Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble…

Grandma and I were already seated at the dinner table when Grandpa walked in and, somewhat dramatically, threw a fistful of polaroid pictures down onto the white tablecloth, right next to his Italian Burgundy nesting there in its fiasco basket. All I saw was a scattered pile of green. “These are what I’m going to show the judge tomorrow. Let’s see what he has to say then!” Grandpa declared triumphantly. I reached over and picked up a few of the pictures. They were all the same, capturing in living color a dense field of healthy green marijuana plants. MY marijuana plants.

It was the summer of 1968 and paranoia about such things ran high.

An adrenaline dump took me from zero to 110 in about a third of a second as I realized immediately that Grandpa had discovered my handiwork planted down at the far end of the pond. There, on a fertile delta of newly deposited topsoil, I had been growing the seed from some excellent Panama Red my brother had given me the last time he came through. The plants were about four feet high then, maybe 100 or so in total.

It had seemed like a very safe spot. Shepherds Hill Farm was 325 acres of rolling Virginia hills, with the pond at the far end of my Grandparents mile-long driveway. I was the only one who ever went down there and the only one to row the boat stored under his dock all the way to the far end where I was growing my crop. So how Grandpa discovered my plants and why he would take pictures to give to a judge and turn me in, was baffling. The greatest fault he ever had was being too easy on his own son and on me. He made no demands and didn’t even scold me when I shot up his “No Hunting” signs or the little suspended birdhouses he carefully hung near the guest house. He even gave me the money for the ammunition. Grandpa always cared for, and protected his own, at all costs.

Now, inexplicably, I was about a day away from serious jail time…by his hand. It made no sense.

As I slowly rallied to present my appeal for mercy, Grandpa forged ahead with a loud diatribe: “That whole delta of land forming at the far end of the pond where the stream enters is a direct result of the blasting those bastards are doing up the mountain on the Route 64 construction. They’re libel and they can damn well pay to dredge out the pond.”

OH, it was the DELTA ITSELF he wanted to show the judge! The beating pulse in my temples started to subside as I realized the obvious. Grandpa didn’t have any idea what marijuana looks like, and had no reason to care, but I was sure the judge would, both know and care.

“Grandpa, these pictures are no good! All they show is a bunch of weeds, not the delta of new dirt from the Rte. 64 blasting. I’ll get you a better set of pictures this afternoon.”

He liked the idea. Especially since construction of  Rte. 64 on what had been the North end of his property had torn away the top of the hills overlooking his pond, filling it with silt and creating that delta of new land.  The dynamite blew large rocks out for thousands of yards. Two big meteorites had already blasted holes through the roof over his dock, and he was pissed.

I knew I had my work cut out for me though.

After we finished breakfast, I quietly took Grandpa’s Polaroids and excused myself as Mandy cleared the table. Borrowing Grandpa’s camera, I grabbed a heavy pair of gardening shears from the garage and started walking down the last quarter of the long driveway to the pond.

That’s where I spent the next two hours, pulling marijuana plants out of soft dirt, cutting off the roots and stems and tossing them up into the woods. As for the plants themselves I carefully stacked them into a tall pile in the rowboat to take back up the hill to the guest cottage where I was staying.

Before leaving, I took 8 good shots of the evil delta that the Rte.64 blasting had created, clear views of the clean, marijuana free triangle of dirt that was creeping out into my Grandfathers pond and filling it up with silt. Grandpa had all the ammunition he needed for his date with the judge. I had already torn up his last set of pictures and burned the pieces.

Problem solved, jail time averted, and I could breathe freely again. But the question became, what should I do with 100 marijuana plants?

This was 1968 and I had no idea how to process the plants. Google hadn't yet been invented and I had already tried smoking the stuff. It would certainly have made better rope than smoke. But maybe if I could concentrate the THC somehow? I didn’t know how except through cooking, the way I would concentrate soup or broth.

I turned the guest cottage into a vegetable processing plant. Grandpa and Grandma never came over there anyway, so it was a safe zone. They only sent Mandy over before I arrived. She cleaned the place and stocked the refrigerator. Shepherds Hill Farm had been my private paradise since I was seven years old. I could be dropped anywhere in those woods and know exactly where I was. It was crossed by old stagecoach roads, still rutted and prominent under a canopy of mature hardwoods. My ancestors had walked those woods, and I felt their presence. But then and there, the pressing and very real challenge, was to extract THC from 100 plants and get rid of the evidence.

So I boiled the plants. In a large ham roasting pan with high sides over two burners. As I stripped off leaves and threw them in the bath, the stalks went into a pile destined for an unmarked grave in the woods.  Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. And it did, for three days straight.

By day three, I had some very thick tar. Cooled and rolled into balls the size of a quail egg, twenty-four in all.

After everything was cleaned up, I began the testing phase. I had no clue then that boiling pot plants was exactly the wrong way to distill their essence but it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.

I began by swallowing tar balls whole with lots of water. Wait an hour, nothing. Swallow more of the stuff. Much like choking down over-sized pencil erasers. I ate all twenty-four balls of tar. Nothing happened. The only high I was getting was from the good pot I rolled up into fat joints to help pass the time.

Nothing happened, nothing, that is, until I realized the next day, that I was completely stopped up like a tightly corked bottle. All peristalsis had come to a frightening and complete halt.

I’ll spare you the unpleasant specifics that filled an additional three days of guest-house frolic, marked by sweat, strain, loud calls to god, and numerous ex-lax chocolates. I had visions of carrying a pound of prolapse around in my jockeys for the rest of my life. That should really get the girls I thought. Get them to run as far away from me and my special diapers as possible.

By day four, the fecal gods smiled as I experienced a very painful home birth to 24 tar balls that came out that same way they had gone in, although they didn't exit car by car, they passed the entire traffic jam at once. Mashed together by the cars behind them, they had put on the breaks right at their shot of freedom. They could almost smell it. Nice.

So kids, what is the moral of this story? Don’t plant pot in the wrong place? Have a clue as to what you are doing? Never, ever boil marijuana plants, or any other kind of plant material for that matter, and then eat the resulting tar?

All of the above.

To do so is simply an invitation to start a monumental traffic jam in the worst possible of places.