Can’t Get Stoned Again

Fredda Rosen

Word Count 1042

As we neared the entrance to Olympic National Park, my husband turned into the parking lot of a marijuana dispensary. The legal marijuana business was still in its infancy back home in New York City, so we were amused to see the proliferation of dispensaries on our road trip through the Pacific Northwest.

“Yes?” Steve asked, glancing at me as he pulled into a spot.

During the counterculture years, I’d whiled away many an evening high on weed and my youth. Friends gathered in someone’s tenement apartment, passing around a joint. The Velvet Underground or John Coltrane on the stereo. Conversations that were either deeply profound or impossibly funny. Now past Social Security’s full retirement age, Steve and I had smoked the odd joint over the years, but our forays into substance use had long been limited to an extra glass of wine at dinner.

Inside the dispensary, we were taken aback by the bounty in the showcases that ringed the shop. We listened while a guy with a grizzled beard and a ponytail discussed the finer points of Blue Dream, Green Crack, and Sour Diesel with the clerk.

When it was our turn, she quickly sized us up. “You’ll want the edibles.”

We were skeptical about the tiny candies she pointed out, but she assured us we’d be happy. We chose dark over milk chocolate and left with the stash in my tote.

After we checked in at the park lodge, we wound our way through a complex of cabins, hefted our bags into our cabin, and pulled out the chocolates. When I finished mine, I stuck the wrapper in my jacket pocket for disposal elsewhere.

“I know it’s legal,” I said to Steve. “But I feel compelled to hide the evidence.”

He laid down for a nap, and I took a bath. “Do you feel anything?” I asked an hour later.

“Not yet,” he said.

As we drove to the lodge for dinner, looping our way through a tangle of narrow roads, the light was fading. Aside from the cabins, there was nothing to see but forest.

“I still don’t feel anything,” I said after the waiter brought our food. Then I noticed the salmon, weirdly pink and nearly aglow. Steve, too, was staring at his plate.

“I feel something,” I said.

The fish smelled like a school cafeteria at lunch hour. I pushed it aside, ordered dessert, and ate a mound of vanilla ice cream, scraping to the bottom of the bowl.

When we walked out of the lodge after dinner, the night was deep and enveloping. Stars were scattered across the sky. We wandered around, trying to locate our rental car, until Steve remembered what was usually embedded in muscle memory: press “unlock” on the key fob. We followed the flash of light.

As we drove through the night, the car seemed to sway back and forth like a porch hammock. It was pleasantly peaceful until I noticed that Steve was hunched over the wheel.

“I have no idea where we are,” he said.

I went on alert like our cat responding to the doorbell. We were on a one-lane road lined with trees. All I could see were mammoth trunks on either side. There was nothing in front of us but black night.

“It’s not that big an area, and the cabin wasn’t far from the lodge,” I reasoned. “I remember a turn. Try that road on the left.”

We crept on, inky yard by inky yard. A row of cabins came into view, but when we pulled up and beamed the brights, the numbers didn’t correspond to ours. Steve put the car in reverse, setting off warning beeps as he nearly hit one of the ubiquitous trees. He turned back onto the road, peering ahead with intensity, grasping the wheel in classic white-knuckle style. I sat stiffly upright and wide-eyed.

“I think I see a sign.” I pointed to something white that glinted ahead. “LODGE THIS WAY,” the sign proclaimed.

“Let’s go back and start from scratch,” Steve said.

I took a deep breath. We were in the lodge complex. Our cabin had to be there. Surely, we would find it soon.

“That looks familiar,” Steve said, pointing ahead.

We parked and tramped through dried leaves up an incline and around to the front of a row of cabins. As soon as we caught sight of the numbers, we realized we were wrong again. We tramped back down the hill.

Should we just sleep in the car? Return to the lodge and ask for directions? What would they think of two white-haired visitors who were so obviously bewildered? Would they know we were high? Would they think we were on the verge of senility? Were we on the verge of senility? I was certain that I was. The authorities would call our daughters, and they’d fly us back to New York, driving straight from JFK to a long-term care facility.

Steve looked at me and asked if I was OK. I nodded vigorously. I couldn’t say that I knew something was wrong with me. That would make it real. I squeezed my eyes shut in an attempt to quiet my mind.

I wasn’t aware that Steve had stopped the car until he said, “This is it. Definitely.”

We approached a door. Our number! I peered through the lighted window. My tote bag sat reassuringly on a table. When Steve pulled open the door, I rushed in and threw myself on the bed, willing myself to sleep in the hope that rest would straighten out my addled consciousness.

I awoke to sunlight and took a lazy look out the window. Then I remembered the search for the cabin–and the fear. I surveyed the thoughts in my mind as if I were an accident victim checking for damaged limbs: today was Tuesday, Joe Biden was president, and Steve and I were in Olympic National Park. My brain seemed to be in order. There was nothing to worry about except breakfast.

On the phone later that morning, I told my 27-year-old daughter about our experience. “Mom!” she said, drawing out the word in exasperation. “You’re supposed to eat just half of those things.” Wise marijuana advice from my kid.

Fredda is a non-fiction writer whose early work was published in the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. She took a thirty-year detour from the writing life to lead a nonprofit that helped people with developmental disabilities find jobs and live in their own homes. Thrilled to be retired and writing again, she lives in New York City with her husband and a large tabby named Monsieur.