Twenty hours of summer sunshine every day, incredible soil, perfect growing conditions.”
I didn’t need to ask what kind of agriculture Mick had in mind. At the time, there were basically four types of marijuana: Acapulco Gold, Maui Wowie, Matanuska Thunderfuck, and locally grown skunk weed, which was often passed off as one of the other three. I’m sure there were other variations, but that was most of what we saw in Mossyrock.
“You gonna stay up there, or go back and forth?”
“Once the plants are in the ground, I’m not leaving. Gotta keep an eye on them.”
“How long are you going to be gone?”
“About six weeks. I’ve been saving seeds all year and I started ‘em in a greenhouse a few weeks ago. I’ve just got to get up there and put ‘em in the ground. You want to help me?” He took a bite of mac and cheese, which gave me a moment to think.
I had $160 stashed away from painting apartments. Enough to buy my school clothes, probably, but nothing else. “Maybe.”
“I know you’re wanting to buy a car. I remember being your age.” Mick leaned back, put his feet up. “Listen. If you want to stay here and keep painting apartments, you can probably go home with what, five or six hundred dollars?”
“Yeah. Probably.” Not to mention a lifetime aversion to babyshit green paint.
“I can’t be sure, of course, but I think this crop is going to net me about ten grand or so.”
“Maybe,” Joann chimed in from the kitchen. She was already learning not to count on his big plans.
Mick grimaced at the kitchen, looked at me and shook his head. “If you want to come camp with me, and if you work your butt off, I’ll cut you in for ten percent.”
Easy math. Stay in town, living with my brother’s wife that I don’t really know and make a sure six hundred dollars, or go spend the summer camping with my brother, maybe make a grand.
“I’m in.”
Early the next morning, we loaded up The Bumblebee and drove north from Seward. The Bumblebee was Mick’s yellow-and-black-striped 1970 Toyota Corona. You might think that two enterprising young dope growers would have a huge van with blacked-out windows, or at least a big pickup truck loaded with equipment, but not us. The Bumblebee—so named because of its distinctive yellow and black striped paint job—was a tiny little two-door that barely carried us, let alone enough equipment to stock an undertaking like this.
Between my feet was a small backpack with a change of jeans, some shorts and t-shirts, and three or four changes of socks and underwear. Mick hadn’t brought even that much. Both the backseat and trunk were filled with plant starts in little peat pots. They were tall enough to sway back and forth as we drove over increasingly rough roads.
We were jolting along a once-paved back road, listening to Don McLean’s American Pie album on the 8-track. We chose this tape mostly because it was the only one we had.
“Uh, Mick?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You said we were camping up here, right?”
“M-hm.”
I glanced into the portable little backseat farm, then back at Mick. “But, we don’t have a tent, or food, or… anything, really.”
He gave me his trademark Mick smirk, turned the music up louder, and drove into a pothole that reminded me I would need to get my fillings checked as soon as I got home.
Half an hour later, that poor excuse for a road seemed like a dream, as each succeeding turn had brought us onto surfaces that could be called “roads” only by a cock-eyed optimist. T
wo twin paths marked an avenue for our tires, with long grass growing up between them. Bushes scraped against the doors and windows as we drove.
After another few miles, Mick pulled into an opening between two trees, then drove another hundred feet until we were surround by bushes on three sides. He turned the key, jumped out, and opened the trunk. I pushed the door hard enough against a giant fiddlehead fern to let myself out.
"Gotta take a leak?” I asked.
Mick looked surprised. “We’re here!”
I looked around. The ruts in the road continued ahead of the Toyota. I had no idea how Mick knew where “here” was.
“C’mon. Grab your shit. We’ve got a little hike ahead of us. “
When I heard Mick say, “a little hike,” I envisioned a twenty-mile walk over hill and dale. For once he had been literal and accurate: after a few hundred yards through thick brush, we stepped out into an open meadow. It was mostly flat, with one rising hill in the middle. A large surplus Army tent was pitched to the left of the clearing. What looked like an abandoned shack sat at the edge of the meadow.
Green grass and wildflowers covered the ground. Late morning sun shone through the surrounding trees, giving a sun-dappled appearance straight out of a Disney movie. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
“Is that our tent?”
“Yeah, of course. You didn’t think I was going to bring you up here and make you sleep in the dirt, did you?”
“Yeah, maybe.“
“I’ve been coming up here, getting this place ready since spring. Everything’s good to go now. We’ve just got to break ground, get the plants in, then sit around and keep an eye on them while they grow.”
I looked around. I couldn’t imagine a more remote place. Keep an eye on them against who? How could anyone could ever find us and bother our little plants?
“Drop your stuff in the tent, then we can walk out and I’ll show you the runway.”
I had no idea what the runway was, but I opened the heavy flap and stepped inside. It was warm and smelled like army surplus canvas and unwashed laundry, with a strong chemical finishing bouquet of Cutter's mosquito repellant. Since mosquitoes are the unofficial Alaska state bird, you absolutely, positively, didn’t want to leave home without Cutter’s. The tent had one cot with a sleeping bag. Next to the cot lay a pile of paperback books and Playboys, and a small bucket filled with cigarette butts and roaches—the discarded joint kind, not the bug kind. On the other side, a rolled sleeping bag sat on a blanket spread on the canvas floor. In one corner sat a disorganized heap of canned food: Dinty Moore Stew, Hormel Chili, and Campbell’s soups.
Looks like home. Not bad. I dropped my pack on the empty blanket and went back into the fresh air. Mick was twenty yards away, standing on top of the rise in the middle of the meadow.
“This is gonna be our latrine.”
“Why up there?”
“Because there’s nothing better than waking up and taking a shit first thing in the morning, on top of the world.”
I had no experience with this idea, but it sounded reasonable.
“C’mon. Grab those stakes and twine, and I’ll show you where we’re going to work.”
A couple of hundred yards north of the camp, we came to a long tree-lined stretch of open grassland. The treetops bent together in the middle to filter the sunshine that fell on the grass. It really did look like a runway.
“Did you build this?”
“God built this. We’re just going to borrow it. See how the trees grow? No airplane is going to be able to see what we’re doing.”
For the first time, it sank in that what we were doing was illegal. I cast a glance over my shoulder, thinking a DEA agent might be waiting for us. “Okay, what do we do?”
“Two inches underneath your tenny runners is good Matanuska Valley soil. We’re going to dig and turn the grass and break up the clumps underneath it. Then, we’re going to plant our little plants. You won’t believe it—they’ll grow a couple of inches a day. We’ll almost be able to sit here and watch ‘em shoot up.”
I liked the idea of sitting cross-legged on the ground watching the plants grow. It sounded like contentment. Very Zen. I dropped the cord-wrapped stakes. “What do we need these for?”
Mickey picked up two of them, unraveling the cord. He eyeballed the runway, then pushed one of the stakes into the ground. He walked a straight line and did the same to the other.
“These will measure our beds for us. We’re going to be scientific about the way we lay everything out. I know just how much soil each plant needs to grow to maximum size. We’ll get started on that tomorrow though. For now, let’s go back and dig the latrine.”
By the time we got back to camp, I had sweated through my t-shirt and my throat was burning with thirst. I walked the perimeter of the meadow, looking for a stream to dunk my head in and drink half dry. I found nothing but swaying grass and trees. Mosquitoes were doing the only drinking, having an early Thanksgiving on every inch of my exposed skin. I brought this to Mick's attention, trying not to sound whiny.
Mick stuck his head out of the tent. “Good man. You have identified the one flaw in our little camping Nirvana. There’s no fresh water within five miles of here. We’ve got to pack in everything we drink or use. There’s water in a container inside the tent.”
Who the hell picks a campsite with no water available? My ever-lovin’ brother, that’s who. More worried about a great place to grow dope undiscovered than what we’re going to drink.
I went inside, found a half-full five-gallon container, and poured some into a dirty plastic cup. It tasted like water with all the life sucked out. It was awful, but I drained it and poured another cup.
“Just remember, we’ve got to haul back in everything we use. Don’t drink too much.”
I bit back the reply: probably not going to be a problem. This isn’t exactly an ice-cold Pepsi.
We exited the tent, grabbed the shovel, and headed to the small rise in the middle of the clearing.
“You want to build, or dig?”
I had no idea what it was we were going to build—I couldn’t imagine an outhouse going up here—so I held my hand out for the shovel.
“The hole doesn’t have to be too big. Maybe two feet each way. But it’s gotta be deep, so we don’t fill it up too fast.”
Pleasant thought.
I dug. The grass wove itself together into a tight resistance, but as soon as I broke through that, the digging was easy. Mick busied himself chopping down a few saplings at the perimeter of the clearing.
Two exhausting hours later, I was done. When I jumped down in the hole, it came almost up to my armpits. I couldn’t imagine that the two of us would poop that much in six weeks. Mick was putting the finishing touches on his creation: a seatless chair, built from saplings and rope. The legs looked too long, but once he pushed them down into the soft soil on either side of the hole, it was just the right height. Mick stood back, admiring his masterpiece. “Whaddya think?”
“I think the first time one of us uses that, we’re gonna fall ass first into the hole I just dug.”
Mick assumed a look of infinite patience, held up one finger, and retreated to the old shack. A moment later, he reappeared with an old toilet seat. With a little effort, he screwed it where the chair bottom would normally go. “There. A throne fit for a king.” Back he went to the old shack, then returned with a lidded bucket. “Lime,” he said. “Just sprinkle a little bit each time you use it and you’ll never know we’ve got a shitter right here.”
I nodded. I was tired, hungry and worn out. I looked at the sky, which was just as bright as when we had arrived. “What time is it?”
Mick glanced at his watch. “9:30. It gets late fast when it never really gets dark. Come on, let’s grab some stew and hit the hay. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
The next few days flew by in a whirl of backbreaking work. We worked at least twelve hours for each of the next few days: turn
ing soil, building beds, and putting the plants in the ground. It was hard, but once my blisters popped and callouses started to form, I loved it. Back home in Mossyrock, life was chaotic. Mom was still a drinking alcoholic, and she and my stepdad fought constantly. Here, in the Matanuska Valley, we saw wildlife every day. No one uttered a cross word, and Mick let me read his Playboys.
The best thing about the summer was our glorious latrine. Mick had been right. There is nothing better in life than shuffling out of bed, climbing a small hill to sit on a throne made of tree branches, and contemplating the universe and the gorgeousness of your surroundings.
The worst thing was the insect life. I staged an ongoing war with the mosquitoes of the Matanuska Valley. After the first day, when I was essentially one big bite, I religiously applied Cutter's to every inch of exposed skin. That wasn’t sufficient, as the little bastards would find a way past the kill zone and work their way inside the band of my jeans or neck of my t-shirt. Eventually, I took to jumping out of my sleeping bag in my underwear and spraying every inch of my body. Twice. Even then, if I missed a spot, they would find it and punish me. One enterprising mosquito managed to crawl inside my sock, all the way to the bottom of my tennis shoe. By the time I noticed, he had feasted on my big toe all day. It was a war I knew I could never win, but I had to fight the best holding action I could.
Once we completed the hard work of breaking ground and planting the seedlings, there wasn’t much else for us to do but hang around. Mick wasn’t really worried about people stumbling onto our little operation. Natural enemies–rodents, rabbits, or moose–were far greater concerns. Mick thought that if we spent a lot of time around the crop, the animals would be less likely to come around. So far, so good.
At night we sat around a campfire, listening to a battery-operated radio or reading. I remember Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts coming from the tiny speaker while a summer breeze of our own ruffled our hair and cooled us down. For us, it was paradise found.
