The Road to Virginia (part 1)

Drinking and getting high like so many other 17 year old boys in 1993, I felt as though I fit in, belonged to a culture of skateboarders and rabble-rousers, dudes looking for a good time finding trouble and getting away with it. I had spent the past year in high school in southern vermont, snowboarding, smoking pot, visiting Boston to skate on the weekends and getting into all the regular teenage boy bullshit. I spent most of my free time from class, ( a relative term as class was an elective schedule in my mind) learning how to steal car radios, how to grow pot in the woods, how to steal 40's and packs of Camel smokes, and trying anything to get girls to like me.

At 4'11" I was the smallest guy in school, which I made up for by being the loudest and the wildest most of the time. My friends were my roommates of the previous year, Jack and Corbin. Jack hailed from Marin county, and Corbin came from Brooklyn and Montana, a native american whose family was steeped in history and a fair bit of legend as well. Jack and I hit it off immediately, he skated and shredded as I did, and we were both on the small side, while Corbin was a mellower character, who provided both Jack and I with insight into the ways of being a cool cat with the ladies.

Jack and I treated the school as a park for most of the beginning of the school-year, hauling benches out of classrooms and cafeterias to skate, building snowboard parks with the schools snow cat, and generally doing whatever the fuck we could get away with along with the genius assistance of a fellow by the name of Phil, who built anything out of everything and was as clandestine and reclusive as you could get at that age without being accused of resembling a Unabomber.

Phil once built a portable bong out of a Carmex container, radio antenna, bottle cap and screen from his dorm room window. It worked well, and Phil built it in all of 10 minutes.

One fall day in 1993 Phil, Jack and I, along with a hilarious ESL student from Tokyo named Seshi Yokoyama set out into the 500 wooded acres of school grounds in search of a spot to build the fort to end all forts. Phil had scoped a ravine deep in the back woods that had a perfect vantage point over the cross country ski trail that ran in the gorge below.

Putney School was built on 400 year old french sheepherders land, attached to a dairy farm that also served to feed the school. The wooded acres that surrounded the property had been used for cross country ski trails and students getting high in for the past 50 years. There were various forts all over the place. The "brush fort" was made of twisted bracken and shrubbery woven together to form a camouflaged igloo of sorts, there were a few tree forts scattered through out the forest as well, and Phil had made a point of searching out and evaluating them all earlier in the fall. He had decided at some point that they all were to exposed, there locations known to those teachers who made a point of seeking out kids getting high to bust them. So Phil had found this spot.

Untouched, forgotten and hidden from all below it, the location for this fort had a sheep herders stone wall running right up to the edge of the cliff, which plunged vertically down to the ski trail 60 feet below.

The four of us hiked out to the gorge with 180 feet of navy rope, 60 feet of 10' wide rubberized chain-link fence stolen from the schools basketball court fence rebuild project, and all the dope, cigarettes and beer we could find. Phil had designed a giant Hammock that we suspended above the gorge. Tying off the rope to two huge oak trees on the fort side of the gorge and threading the rope through the fence we then tied off the ends of the rope to oaks on the other side of the gorge, creating a 10' wide 90' long hammock that hung secretly above the gorge, invisible to those below due to the fence being coated in green rubber which blended perfectly into the tree canopy above. We would lay in the hammock smoking joints and drinking beers silently watching teachers on cross country ski's pass beneath us in search of students doing exactly what we were. Phil was a genius. And we were stoked.

The fort was an ever growing project, first designed as a simple rock wall form we changed the plans by adding five columns of 6'' thick pine in front with a beam across the top to support the rafters made of saplings that ran 12 feet back to the rear wall and down 3 feet, giving the roof a mellow pitch strong enough to support the canvas lined roof covering which we then hid under boughs of pine and spruce. The sheep herders wall supplied us with the stones we needed to build, and by the end of the first week of building at night we had a safe, camouflaged well hidden fort in which to get as fucked up as we wanted. But it was cold. And it lacked lights and beer coolers.

Phil and Jack and I spent a Sunday building a slate hearth in the fort with a well drafted chimney in which we could have fires that would send a plume of smoke through the chimney out into the dense Oak pine and spruce tree canopy above. The fireplace warmed the fort well, and we proceeded to bury three coolers in the ground around the fort, covering the lids with tree boughs to hide them, we now had hidden fridges for beer. And as for lights, well we just strung stolen mag lites up inside and ran through batteries a lot.

Seshi rolled up one day in late november, while Jack, Phil and I were chilling on the hammock, with a few of his fellow Japanese students and pulled out a 1 ounce bag of pot, which he had decided he wanted to smoke all at once. So he and Phil rolled a joint , which when finished was the the length and thickness of a paper towel tube. The news of Seshis intention had been spread earlier the previous evening, and that afternoon people beagn to find their way to the fort. Around 15 pot heads, guys and girls alike, sat in and around the fort getting really really high with us. The joint burned for over half an hour, filling the entire area with the scent of Seshis bud. No teachers showed up, no one got busted, everyone was fucked up, and it was way out of control. Phil expressed legitamate concern about too many people knowing about the fort, and he was proven right.

In the weeks that followed more and more kids frequented the fort, until eventually teachers, like Dave Arnstein, a physics professor notorious for following students in to the woods to catch them getting high, followed students and kids got busted and the fort was found. End of story for all the hard work and genius that we had put into it.

The lesson though, of DIY, and being clever enough to outsmart authority had not been lost on us all, and Phil had been the teacher. I returned to Nova Scotia at the end of that school year filled with a newfound ability to do shit on my own, not needing permission or acceptance from others in order to move an idea into action. This was a revolutionary thing for me.

Skateboarding and getting fucked up all summer was my intention, and I saw it through for much of that summer, until the time of my 18th birthday I had been carefree and getting away with all kinds of bullshit. I had made out with a few girls, almost got a blow-job behind a church, stolen lots of booze, run from cops and not gotten caught, smoked huge piles of weed and hash, and just gotten into all the shit I wanted to. I was pretty happy for an angry teenager.

My folks were not.