When I was 13 years old, I started smoking as much pot as I could find. One summer, I was totally against the idea of drugs and the next summer, out of nowhere, it just made a lot of sense. I was a natural at pot smoking and I just loved it. I loved pot more than just about anything, except for the piano. The piano was first and pot was a close second.
David Skewes and I used to get pot from his older brother, Johnny. He was cool. Now that we were pot smokers, we needed to find a safe place to smoke our pot. The tree fort was too much of a bust. It wasn’t secluded enough.
I thought that maybe the best thing to do would be to take down the tree house and transfer the wood to my parents backyard because we had a ravine and then a little hill past the ravine and then some woods and a little area that was basically protected and hidden enough on all sides that a cool little fort could be built there.
I asked my parents if David and I could build a little fort in the back and they said fine. So we demolished our tree fort and used the wood to rebuild a bigger and better one behind my house. The only problem was that we needed more wood and stuff. So we went back over to the hockey arena place and scrounged around and got a bunch more wood. We were lucky and resourceful.
This time we’d build a bigger and better fort. This time it wouldn’t be a tree fort, but a little shack with a real floor and walls and a roof. A little pot-smoking shack. It would be big enough to hold about four or five people and that was just fine with us.
It was all about finding the right spot with the right tree setup. David and I were good at figuring out these kinds of things. We found four little trees a perfect distance apart that formed a little square, and that’s where we attached the beams for the floor. We didn’t have to buy one thing. All the wood was free and we had enough nails between our dads’ workbenches. It seemed that, where I came from, most dads had workbenches with lots of nails and tools.

It took a good few weeks to build the shack. It was a lot of work and it was fun. We were very focused on our project. Only this time, we didn’t bail once it was done. We could smoke pot in there and no one could bust us. We were safe.
For a while, that is.
The shack was basically  a few hundred yards from the Back of our house, definitely far enough away where you couldn’t smell anything, which was perfect. It was also about half a mile from the back of the high school and junior high school. It was just far enough away where you couldn’t see it through the trees from the school, but you could see the school from the shack. Basically, it was the perfect location for us and all our friends to sneak away from school in between classes, smoke a quick bong hit or doobie, and then run back to school in less than 10 minutes.
It didn’t take long for word to get around to the cool people in school. We used to say, “Let’s go for a shack attack”, which meant, “Let’s go sneak off and smoke some weed at the shack and not get busted.” It was pure utopia. During the winter, there’d be footprints in the snow from every direction, heading directly to the shack. It was basically the center of the universe.
For a while, that is.
In freshman biology class, I could look out the window and see the shack. It had a yellow plastic tarp on the roof that used to be a two-man tent that David and I put on there to keep out the snow and rain. It worked great, but you could totally see the shack during the winter because all the leaves were gone, along with our protection from being seen.
Our teacher, Mr. Rowe, was a stoner and a super funny guy. We’d say, “Hey, Mr. Rowe, you see that little yellow shack way over there in the woods with the yellow roof?” He’d say, “Yeah, so?” We’d say, “That’s where we go every single day before your class to get stoned, right over there.” He’d laugh and say, “You guys,” and make it look like he thought we were kidding. I’d say, “No, seriously, Mr. Rowe, we get stoned every single day, right before your class, right over there, see,” and I’d point and be, like, “Right over there, man, that’s where we go.”
Mr. Rowe was super cool. He encouraged plagiarism in his class. He flat out would tell us that if we had a paper due on a subject, that it was okay with him if we copied the exact text for a subject, word for word, from the encyclopedia. The reason why he’d let us do that was because the actual act of sitting there and reading and writing EXACTLY the same thing from an encyclopedia was better than not doing any homework at all. He was right, of course.

Our class was Bio-Yellow, which was the class for slow learners, or dummies, or STONERS. Bio-Green was super hard and for all the over achieving kids, the ones who would take pre-calculus at Dartmouth when they were 17 — the smarty pants, show-off types.
But hey, they couldn’t play rock ‘n’ roll on the piano and my life was going somewhere. I was going to be SOMEBODY .
The shack lasted for a few good years until that fateful night of the Frank Zappa concert. The hockey arena was all finished and it was big enough to hold rock concerts. Frank Zappa was on tour and he came to our town, and that night, after the concert, a bunch of drunken older high school kids totally demolished our precious shack. All that was left was the floor.
The next day, me and David Skewes went over there and we couldn’t believe our eyes. The wood was scattered all over the place and our precious little shack was no longer. We just looked around in horror at the carnage; all our hard work, all our effort and skillful craftsmanship ruined by a bunch of freaked out Zappa fanatics all amped up from the concert with nothing to do afterwards except crush me and David’s private little utopian refuge.
Those weasels! Those rat finks! Those nitwits! What kind of heathen, mongrel, black-hearted vandals would do such a thing? We were so bummed we didn’t even care about rebuilding it. The shack was like a one-time thing and it would never be the same again if we fixed it back up. Someone else would just come back and destroy our creation.
There are builders in life and there are destroyers. We were the builders, and they were the destroyers. The hate filled cretins. Our sacred area was tainted and poisoned. The energy there was no longer pure. We must’ve concluded that the shack was killed prematurely — in the prime of its life — and that it was time to move on. Or, maybe we were too stoned and didn’t have the focus or the drive to rebuild it. Or, maybe we were just too depressed to try and even make up our minds how we felt about it.
Let’s just say that it was time to move on…