On The Road … For Self-Discovery

After the wedding, reception and honeymoon in July of 1971, I took a “leave of absence” from the New Haven Police and set off on a long road trip with Steph.  I had NO IDEA what I wanted to do “when I grew up.”   I knew the PD wasn’t for me, and I no longer needed to be a cop, because the threat of being drafted had passed.   I chose “leave of absence” instead of quitting because I could do that … and it preserved options.  As it turned out, that was very useful.

The lease in Stony Creek was up in August and all the roommates were moving away.  I had no place to live after August.  I was truly free.  And truly lost.

Happily, Steph was open to lots of possibilities, and we thought we’d put everything we needed in the trunk of the car,  store a few things and go on an extended road trip intended to identify a nice town we could/would live in.  In retrospect deciding “where” before you decided “what” is crazy, but it seemed sensible at the time.

So, in early September we headed up to Maine to see some of her relatives who hadn’t been able to attend the wedding.  We stopped in Providence, R.I. to crash at the house of my college friend, Steve Dunwell, who was a professional photographer (and who had taken our wedding pictures).

About 4-5 months before arriving at Dunwell’s, Nicholas, Buddy and I had planted a number of marijuana plants in a secluded corner of the lot at Stony Creek.  We had harvested a few leaves over the summer and dessicated them naturally, drying them on the sun porch over a week or two.  The results gave a good buzz — and was perfectly adequate as far as pot went.  And  it certainly was a lot cheaper than buying it.  But, when we gave up our lease at the end of August, we had a dilemma — what to do with the rest of the marijuana plants.

A few days before leaving, we harvested everything that was ready and destroyed/buried the rest.  We divvyed up the stash, my portion being about two pounds — certainly plenty to last us for a good while on our trip.  We dried the plants on the sun porch for a few days.   But we didn’t get it thoroughly dried out before we had to leave.

By the time we got to Dunwell’s, the plastic bag full of pot was starting to ferment.  It began to smell like compost.  It was rotting.  

This would certainly ruin everything, so I devised a scheme to save the day.  I took the weed out of the bag and put it into a large baking pan, aerating it as much as I could.  I then put it into Dunwell’s oven and put the heat on “low.”   I thought that would drive out the moisture and stop the deterioration / rotting of the grass.

But I thought wrong.  Dunwell’s oven had a broken thermostat, so the oven heated up a lot more than planned.  We were in the living room when we first noticed the smoke billowing out from the kitchen.  The oven had overheated, and the grass was smoldering badly, charred on the edges, threatening to leap into flames at any moment.  The smoke was pouring out of the oven and stinking like a DEA destruction fire.   We turned off the stove, pulled the dope out of the oven and doused everything in the bathtub.  Needless to say, our stash of pot for the road was toast.  Burnt toast.  Literally.

I would have laughed as hard as Dunwell did when he got home … had I not felt so stupid.

Happily, Steve’s neighbors were cool and didn’t call the authorities.  There certainly was no mistaking what the substance was that had burned.

The next day, we left Providence and headed to Maine.