So when I went back to look for the spot, it was still there.  I mean it wasn’t just there, I mean like the spot was still a spot… Like it was still being used.  I mean like the crushed coke cans were the new white ones with the polar bear on them, and the empties had the labels with the mountains that turn blue when your beer gets cold enough. But the spot was still pretty peaceful, still, -a circle of milk crates with silence at its center. It was down a well worn trail, only like twenty yards behind the Exxon station. You couldn’t really say the spot was in the woods—you can kind of see rt. 24 if you’re standing up, and on the opposite side is a row of townhouses that has just been built—now it’s more just like a clearing in a big ditch that’s hidden in a copse of thick bushes and thin trees.  Anyway, I knew the guys that cleared out the trail and bushwhacked all the brush to create the spot; Dudes with machetes that their dads bought them from sunnys surplus or wherever. Basically, they made a big project out of it, chopping down bushes and thorns. 

So the spot isn’t so hard to find, but you feel hidden when you’re there.  Its just that no one gave a shit what we did there.  Nobody owned that piece of land, that ditch—and who’s going to follow some kids into the woods after school?  But anyway, we were all super paranoid.  Always talking about the cops and what if they find the spot and sneak up on us?  How to properly lose the stuff and where to properly run.  After a while the dudes cut an escape route that was only to be used in emergencies. I mean like I can even remember times where we just dropped everything and scattered, sprinted home, met up at home just because some kid got so lit up and spooked that he just bolted when he thought he heard something.

I mean this was all before we drove of course, before anything really; we just went to the woods. to the spot. The spot was also good because it was a full mile away from our street.  Far enough that hopefully it wasn’t a neighbor driving by our single-file line walking around back of the gas station, silent, heads down, hoods up. We always walked to the spot even though we had bikes.

And so the spot was pretty cool but also pretty boring.  It wasn’t very magical but then sometimes it was. There was a tiny creek next to the spot with like a trickle of shitty grey water in it.  I think that there were grass and weeds there in the beginning but the ground quickly turned to smooth packed mud under the feet of all these dudes just standing around all the time.  So I know pretty quickly we stole some milk crates from the Highs Dairy store across rt. 24 and arranged them in a circle in the spot. That was huge. I see now the milk crates are still here, stuck in the mud, but how could you know if they were the same ones?  You can’t tell how old a milk crate is, it’s like they don’t age. There is a 2x6 plank sitting on two sinking cinderblocks as well- it’s like a loveseat.

There is still a lot of trash here; it’s like littering is encouraged if you chuck your shit outside a certain perimeter.  its like we always knew it would probably be the trash that got us busted somehow, But the trash also sort of could potentially confuse someone or distract someone from finding the stashes that were around the spot. There were a lot of stashes. 

So like sandwiched in between two big flat stones were a bunch of plastic baggies with their corners ripped out-cornerbags-. I don’t know why we saved them.  Under a fallen tree was the moldy jansport backpack that held the homemade steamroller, 18 inches.  There was a black trash bag somewhere full of puckered and bleeding penthouse magazines.  At one point we had some plants going in a five gallon bucket a couple paces back in the bush.  There were warm cans of beer. There was a bunch of shit in different places after a while.

So but I didn’t do any snooping around, I already knew what I could find. I just wanted to sit there for a minute and smoke one.  I just wanted to stop in the Exxon for some ciggies, see if the old German lady was still there, the one who used to sell Marlboros to thirteen year olds for $1.99, but she wasn’t.