That Stoney Trip to Maine

or, How Lucky Can One Idiot Be?

I was born in Massachusetts. My family moved to Wisconsin in '71. For five or six years after that, I spent winters working in factories, saving up a little traveling money, and my summers I spent hitchhiking, usually back to New England. I stayed wherever I could find a bed.

One weekend a friend of mine thought it would be a fine thing to do if we borrowed his dad's shop's van and take a weekend trip to a certain ocean beach in Maine. We had a bag of pot, some alcohol - Ripple, I think - and about forty dollars. Oh, and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder that I'd used to record songs from the radio, holding the microphone up to the speaker. Because he spent his days working in his dad's shop, we left on Friday afternoon for a drive that would take about twelve hours.

The drive was a combination of Interstate and highway driving. The thing to remember here is the way they built Interstates in New England. They followed the lay of the land when they paved out each direction of road, which meant that for a north-south highway, you could drive for miles on the northbound side and never see the southbound side, especially at night when traffic was light.

So, there we were. It was my turn to drive. My friend had passed out after that last joint, quite awhile back. The road was clear, driving was easy. I got into the fast lane and passed several cars, keeping to the speed limit. Then I cruised along in the fast lane for a while, and finally decided if there weren't any cars to pass I might as well get over into the far right lane. Good driving habits and all that.

I hadn't been in the slow lane for more than a few minutes when a semi roared passed us going the other way. Marijuana being what it is, I just kept driving along for another minute or so before it hit me. "That son of a bitch just passed me going the wrong way on the Interstate!"

Then I started to take a good look around and noticed there weren't any of those big green signs with the big white letters, and there weren't any interstate mile markers. I was on a two lane road. My friend must have left the interstate before I took over, and I hadn't noticed. I had been driving in the wrong lane, going sixty-five miles an hour, around curves and up hills, thinking I was on an interstate highway. If I'd done it for another two or three minutes I'd have run right into a fully loaded semi truck, also traveling about sixty miles an hour.

Now, before you blame it ALL on the drugs, there's a little bit more about the Interstates and the other roads in New England. Maybe they've changed a bit since 1970 or so, but back then both roads were paved the same. All black, nice and smooth, with nice easy-to-navigate curves. The shoulders were the same too. Then there's that little thing about not being able to see the cars going in the opposite direction for long periods. That two-lane road looked and felt an awful lot like the Interstate.Yes, I should have noticed that the line in the middle was sometimes solid. Yes, I should have noticed that there weren't any interstate signs. If I hadn't been loaded and if it hadn't been about two in the morning, I probably would have.

All I know is, I came within a hair's breadth of killing one of my best friends and myself, and every time I've thought about that incident, or told somebody about it, the same thing always comes up: something had to be watching over me during those drug years. The odds against living through a string of fuckups like that are just too high.

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