flash back
I said good bye to my mother, grabbed my lunch bag and took off for the day like any other school day. I was a freshman starting high school. I’d spent the summer with my primary school friends hanging out around downtown, reminiscing and smoking pot. All the first week I had road my bike directly to school and back home. But today was different, I had a plan. I would skip school and hang out at the local gravel pit. It was early in the fall semester and the days were still sunny and warm. The gravel pit would be empty and I could set in the sand, soak up the sun, smoke my little bowl and be alone all day. I would get transcendental like Henry David Throeau. I thought to myself. Damn this a plan.
I thought to myself “This will be a great day” as I mounted my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed bike and started peddling to the gavel pit a feeling of anticipation and excitement over took me. I peddled hard and purposely because as soon as I got to the sandy shore of the gravel pit I could fire-up my bowl. My friend down the block Bill had borrowed my pipe the week before and when he returned he had included a small bud of some gold colored weed. I would smoke that gold bud, be high and know what being carefree and independent and free of everyone for an entire day is like.
I got off my bike and walked around the gate blocking the dirt road, I ignored the private property sign and the no trespassing sign. I’d been to the gravel pit many times before without much issue. (There was the time on Lenny’s Honda dirt bike and the police chase but that’s another flashback for a different day).
As I walked down the private road I passed the active gravel pit on my left. I noted the vastness, noise and ugliness of it compared to ‘my little gravel pit’ a short ways up the road and over a hill on the right. I walked on until I crested the hill and saw my beach. It was a pretty view. A small ridge of trees with a road running along was across the water and golden sand under my feet running down to the water's edge. I sat down unpacked my stash and hit the little bowl a couple of times before drifting off into thought. I can’t say how long I sat there, it may of only been 2 minutes or an hour but I was startled into action by the sight and sound of approaching trucks traveling down that road across the gravel pit.
I remember grabbing my bike and pushing it and my skinny ass as fast as possible down that private road past the gate blocking that private road to the safety of the other side of that private property sign. I hopped on my bike and peddled to the safe space of the nearby Friendly Forest. After riding down the tree lined path into the forest some I sat in the forest feeling safe from today's adventures I remind myself of when Brent threw a rock through the window of the nearby liquor store and stole a bottle of whiskey and we hid out in this forest nearby drinking and waiting to hear the police sirens that never came that night. Brents gone now, I've lost touch with Lenny and the gravel pit is closed down. It's been filled in and turned into a river front community. But maybe those moments that day are as free as I've ever felt.
