STONED IN HOMER

One day in October my friend Yancey talked me into driving down to Anchor
Point to score some pot. I hadn't known Yancey for that long, maybe a
month, but he seemed all right to me. He likes being outside, kayaking,
hunting, hiking. He has a couple of dogs, a Ph.D. in linguistics, and he's
a writer. He yells at the top of his lungs when he's excited, which is
pretty much all the time. He needed to go to Homer to register his truck,
he said, because it couldn't pass Anchorage's emission test, and he had a
buddy, John, in Anchor Point who would put us up and get weed for us in the
morning.

I moved to Alaska from Wyoming in September to go to school. I'd never been
to Homer. It sounded great - rural, spread out, like the small town I was
raised in. And I wanted some pot.

"Homer is killer, man," Yancey yelled, "You're gonna love it."

We didn't get out of town until well after five o'clock. The dark set in as
we passed the sign for Whittier. Yancey's dog, Huckleberry, a sweet
Australian shepard stood with his front paws on the console between us.
Yancey handed me a beer and we talked about writing and politics and women
and the best way to keep fish, and the next thing we knew we were five
miles from Anchor Point. We pulled the car over to take a leak and watched
the moon dip down from the west, below the arc of green Northern Lights,
just touch the horizon, and start on its way back up east into the sky. I
had never seen anything like it.

In Anchor Point, Yancey's friend, John, held the door open for us as we
jumped out of the truck and he tried to quiet his three dogs, which were
all barking their heads off. His front porch was held up by three jacks and
sided with plywood. "Come on in," he said.

John looked wasted. He had bags under his eyes and he wore sweat pants and
a ripped T-shirt. He started ranting in a thick Southern drawl about
marijuana and our constitutional rights to possess it. It turned out John
didn't actually possess any at the moment, but he gave us a wink as we left
for a campfire at the beach and said, "Tomorrow, man, I'll take care of you
guys."

We grabbed some beer and a summer sausage at the Anchor Point store. The
sky was really starting to go nuts, with red and green shooting up in great
long spears. I spent a lot of time jumping up and down and yelling. There
were slim pickings for wood on the beach but we managed to have a little
fire, which Yancey started by squirting some "Cub Scout kindling" (lighter
fluid) on the wood and throwing a match into the pile.

"John is an interesting guy," Yancey said. "He was Special Forces in the
DMZ in Korea. I mean, he's killed people."

"Wow," I said - because what else can you really say to something like that?

Sometime after midnight we drove to the campground and picked a spot to bed
down. I put my sleeping bag in tall, soft grass, thinking I'd pass out
right away, but it was really, really cold. After an hour I was still awake
and there was a shell of frost over my bag. An hour later and I realized
that the bottom of my bag was unzipped, which explained why my toes hurt.
After another hour I fell asleep, only to be woken by Huckleberry, who came
over to investigate a small animal in the grass. An hour later I was able
to fall asleep again, and right away I heard Yancey's footsteps on the
gravel beside his truck.

"Is it morning?" I yelled.

"Oh, yeah," Yancey yelled. "It's morning."

"I don't think I slept very well," I said.

"Well, I didn't sleep a fucking wink."

We got in the truck, cranked the heat and drove to John's house. John
stumbled out of the bedroom and pulled on his jacket. "Sorry Huck," he said
to the dog as he climbed into the back of the Four Runner, "I've got to
steal your seat."

We headed south, toward Homer. John started talking and didn't stop. He
spoke in long rambling, emotive sentences that were a pleasure to hear. He
told me about all the property being sold on the right side of the road, on
the bluffs above the sea. "That land is falling off into the water at a
rate of a few feet a year, but people are buying it," he said. "People will
buy anything for a view like this."

It was an amazing view, one of the best I'd ever seen; better than the tops
of mountains in Wyoming, where I'd spent the better part of the last four
years, and certainly better than the skyline of New York, where I moved
after college.

In Homer, "You've got your starving artist types," John said, "your
tweekers, and your trust fund summer types. Anchor Point is just way more
relaxed." As we drove into Homer I thought it would be hard to find a more
relaxed town. We stopped at the DMV so Yancey could take care of his truck,
but it was closed.

"I talked to her yesterday," Yancey yelled. "She said she'd be here."

"Yeah, but this is Homer," John said.

We went to Homer's new coffeehouse, which roasts its own coffee. John
started talking to a short skinny guy in a camouflage hat and a backpack
who was hopping from foot to foot and pouring tons of sugar into his
coffee. John asked the guy if he could help us score some weed. The skinny
guy looked quickly from side to side, grinning, his brow furrowed. Then he
started talking and I couldn't make out a single word. I was standing just
four feet away from him but everything out of his mouth sounded like
muffled comic book talk: whoosh, bang, zip, kapow.

"Hey guys," John said and waved us over. "This is Tosh."

Tosh shook my hand and then went back to the coffee and pumped himself
another cup. I stood at the coffee pumps, filled up my cup and poured in
some cream. Tosh stood beside me and mumbled. I could sort of hear him
mentioning names and he seemed to be reciting phone numbers, but he was
speaking so fast that I was sure he was crazy and I tried to give him a
wide berth. It was only after I turned toward him to go sit down that I
realized he'd been talking to me the whole time.

We both went over and took a seat with Yancey and John.

"Yeah, I know this guy, Brian, right. Oh, oh, and I know this other cat,
Dave. They'll hook you guys way, way up. Yeah," Tosh said. He spit out his
words in little electric clusters. I still could barely understand him. He
littered the table with little pieces of paper that had names and phone
numbers written all over them, and he kept on talking, a low static sound
with hisses and pops. "This dude, oh yeah, he'll help us, he'll be at work
in ten minutes, we'll just go over there," he said.

"Where do we have to go?" John asked.

"To where this dude works, man."

"Where's that?"

"Oh shit, it's right there -" Tosh's hand shot out from under the table and
he pointed to a garage beside the coffee shop.

We decided that Yancey and I should head over to the DMV and then hit the
bank to get some cash. John and Tosh walked over to wait for the guy at the
garage.

"I can't understand a fucking word that guy says," Yancey yelled when we
got in the truck.

The DMV still wasn't open so we got some money and drove back to the
garage. Huckleberry jumped out of the truck and Tosh tried to pet him.
Huckleberry was wary.

"That reminds me of when my buddy Dave's dog took a big old steamy, yeah, a
big old steamy right by Dave's head, and Dave woke up and he was all,
Waahhh, you know, a big steamy on his pillow next him. Just Waaahhhh!" Tosh
made a big wide-eyed face and held his hands up in the air to show how his
friend Dave reacted.

"No shit," John said. None of us really wanted to ask Tosh what reminded
him of that.

An old man pulled up. He got out of his truck and coughed for a few
seconds, lit a cigarette, and left his keys hanging from a bungee cord by
the door of the garage.

"Hey," Tosh said to the guy. "You know the young dude that works here, you
know him right? When does he work?"

"Raymond? He doesn't work today. It's Alaska Day."

We were out of luck for pot, the mystery of why the DMV wasn't open was
solved, but Tosh and John were unwilling to let our trip be a total bust.
For a few minutes Tosh rifled through his slips of paper and picked out
phone numbers. Yancey handed him the cell phone. "I can't figure these
fucking things out," Tosh said, holding the phone away from him. Yancey dialed.

"Hey, it's me," Tosh said when he connected with someone. "Can you hook me
up with a zip? An ozer man? Yeah, yeah. Shit no, that's too late. These
guys have to go back to Anchorage tonight."

The phone calls proved fruitless so we piled into the Four Runner and
started driving out of town. Yancey and Tosh began talking about guns,
which put me totally in the dark. Evidently Tosh had a Ruger .44 in his
backpack and they weighed the pros and cons of using it for bear protection.

"You're not gonna shoot anything past a hundred yards," Yancey said.

"Oh, I beg to differ, mon frA(c)rre" Tosh said.

"Well, let me say," John spoke up, "I've never shot a handgun at anything
past twenty yards away, and if I didn't hit you, I damn sure scared the
shit out of you." John was originally from Virginia, like me, and his
gravelly, Southern accent demanded authority, so nobody mentioned that the
conversation was about shooting bears, not North Koreans.

The first house we went to was just outside of town.

"Turn left," Tosh said. "No right. I can't fucking tell the difference
anymore. Go downhill."

The yard was covered in stuff: There was a school bus, two broken-down
trucks, a refrigerator and a dryer.

"That's a sweet refrigerator," Yancey yelled.

Nobody was home so we pushed on, driving several miles down East Road.

"There's a house out here with a trampoline in the yard and a green Subaru
in the yard," Tosh said.

"There's a Subaru in that person's yard," Yancey said.

"It's not green."

We passed seven houses with Subarus in the yards. None were familiar to Tosh.

"I helped this cat pull in his irrigation hoses, and he got me high, so,
shit, I can't really remember where it is," he said.

"Let's just go to Bart's house," John said. "This is Homer, for God's sake.
I know we can get some weed somewhere."

"Yeah, Bart's house," Tosh agreed. "It's beside a green house which is just
past some bushes by the road."

We drove past the house because Tosh couldn't figure out his left from his
right again.

When we eventually made it to the right driveway, Tosh collected our money
and then went to talk to Bart. When he came back, he told us to meet him
over on Little Road, so we weren't hanging out on anyone's property.

"I'm gonna look at your gun, Tosh," John said. He pulled it out of the
backpack. It was enormous.

"See, Tosh is smart," he said. "He keeps an empty chamber by the hammer."

Yancey weighed it in his hand. He said he had one just like it but older
and bigger.

We pulled onto Little Road and Tosh jumped out of the car behind us
carrying a McDonald's bag. "Now this is the best fast food I've ever had,"
he said and passed us our weed.

"Now we've got guns and drugs," John said. "We've got everything we need."

We drove down to the spit, passing a piece of antler that Tosh had made
into a bowl. John told a story about being pulled over on New Year's Eve:

"I'm high as a damn kite, you know. The cop says, 'You boys been drinking?'
and I say. 'No sir.' He says, 'Well it sure does smell like marijuana in
your car.' 'I haven't been drinking, though, sir.' 'Well,' he says, 'what's
in that plastic baggy there?' I looked at him and I say, 'Sir I told you I
had not been drinking. I saw every one of your public service announcements
about drinking and driving on New Year's Eve and I wouldn't be caught dead
with a drink tonight.' That cop just thumped on the roof of my jeep and
told me to have a nice night. It was that young skinny one who used to work
for Johnson and them."

"Oh yeah, I know that cat," Tosh said.

We got out of the truck on the spit and let Huckleberry run. John told me
about the bear he'd just shot across the inlet at the base of the
Aleutians. The bear was crawling up on the hood of his jeep so John climbed
up on top of the jeep from the back, stuck the barrel of his rifle up to
the bear's head and pulled the trigger, he said. "People tell me that was
unsportsmanlike, but a bear will kill you. I'm not interested in fair or
unfair. I'm interested in staying alive and feeding my family."

Yancey looked at his wrist and realized that his watch had stopped a long
time ago. He'd thought it was a quarter to ten for a couple of hours.
"We've got to go," he yelled. "Got to get back for school tonight."

We had to watch the poet Jane Hirshfield read that evening.

"I'll write you a note," John said and grinned. We were very stoned by then
and everything was hysterical.

We drove Tosh up to the top of East Hill where he lived in a van on a piece
of unclaimed land.

"You need to get a car," John said.

"Then I'd have to get a job," Tosh said.

"You need to get a job."

"Yeah, probably."

"No, but seriously, Tosh, you do better than anyone else I know that
doesn't have a job."

"Yeah, yeah, I do, okay. I get high every day. And I've got a great view."

"Oh God, you've got the best view that anyone in the world ever had from
anywhere. Three glaciers and two volcanoes, the Kamishak Bay and the whole
fucking Aleutian Range. How could you beat that?"

A little 250cc motorbike passed us going the other way.

"That's what you need," John said to Tosh. "A little dirt-bike to get into
town."

"Yeah, yeah. I should get one of those."

"Nah," John said. "You'd die."

We all laughed hysterically.

"The safest way for Tosh to travel is on his feet," John decided.

We came to an intersection at the top of the hill. "This is as far as we
go," John said. Tosh jumped out.

"Don't worry about him," John said. "I know that guy."

We wound our way down the hill in silence, mesmerized by the snow and ocean
spread before us. Across Cook Inlet, about seventy miles of deep sea, sat
the Aleutian range. Covered in snow, it sparkled. Redoubt Volcano shone
high and tall, but the whole range emitted a pulse of powerful current.

"I don't know why anyone would want to live anywhere else," John said.

"I can't believe the DMV was closed," Yancey yelled. "Fucking Alaska Day!"

"What are you supposed to do on Alaska Day?" I asked.

"Get stoned and drive around," Yancey said.

"I thought that was Tuesday," John said.

"I thought that was every day," Yancey said.

We watched the sun play on the snow and ice across the inlet. Yancey and I
had to go to school that night and John had to be at work in an hour, but
for that one moment we were on the edge of the world riding high toward the
endless possibilities of being stoned in Homer.