So it goes like this. My good friend Morgan and I assumed the driving duties. Our other good pals Justin and Nick were in the back seats tripping their balls off on mushrooms saying how beautiful the trees were. Morgan drove the first half of the trip from campus and then we switched and I took over for the rest of the way. But somehow we miscalculated because Morgan only drove for four hours and I had driven for like eight hours and we still hadn’t reached the border. When we finally did, the security was so lax – they just checked our passports and waved us through – that we figured all the cautionary tales we were told was bullshit.

Then it was like another two hours after crossing the border until we actually saw some signs of a city. I was so fatigued and fed up with all the French street signs which I couldn’t understand, plus it was dark, that I mistook a pedestrian walk bridge for an actual bridge. I retired from my driving duties shortly thereafter.

Though we escaped from that incident without injury to man or car, though I don’t remember how, we had a much closer brush with danger later. We were on our way back from Canada – driving free, blowing smoke, and feeling good (which is basically all we did when we were in Montreal). Passing into Canada was such a breeze that we thought nothing much of the border patrol. So when we drove out of Canada and into upstate New York we were gleeful and were smoking our brains out.

I didn’t even understand what was going on at first. I thought it was some highway construction holding up traffic. By the time the Texan border patrol dude in a funny hat asked us to roll down the window it was too late. We had the wrong driver behind the wheel.

Justin, bless his heart, was fond of wearing his McDonald’s marijuana shirt. He wore it almost every day of sophomore year in college. It’s a red shirt with a big yellow McDonald’s “M” and underneath it says “Marijuana, over one billion stoned.” Justin would wear that shirt in class. Hell, that crazy fucker would light up a bowl during class while the teacher had his back turned and wrote on the chalkboard.

Justin and I were both economics majors and so we shared a lot of classes together. If he wasn’t getting baked during class he was definitely stoned before and after. I never knew him not to be stoned. And not laughing. I let him copy my homework assignments and cheat off me during tests. I think if it wasn’t for me he would have flunked out of school. I was happy to help him out. If letting him cheat kept him around and in school, then that benefitted me; he got me high and made me laugh. But I couldn’t help Justin on this occasion. Because sure enough he was wearing his McDonald’s marijuana shirt and as soon as the cop saw that shirt, and saw the rest of us three characters, we were screwed.

The Texan gave us the whole spiel about threatening to get drug sniffing dogs to search the car if we were lying about there not being any drugs in the car, and us going to a federal prison. Then he told Justin to get out of the car and began to grill him. The rest of us were still in the car so we couldn’t hear what was being said, but we got the gist. The trooper then came up to the car and knocked on the window. We rolled it down and he asked, “Where’s the soda cup?”

I had no clue what the hell he was talking about. Apparently Nick had stashed the weed in his cup of soda. And Justin saw this because Nick was in the front seat with him. So Nick reluctantly gets the soda cup from under the seat and gives it to him. The cop looked at the plastic bag with irritation and incredulity and asked “Is this it? This is all the drugs in the car?”

We couldn’t quite believe it ourselves. That was all that was left? We had smoked so much pot on the trip and on the drive that what had been a ¼ pound bag of weed was whittled away to only a few joints worth over the course of three days. It was an amount that was barely worth the cop’s time. Being such big potheads had saved our ass. Mr. Texas reluctantly had to let us go, but not without making us throw all our bongs and pipes off to the side of the road and into a ditch that contained a holy grail of pipes and bongs. The cop looked at Nick’s asthma pipe thinking that it was a bong. “What’s this?” he asked. “It’s my asthma inhaler,” Nick said. And the cop gave a look as though his brain was about to explode in the face of what he had just heard. “So you got asthma and you smoke the reefer.” He couldn’t compute such a massive contradiction. I couldn’t believe the copper actually said that. It was like out of a movie. Just perfect in that storybook sense.

I was pissed off over losing my newly purchased pipe, but couldn’t complain too much. We had dodged a bullet. We high tailed it away from the border stop and drove home in what was an epilogue of immense satisfaction. We were a gang of four hapless hooligans who drove to Canada for the fuck of it: got high, got kicked out of hostels, and almost got pinched. We had the whole rock band thing down pat, except for the playing of music part.