6/6/66

by JN Lenz

  ” Seriously just fuck off; I don’t need to hear your shit. I’m not into it so don’t ask again ever. I mean it”

  After that he never would mention of the incident again and he never did ask me to hunt or shot at another animal again. In fairness we would cook it up later, the bird was tasty as hell. After my reaction, Clyde would walk over and retrieve the headless bird before the two of us walked home in silence. Once back to his hidden trailer, Clyde sliced the breasts off the bird and grilled them on an open fire in his back yard. We would have a shore lunch of sorts, with Goose breasts instead of Pickerel.

  I knew at a young age, that Clyde had a closeness and connection with the bush that few other people I knew possessed. I found out how rare his abilities were, the night before our graduation from grade eight. A group of us had decided to experiment with something new beyond the alcohol and pot.

  One of our friend’s named Chad, had a brother who supplied us with two hits of purple mike acid each. We had all been using pot since grade seven and had heard of the fun acid trips our friends older brothers that were in high school went on. Chad told us about these crazy fun filled nights his brother would have high on acid, the acid trip would apparently last for hours.

  There were six of us, we chased the acid down with a cream soda at the bowling alley and flew through the town as high as a kite, full of energy and wild thoughts. Ending up at the hidden trailer at two in the morning, the group settled around the table we had built in the center of the trailer. As the dubes continued to circulate and the group of us laughed endlessly, Clyde stood up and announced that he was going hunting.

  “I’m heading for the bush.” Clyde announced, after standing up and grabbing a large hunting knife.

  ” That’s not such a good plan’ I chirped in along with the couple of friends that were still coherent enough to give a shit.

  “Fuck it I’m out of here”

  “No shit man, you’re too stoned to head out there tonight. Its pitch black out there man, you can’t see a thing.

  “I can see in the dark just fine, the trees point me in the right direction”

  “The trees? You’re tripping man”

  “What the hell is he going to hunt with that?“ laughs Bill Munroe a fat kid that the two of us had been friends with since grade one.

  “Mushrooms” giggles Chad and the group erupts in laughter forgetting about Clyde and moving onto the topic of magic mushrooms and who knows what else.

  Clyde emerged from the bush, in the back of Skip’s property the following morning, wearing no shirt or shoes. Covered in dirt, from his head to toes along with the blood of the dead deer he was carrying over his shoulder.

  How, when or where he had killed the deer even he could not remember, or at what point he had gutted the animal. The carcass was ready to be hung from the closest tree, to drain it of its remaining blood. I don’t know of another human being that could walk into a forest with a knife and kill a deer. I had spent a lot of time in the bush as well and have had many deer come to within very close proximity to me, none so close to bring one down with a knife.

  I could just visualize him out there in the bush, lunging out of a tree onto the deer’s back and slicing its throat open. Or perhaps he was hiding silently behind a rock, lunging out with the large knife as the young Doe passed by him.

  By the summer of our fifteenth birthday we germinated, planted and harvested our first plants of pot. Clyde and I began to grow pot during the summer of grade nine. No longer having the funds to supply our growing appetite for the drug, we decided to grow it ourselves. This not only save money, but also to maybe make a little cash along the way.

  We started off using saved seeds, these from the bags of pot we had bought and salvaged along the way. Having the use of Skip’s hidden trailer as an incubator, we created our own hothouse by renovating the roof of the trailer. We used a sharp knife and a hacksaw to cut the roof at the one end of the trailer, this to accommodate the set of aluminum storm windows we salvaged from garbage bins around town.

  The addition of windows to half the roof on the trailer provided us our new magnifying eye to the sky. The sun’s rays which radiated down on our collection of saved seeds, lying on wetted toilet paper from the schools bathrooms. Several times a day, either Clyde or I would tend to the germinating seeds. The pair of us worked with the conviction of a farmer, tending to his crops. True to the basic principles of grade school science, the seeds did in fact germinate.

  Those first germinated seeds would serve as the start of our first business venture. The planted seeds soon turned into several low grade pot plants. Our first harvest by today’s standards would be a joke, closer to shake than bud, but every business has its humble beginnings. The fact was the plants grew; we were able to harvest and sell what we did not smoke.

  Our original selling price was twenty six bucks an ounce, an almost fifty per cent discount from the going price of sixty bucks for a typical bag of “home grown”. Our first joint (no pun intended) venture, would net us a cool sixteen hundred dollars in that first year of growing.

  Inspired, we spent the course of the next winter planning our expansion. We had plenty of inspiration since we had also traded a pound of the pot, for six ounces of the best black hash Lebanon had to offer. This was the real hash from back in the mid nineteen eighties, not like the shit that usually gets passed off as black hash today.

  The early success in growing and selling pot that first year, along with the encouragement from a good friend from school gave us the motivation to increase the size of our crop the following year.

  The mutual friend would help us in the selling; this meant our garden needed to reach well beyond the walls of the trailer. In the second year, the trailer became the incubator and was used primarily as a greenhouse. It was here that we started the process by germinating the seeds and starting the plants. Once they had begun to grow to a height of six inches the budding plants were moved to several remote areas on the outskirts of town.

  The presence of thousands of acres of Crown land around the town of Parsons, provided us with ample remote areas of free fertile land to expand our operations. Clyde had been hunting illegally throughout much of the vast forest tracks for years and knew the area inside and out. Clyde would know where we could find the best sandy soil and sunny areas for our fledgling plants. Very few people, including the wardens hired to protect the land knew it as well as Clyde. The majority of the parks, with their swamps and hilly terrain witnessed few visitors outside of the handful of groomed trails.

  We picked remote open spaces far from any roads or trails, often shielded by swamps or dense scrub brush. Using nature to keep prying eyes at bay, back then there was no use of Police planes to spot pot plots from the sky. In that second year of growing pot, we had two hundred and sixty six plants planted in three distinct areas. The area covered a large space, across several concessions, throughout the surrounding counties.

  After that first year of just selling weed to our friends and the people they knew, the amounts and the cash generated was small. Now in the second year and our high volume buddy on board we turned our green thumbs into a thriving enterprise. The cash generated from the sales provided us with financial freedom at a very young age. The name of our buddy and sales master was Junior, or that was the name everyone had always called him.

  Junior was tall and had a large frame, with a physique bordering on being portly. Even at a young age Junior was always trying to hustle someone for something, a real natural shyster. But Junior was a hell of a lot of fun to be around, and he was well connected to the underworld.

  Turned out his brother Spence, who was some twelve years older than Oliver, had been a member of the Hell’s Angels in California. This during the original Owsley acid days of the late sixties; Spence had even hung out at the original day glow tract, owned by the author Ken Kelsey.

  Spence left home at the age of sixteen on a stolen Harley Davidson, he had stolen from a resi
dence in Parsons. Spence would head straight for California on the big black V-twin and never looked back. Spence even managed to make it across the border on that stolen bike, by swapping its plates with one he had stole just an hour before hitting the border. Instead of crossing in Windsor he would drive all the way to rural Saskatchewan, entering America through the Iowa border without incidence.

  The Northern Ontario toughness gained thru playing hockey, allowed Spence to fight his way into a quick membership into the Hell’s Angels. After several members of the Angels, almost had the living shit kicked out of them by Spence they decided he should become a member. No striker patch would be required for Spence, becoming a full member almost immediately following his hazing and initiation.

  Aside from his toughness, Spence was up for anything the Angel’s asked of him. Spence was not scared of anyone and was willing to run guns, smuggle drugs or extorting money from whomever the Angles targeted. The fear of jail, which is where he ultimately ended up, did little to deter Spence from taking on increasingly risky illegal activities with the Angel’s. This won Spence deep respect from the fellow gang members.

  Even while he was behind the bars of the Bakersfield State Penitentiary in California, Spence still had under world connections. From behind bars, Spence would continue to guide Junior through his drug distribution connections in Canada. This connection would purchase as much pot as we could supply to Junior.

  I was always amazed how these illegal business dealings of the criminal world would continue unimpeded, even after its members became incarcerated. With Junior having his established distribution all we were required to do was deliver the pot to him. From there it was his baby to make sure the goods made it to where ever the hell it was supposed to go, that part I was glad not to be involved in.

  In fact that was the beauty of the whole process; one contact, that’s why it worked. There was no need for Clyde or I to deal with the biker’s, which was fine by us.

  It all started by Junior coming to us at lunch one day, it was after that first winter of year one. Junior presented us with his plan, he bragged to us that he could take whatever we could grow, and he would pay us in cash.

  ” I can’t keep a cactus alive or I would try to grow the shit myself, besides I’m no fucking farmer” Junior would explain to us.

  We only half believed him at the time, the price per pound sold would be much lower than selling it by the quarter or by the ounce. We had all heard his brother had a reputation around town as being one bad ass and the lure of being able to sell the entire crop every fall in one transaction, that was too good a deal to pass up. Both Clyde and I, had read the Front page articles about the former town resident by the name of Spence Ferguson in the local paper. Articles chronicling Spence’s trial on extortion and assault, the jail time he would ultimately receive as a result of the guilty judgment he would receive.

  Beyond the connection to a buyer, Junior was a lazy prick. He would be unwilling to put the effort required to grow and harvest this amount of plants. The claim he lacked the ability to grow pot himself was likely the truth, there was a fair amount of manual labor required in the cultivation of the pot. That amount of work would be more than enough to stop Junior from attempt cultivation on his own. Besides that we had fully planned to grow anyway, so now we would just plant way more that was all. Neither one of us cared for the peddling aspect of the business to begin with, so this arrangement suited us perfectly. The more Clyde and I talked about it the more we knew we could make it work, our plan was to not only grow the majority of it on Crown land but to also distribute it to Junior from there as well.

  The trailer would become the dry house after harvesting the plants, which would stink up that tin can up to high heaven. Luckily, we had pushed the old trailer far enough back on Skip’s property to avoid detection from the stink Police. Additionally, both Clyde and I would join as a volunteer in a local club that supported the National Park board. The membership would provide us with an insight into what area of the Park that was most likely to be surveyed or traveled through. Plus, we gained unfretted access to the Park without drawing suspicion from the Rangers.

  Dedicating a few hours of our time to count species, or to help cut paths in the Parks, was a small price to pay. All in an effort to secure our ability to spend a large amount of time in any and all of the vast park system, without fear of being questioned. In addition to the Park ID issued to the both of us, our presence allowed both Clyde and I to personally get to know all the Rangers who worked in the Parks. When on occasion we came across them when while traveling back to the hidden plots, the Rangers would simply give us a wave or stop for a moment shoot the shit.

  During the fall harvest, we would cut the plants down one plot at a time. After bringing the plants back to the trailer to be dried and trimmed. Clyde and I would often complete this work late at night, when the town and roads surrounding Parsons would be desolate. After drying and trimming the bud back at the hidden trailer, we would package the pot up in water tight bags. The bagged pot would be returned into the same forests to be buried beneath the forest floor, using water tight Rubbermaid containers. The locations of these tubs would then be provided to Junior for him to retrieve on his own. There never would be any direct drop off between the Clyde, myself and Junior.

  With the delivery to Junior consisting of one massive drop; our preferred location was usually on the edge of a bush line, close to a gravel side road. On most occasions Clyde would source the location close to a field or in the bush. After deciding on a location, the two of us would dig a hole at night in a location we had established during daylight hours. When we had harvested, dried and clipped our full harvest, we would bring the full amount to the hole and bury it. Usually this happened in the middle of the night, with the Rubber maid containers resting just below the forest floor, for Junior to retrieve.

  In later years as the harvests grew, we would bury the crop in several locations throughout the forest and cover the hole back over with earth and leaves to conceal its presence. We would contact Junior with the location of the stash; Junior would meet up with us a few days’ later cash in hand and we would often get drunk together in celebration.

  Over the years, the development and accessibility of hand held GPS units, made the locating and hiding of these stashes that much easier. Instead of measuring out precise distances from roads and land marks to locate the hidden bounty, we would be able to provide Junior with the precise coordinates, using the GPS to locate the pot. In a small way it helped to make the exchange between us and Junior a little less risky, with Junior using the GPS tracker to also burry our cash payment back into the same forests. It always amused both Clyde and I when we heard stories on the news, when illegal cash would be confiscated by the authorities. After the cash had been deposited in various banks or had been discovered in a home following a drug bust, how could they be so foolish?

  Who the hell deposits money in a bank or safety deposit box if the business you are in is completely illegal? Worse yet, trust it to someone to clean it and hope they only take half of the value. Or the fool’s that are stupid enough to keep tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal proceeds in their homes? Even at this early stage of our cultivation, we were smart enough to own nothing that was worth any more than a few thousand dollars. The motor bikes we rode were all over the age of ten years. The rough old Ford one fifty pickup, a vehicle we shared between the two of us. Plus we rented a place to live, even though by the age of eighteen we had the money to buy a house.

  For both of us this was a cultivation basic rule, because there was a good chance you would eventually be busted. If that happened the more you own, the more you loose. By the time we had quit, we had enough tubes buried across the countryside to provide us with a steady income for years. Worse case would mean a short sentence, after which we would still have our money. Preferably we wanted to obviously stay clear of jail period, but that could one day be beyond our control.r />
  But when large seizures of narcotics included stacks of cash, this from the very individuals that had the balls to go make all that cash in the first place, seemed like insanity to both of us. Clyde and I vowed not to make the same mistake so many had made before us. The pair of us would continue to stash what would turn into dozens of tubes, in various locations throughout the National and Provincial Park forests of Ontario.

  Using six inch PVC drain pipe, we would over time bury amounts varying from sixty to hundred twenty thousand dollars in each section of tube. The bills would be rolled and bagged in plastic after being bundled like a cash register roll, stacking them neatly up the length of the pipe. The length of the tube would determine the amount of cash the tube would hold. After sealing and taping the plastic the tube, we would cover the ends in silicone and left them to dry, sealing the PVC cap to the end of each tube. Digging our holes with either shovels or a variety of manual and gas powered augers into the forest floor. The augers provided us a nice clean small hole to insert the tubes, this also made concealing their location that much easier.

  During later years, the development and release of GPS technology allowed us to map the tubes locations, using the hand held GPS device and store them digitally. Clyde and I would still maintain a manual log of all the tube locations, which we referred to as the little black book. Aside from the copy each of us held, we would update a third copy with the tubes locations. That thirds copy would be buried in its own tube, within the remoteness of Algonquin Park.

  The profits from our cultivation of Marijuana continued to increase throughout those last few years of high school and had continued to grow for the first three years after graduation. The money we earned even through school, would allow both Clyde and I to leave home the week after out grade twelve graduations. The two of us would rent an apartment together on the main street of Parsons; we would both find entry level jobs, to justify our living expenses to the town and the small local Police force.