Stranded in Oregon, Part 2: Smoke Out with the Hippies

Last time, in the first part of the Stranded in Oregon series, we arrived on the property in Oregon where we ended up staying for several months.  The geographical surroundings were stunning, it certainly was a beautiful place to be stranded. The property was out in the boonies and freshly populated with what was essentially an anarcho-communist commune.  I doubt they'd ever refer to themselves as such, and they may even be offended by me referring to it as such, but at the end of the day it functioned as a commune.  While that's fine for some people, it's not so fine when you're an anarcho-capitalist stranded there with no money or transportation while on the run. 

We had just told the man of the house about our situation.  He assured us that we would be safe on his property.  Should any cops come, he'd do what he could to send them away.  He told us there was only one cop in town and he didn't actually work in the town.  That meant he would only report to murders and things of that nature, anything else was handled by other cops that weren't really in the area on a regular.  It was a small town who's main industry was the lumber mill, so not much happened.  There was a presence of meth users there, but Southern Oregon in general is what's known as a Tweakerdise (Paradise for tweakers, ideal place to live and tweak with little interaction with anyone who might bring cops about.). That being said, despite the tweaker population there really wasn't a high population of cops. 

The bad news was that we were told we were coming to a farm to trim but it turned out that farm was technically overstaffed due to record low yields for the farmer. Our contact, Hippy had so far been unreliable, and she was essentially our last hope for finding a job here quickly.  The whole reason we came to Oregon was because we were told there was high paying, easy to get cannabis work there.  So far, that didn't seem to be the case. 

We were told to keep our smoking to the smoke room, or our tent.  They had children in the house and to remain "legal" they tried to keep the smoking devices out of the house for the most part, which is where the kids spent most of their time. We decided to head out there and see if anyone was about.  There was, it was a pretty large man that I'll call Carl. 

He had a very familiar look to me, like someone I used to be friends with.  He also had the nerdy, borderline flamboyant mannerisms that my friend had.  The difference was that he looked like a viking, with the way his hair was cut and how his beard was shaped.  I joked about this, calling him the Viking.  I meant it in good fun, Viking is actually kind of a badass name to get.  He got offended though, just like my old friend would have. 

He was in there alone at this time, with a dab rig and a torch in front of him.  There was at table in the middle of the room, which he was sitting at.  It was honestly pretty badly setup, which led to it being reorganized later that day. He made a comment about a guy I'll call David, saying he'd be pissed if he knew Carl was dabbing before him.  He smirked and took a large dab, proceeding to choke and nearly drop the bong immediately after. David evidently was sleeping next door, which was just another room in the same building.  

They were wood buildings with wood paneling for the outside, so there wasn't much to them.  The top half of the door of the other barn was open, letting the weather in a little.  Just beyond that door was his bed, a mattress essentially.  The rest of the room was jam packed with stuff that belonged to the previous owner, as well as stuff that belonged to the new owner. 

Hearing the choking, he woke up, groaning about someone dabbing before him.  He stumbled in in pajama pants and a teeshirt saying "No one dabs before me. I'm the first dabber".  He shoed Carl from the chair and sat down.  We introduced ourselves, with R's help I'm pretty sure. We talked about dabs and showed him ours, which were significantly better quality.  Our dabs had essentially been vaccum purged along the way due to the changing elevation of the mountain roads.  This caused small terpine and air bubbles to expand into very large bubbles, almost giving it the appearance of swiss cheese type candy.  When you tried to get a dab, it'd almost crack into a semi-solid grainy caramel texture. It tasted delicious and was much higher quality than what they had.  

I'll admit that I'm not sure about the order in which the last several characters came in.  What matters more is their character, as we met all of these people pretty much at once at our first smoke room smoke out. It gave us a good idea as to what kind of people we were going to be living with.  Meeting these people confirmed our previous statement; this was the craziest thing we had ever done, we moved across the country on a notoriously unreliable person's word.  We were going to get a true Oregon backwoods experience. 

First, I'll introduce someone I'll call Acid.  He was previously introduced in my On the Run and On Acid story, where he told us about being mega-dosed with LSD in North Carolina after stumbling into something he shouldn't have. He was an interesting individual, to say the least.  He had a greasy jacket, greasy pants and a greasy vest.  He had a memorable hat with crystals and other things sticking out of it.  With a long face, nearly devilish in nature due to facial hair, he was quite a sight.  A dirty sight, not only were his clothes greasy but he was as well.  They immediately described him as a train kid, one of the many kids that have left home in the states to illegally travel the nation by freight train. We were getting immersed in some culture here, clearly.  He ended up being one of our better friends there, one of the closest to us in terms of beliefs.

Next was a crazy little man we will call Crazy (he really went by something just as interesting, but I figured I'd change it a bit. It suits him still) and his interesting, shy, but possibly crazy herself girlfriend.  They were reportedly there to trim.  He was reportedly on the run, she just a girl who left suburbia to live a life on the road. It was an interesting mix to be around.  We later ran into them once more before leaving the country, which was an equally interesting experience. 

There was a girl that was traveling with them at the time that I'll call Resist. She was a short, dark quiet girl with hair that was in the beginning stages of forming dreadlocks.  She had recently left home, becoming a train kid and general street kid and traveling the country.  She had a friendship with the woman who owned the house, who I'll call Jane. Jane told her to come to trim for her husband, and she brought Crazy and Crazy Lady with her to help.  That left them overstaffed. By a lot. 

And lastly there was a guy I'm going to call mountain boy.  He was the son of R, and he was a true mountain boy.  He's the type of guy you see walking off the property with a freshly cut down tree on his shoulder, hauling it into the forest where he was building a fort.  I never saw this fort, but from my understanding he had made it pretty badass in a pretty short time.  His means for coping with living in a pretty crazy house was to retreat into the wild, practicing hunting and foraging. He was another good friend of ours by the end of our experience there.  Not everything there was bad, and not everyone there was bad either.  It's just not our preferred living environment. The nice thing was, once we had transportation, leaving it all behind was voluntary. The way it should be. 

We shared some dabs and everyone was pretty impressed.  David was immediately picking John's brain as he was currently the best dab maker on that property.  John came in with the product that David had been trying and failing to produce, so he wanted to know how it was done.  It wasn't long before John was showing him, and anyone on the property who was interested, his methods for blowing and purging dabs. 

This first smoke out was interesting and showed us a lot just from our first impressions.  It was clear the people that we were going to clash with, and which one's we were probably going to be okay with. We hoped for the best but we could tell our time on this property was going to be interesting to say the least.  For the time being at least, the roof over our head was our tent, which had been bought for us by someone very dear to both of us.  We were stranded without transportation and money on a property with total strangers.  So far the cast of characters was quite interesting from the very beginning and only got more so as time went on.