Bob had a beard before any of us. And I never saw him without his baseball cap. Bob drove a pickup truck, chewed tobacco and could always be counted on for having weed.

Bob had a canoe too, so one Saturday we set off for Leaser Lake: me, Bob, and another friend named Bill. Two Bills and a Bob, a children’s story. We were maybe 17.

I’d been to Leaser Lake as a kid with my parents in their Grumman aluminum canoe. But seeing the lake stoned was a different story, the texture of the roots along the muddy shores, the layers of earth packed with little stones, the tiny snakes that emerged just above the surface and the way they flicked their bodies forward underwater. Their demon eyes and patterned skin, the more you looked the more of them you saw.

Weed activated my brain in new ways, my senses. The sound of the frogs croaking was like a steel nutcracker slipping along the edges of a walnut shell. Or a socket ratcheting. As a young writer enamored by metaphor the possibilities were endless; weed was a portal to another place, clearly better.

Jim Morrison quoted Aldous Huxley about the doors of perception and both promised new worlds of possibilities. It was not just a portal to new dimensions but one to adulthood.

Even the sound of the paddle slapping the water and the plip plop of the drops beading off the edge: all the world shone with a new luster.

I thought about Bob as I walked with my stick down the muddy trail at the state park. In fact I slipped and went down on one knee and grunted as I did. Hadn’t recalled Bob’s name or seen him in nearly 40 years.

That was the time Bill and I pretended we were surfing as we stood in the back of Bob’s pickup truck and sped down the highway with the two of us laughing and crouched down low, arms out to the side for balance. I made the mistake of turning my head to look behind me though and with my sunglasses on, the wind yanked the frames right off my face and dashed them on the concrete pavement. They were my first prescription sunglasses, expensive, so we went back to see what we could salvage but they were destroyed, returned to sand.

Drugs can be so deceptive because on the surface they make you feel good, but keep doing them and over time you’ll get further away from reality. Like paddling in a boat the shore gets smaller the farther you go until you can’t see it anymore.

I walked the trail thinking about that and used my stick like an oar. It took a long time but I made it back. The air smelled clean with the recent rain and it made a pleasing plip plop as it fell on the fallen leaves. The sweet sound of the birds, some distant motor purring. The mud was slick but the leaves made for a natural tapestry and firm footing. They were all the color of worn pennies and would get ground down to make new nutrients for the roots and one day, new leaves. First a rich green turned to yellow, then turned to brown. I wondered if Bob was still alive and had his same beard and if he did, surely it had gone white by now.

I’ve been trying to see the world differently for years now. It takes practice but seeing it just how it is can be more fulfilling. It’s one unexpected gift of getting clean, to change the way I see things, my reality.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, inspiration

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, recovery