“Light that shit, bro!” exclaimed Matt from the backseat.
Eddie sagely held up a finger, waiting until his friends took notice, waiting until full silence had descended upon the Volkswagen.
“First…tunes. Always tunes first.”
“I got you,” answered Lance from the passenger seat, fiddling with his phone, pulling up a playlist, adjusting the volume on the radio until Easy Star All Star’s Ziggy Stardub drifted from the speakers.
“Now I will light this shit,” Eddie proclaimed, opening his Zippo one-handed, flicking the flame into life, kindling the end of the joint, all in one smooth movement. A ribbon of smoke meandered from the tip, seeking the path of least resistance to the freedom of the great outdoors, a lush green vista of deciduous forest right outside the open window.
“Yo, I have to be back for rehearsal by six,” Matt reminded Eddie, who acknowledged the comment with a regal wave of the hand not guiding the steering wheel, his other hand still clutching the joint, the dance of smoke rechoreographed by this simple gesture.
“We’ll make this a short one,” Eddie responded, signaling and turning to the left, then bearing to the right as a shabby covered bridge came into view. Blindly handing the joint over to Lance, he steered the car over the rushing stream, taking a moment to glance upward at the wooden joists overhead, speckled with empty birds’ nests and the paper husks of long-abandoned wasp colonies, tattooed by the passage of years. For a moment, the interior of the car was lost to shadow; for a moment, they straddled spacetime itself.
Then the Volkswagen emerged on the other side of the bridge, sunlight spilling in through the windshield. Having inhaled as deeply as he was able, Lance reached wildly over his shoulder and waved the joint in the general direction of the backseat, his body heaving with the barely-suppressed urge to cough.
“Hold still,” Matt instructed, attempting to pinch the joint at the end of Lance’s flailing fingers. He gripped the roll and inhaled as Lance lost the battle in his lungs, hacking great clouds of smoke out the window and clutching his chest like an octogenarian heart attack victim.
“That’s good weed,” he managed, and Eddie nodded.
“My buddy in California,” he commented vaguely.
They drove the winding forest road, cirrus clouds drifting through the evening sky like wishes, Bowie’s words in reggae regalia reminding them all how wonderful they really were. They spoke of attractive women in introductory Sociology courses; they lamented Friday morning calculus after Thursday evening parties.
Another covered bridge soon loomed from just around the bend. Sitting snugly between two stone walls, paint peeling from its dilapidated wooden beams, the bridge beckoned the Volkswagen through the dark maw of its entrance, the interior growing more and more narrow until two cars would have been hard-pressed to pass by one another at the same time.
The joint continued to circle. The road stretched on. Lance lit a cigarette for his other hand, then managed to double-fist fire when it came his turn to inhale.
“Good weed,” he pronounced again, perhaps so overtaken by the quality he found it necessary to repeat the sentiment, perhaps forgetting he had already expressed this identical opinion not so very long before.
Next came a series of gentle turns – two rights, a roundabout, a left – and then another structure came into view. The bridge – red this time, with a white trim, clearly better-kept than those previous – stood over a wide crevasse in the earth, evidence of the students’ proximity to the Pocono Mountains and the changing topography as they drove deeper into the woods.
“Which one is this, again?” questioned Matt. The joint had made its way into the backseat once more, and he held it briefly to his lips before passing it forward to Eddie, tapping him on the shoulder to alert him to the presence of tetrahydrocannabinol floating next to his ear.
Waiting until Eddie finished inhaling, Lance held out his hand to receive the rapidly-withering joint, pausing to tap a bolus of ash out the window. “It’s Wehr’s,” he answered. “The shining jewel of the Covered Bridge Tour.”
“Them’s fighting words,” Eddie interjected. “Geiger’s Bridge is the best. I’m ready to die on that hill.”
The Covered Bridge Tour – a clear example of what happens when entities are named by individuals without an ounce of creativity – was the unofficial territory of those students at the nearby elite Liberal Arts college who tend to celebrate April 20th as canon and Christmas. To get high on the tour was a rite of passage, a ritual passed down from graduating class to graduating class, the bridges standing timeless and stoic before this changing of the guard, the planet continuing to spin, unbothered by it all.
“I always knew you would die on a CBT,” remarked Matt, and puffed from the roach between his fingers one more time.
There were always exams and heartbreaks and family emergencies back home, but for a span of 14 miles – with thanks to the Lehigh Valley Historical Society – it was possible to transcend college and Pennsylvania and the onslaught of adulthood, to participate in something sacred and communal. On a Covered Bridge Tour, entire futures could be plotted; oaths could be sworn; crises could be resolved; friendships could be birthed; and all with cannabis burning under the wooden eaves of history and the steady thrum of the car engine below.
“This is pretty much kicked,” Matt added next, clutching the sooty roach between two fingernails, flicking it out the window until it landed on the asphalt in a small burst of sparks, somewhere in the past.
The road continued to climb.
Shafts of light filtered through the clouds like the fingers of God. Broad expanses of green rushed at the moving car, interrupted by the occasional flash of brick or metal or garish bright paint, those architectural trappings of Suburbia. The bass line throbbed from the speakers as the Starman waited in the sky, wanting to meet them but afraid he’d blow their minds.
“Oh, look, there’s that crazy old dude,” Eddie spoke up, gesturing ambiguously to the route ahead and the world outside. “Just like always.”
Lance and Matt looked in the direction Eddie had indicated, both recognizing the frail, gray-haired man slouched in an old director’s chair by the side of the road. He wore thick glasses and a stained white muscle shirt; he regarded the landscape with an unblinking, thousand-yard stare.
“Jesus, what does he do out here?” Lance exclaimed. “He is always right there, right in that fucking chair.”
“I took a CBT before my 8:30 class one morning,” recalled Eddie. “He was still in the same fucking spot.”
Chewing through the pot-holed concrete at 35 miles an hour, the Volkswagen drew closer to the site of the man’s vigil, then closer still. Staring avidly at the street and everything beyond, unperturbed by the rude wake of warm air generated by each passing car, the man sat; he sat, and he remained.
Starman changed over to All the Young Dudes as the car came abreast of the sagging director’s chair and its Sisyphean occupant. There was an infinite moment of stillness, an event horizon where the man met the boys’ eyes and the boys saw the man. Then the automobile shot right by, headed for the next covered bridge, leaving the figure to his surveillance or his sentry or his intermission or his mourning; leaving the man behind.
“It’s like he’s waiting for something. Just…waiting,” Eddie mused, signaling as a traffic light came into view, glancing once more at the form receding in the rearview mirror.
“Like a character in a Beckett play,” Lance joked, twisting in his seat to face Matt, attempting to confirm if this witticism had indeed registered with the resident actor of the friend group.
“Lame,” Matt declared, and pulled a plastic bag with green buds and rolling papers from the depths of his cargo shorts. “Let’s smoke one more. I have rehearsal at 6.”
Thus the tour continued, and the remaining bridges were crossed, and no one was late for rehearsal. There would be another CBT with the same cast of merry pranksters, as well as countless more with countless others over the months and years; the tradition would continue, even as the players aged and graduated and were replaced by younger versions of themselves.
And through it all…the man sat. He sat in the old director’s chair by the side of the road.
Waiting.