“You know what my favorite smell in the whole world is?”
Billy was one of my tent mates in Alaska during the summer of '04. He was the dishwasher at the hotel restaurant, and his childhood best friend Sam was a housekeeper with me. The three of us shared a dark moldy wall tent, which also housed various cast-aways (read: people who got fired or kicked out of their tents by pukers or pissers) in the space abandoned by a meth-rattled redneck cook who was kind enough to leave us a hammock and the flashlight he fashioned into a resin pipe. Quite the Alaskan ingenuity.
“No, what?”
“The smell of hot butter colliding with Ganja!” he says while getting ready to chomp down on a bright green rice crispy treat half the size of his face.
With the smile of a Cheshire cat, he began to ingest his pot soaked buttery snack. But with the amount of pot we had already smoked that day, it seemed strange that one could possibly get any more stoned.
“Where did you get that?”
I had to have one.
“There's a girl over there,” and he pointed to a collection of trucks and RVs off in the distance, “with a long flowy dress and long hair. But you have to go through Hell to get there.”
Somehow, hope against hope, we had made it to August, the final stretch of our three month self imposed imprisonment in Denali, Alaska, working for the Crow's Nest lodge and restaurant. Many of us had fled,been fired or flogged, and only the heartiest remained. As a special reward, many of us thumbed a lift two hours south to Talkeetna, where the annual weekend-long Bluegrass Festival marked the end of the summer, and the arrival of darkness for the first time all season.
I hated hitch hiking.
It was a fun adventure, because you never knew what you were going to get, but you also never knew what you were going to get. So the prospect of passing on the festival to ensure not having to yet again get picked up by a psycho, pervert or fiend seemed totally fine to me. Even though Billy assured me we could hitch as a team with his girlfriend, I was also in the auspicious position of having to leave the festival early in order to be able to clock in back at work within a few days, which is what got me into trouble during the infamous crack-ride story.
But I didn't run this far to sit back for the finale, and when else in my life will I be in proximity to a place called Talkeetna where once a year they have a Bluegrass festival that attracts visitors from all over the world? Until now I'd never heard of Talkeetna, and never before taken an interest in Bluegrass music, so, why not?
But that's just the thing, the festival attracts all the local seasonal workers who could get the day off, and a handful of old school fringe hippies. So within fifteen minutes of holding Billy's colorful TALKEETNA sign, a yellow truck we had seen in the neighborhood throughout the summer pulled over and the couple inside got out and started making room in the bed of the pick up.
This was my reward for having endured so many long trips with total head cases. The two worked at one of the lodges too, and they had either purchased the truck for cheap, or managed to borrow one for the weekend. Either way, were down for two hours of wind in our hair and Alaska as the backdrop.
The ride to Talkeetna included several pulls off the road to pull off the peace pipe for a while, and take some moments to soak in the entirety of Alaska draped around us.
And I'd take moments to take in the entirety of the driver;
the way he'd lean against the old yellow pick up, the Marlon Brando-issue wife beater perked out at the nipples, a real nerd-rocker complete with dark rimmed glasses with his cute smiley girlfriend with pig tales and a charming disposition. I would stand there fantasizing of watching their love making videos, their bodies like landscapes, mountains, valleys, thunderous eruptions, movement, evolution, unity, separation.
“Come on, I'll take you there.”
Billy realized he had just described every girl at the entire festival, and they probably all had ganja treats for sale, but I wanted the one he had, the one that oozed with primordial green goo, saturating all the rice crispies in between.
And so began our long journey into hell to find just the right ganja treats.
The way the festival was set up, there was a camping area and then there was the festival area. Between the two was one long dirt road on which resided a twenty-four hour tailgate party. Lined on both sides with monster trucks, RVs, campers and what not, giant groups of partiers would merge with other groups, everyone drunk or otherwise inebriated, everyone trying to dance, everyone trying to get to the festival, everyone freaking out on LSD trips, and oh yeah, even in Alaska, August is hot, so it's 80 degrees and it's approaching ten at night.
In other words, it's hell.
When you start, you can't see how long it goes for, where your friends have suddenly gone, or even which direction your supposed to be going, and there's no real guarantee you won't get kidnapped by a gang of Alaskan separatists in bandannas and grizzly pelts.
But where there's a hell, there's a heaven. The desolate tundra of Alaska has a tendency to attract hot white trash men with too much testosterone, no shirts, low cut jeans, muscular everything, tattoos, and absolutely zero sense.
So walking through a jungle of them falling over each other is hardly a death sentence, except in the extreme fact that you know if any of them caught on for even a second that your attempt to get by them by smearing your body all over theirs had more than an “I'm just a bro trying to get around another bro, yo” tinge to it, you'd be impaled on a flag pole and waved around as an example to all other considering perverts.
And just like Billy described, we had finally found her amidst the tall trees of the redneck wonderland, long hair and dress flowing as she spun around in circles, her colorful beads like prayer flags spreading prayers of color into the wind. And like an ambassador of mother nature, a basket of bright green sweets was nestled under her bosom.
Billy made the introductions, and she tried to make the transaction.
They're five bucks each, or two for eight.
Or three for... six.
Stoner math seemed to dupe both of us for a second, but she just seemed happy to be spreading her warmth no matter what. “Just be careful,” she warned. “Try half first, then wait a while.” Ingesting THC with food usually comes with a warning. There's no real way to gage how much you're ingesting, and because it has to seep into your blood system through your stomach, rather than into your brain through your lungs, it takes a lot longer to feel the effects, and by the time you realize you've had too much, you probably ate the rest anyway, resulting in the feeling of being hit by a mac truck for the rest of the day.
What I wasn't warned about, however, is when that mac truck feeling finally hits, don't go into your tent for refuge. If it's 80 degrees outside, inside it will easily get up to 100, and all the weight of Jupiter will conspire against your attempts to move even the tiniest muscle. What's worse is that the left over two and a half ganja treats will be all that's within fingers reach when the munchies attack and you need more sweet in the mouth at any cost.
I may have been in the tent for a few days. It's hard to know exactly.
I woke up to the sound of Jim's voice. The sound of any former Navy boy's voice would be an adrenaline shot to the heart, but I had spent all summer in Jim's presence, and a special fondness had developed.
“Is Ardie in there?” I could hear him outside the tent. Scrambling to put myself together, he muscled his way into my tent. “Let's go hear some music Ardie. You ready? Let's go!”
Even though he pulled me out of the tent, it still attached itself to me like a membrane from within which, and with Jim's guidance, I could brave the depths of hell yet again.
For the first time all summer, it was kind of dark. You could see some stars. The jangle of Bluegrass echoed in the distance. People floated by like flashes of light, I remember large rubbery Boston Italian lips saying, “I'm from Mehhhdfuuud” after noticing my Red Sox cap, and after what seemed like years of trampling over around and under people in various stages of intoxication, the festival area was reached, and the full blow of Bluegrass music enveloped my ears, brain and psyche.
At some point we found Billy seated in front of the stage, enjoying the sights of the sounds. We sat next to him while a total space rock band took the stage. As a complete 180 degree turn from the rest of the day's music, this particular band brought Pink Floyd level stoner rock into the realms of other galaxies and detonated them right there on stage. Dressed in Devo-esque matching uniforms, their super phasers and echo effect laden soundscapes were the perfect companion for the last leg of the ganja treat-trip.
That's when Billy nudged me in the side.
RD.
LOOK
UP.
And as if the gods had cast a net over the entire world, the Aurora Borealis glowed in a shimmering green and gold above our heads.
Cue the choral music, spiritual moment of synchronicity and don't worry about how you're going to get home, because like the lights dancing above your head, everything is provided for. Jim. Billy. Space rock. Ganja treats. Aurora Borealis. Jim let me doze off on him for a few moments as all the sensations became too overwhelming to engage in a waking state. The sky opened, a hand picked me up, and brought me up into the sky where the lights danced with me, and through a series of pirouettes and do-si-does, a final dip dropped me off, out of the membrane and back into the Denali valley, where the rules of the physical world were always in a constant state of suspension anyway.
