Opium for Watermelons

In college, I knew this girl who was a super cool, punk rocker, hippie. And while I've lost touch with her, I know she's now either a high-powered lawyer, or she's living in an Earthship in the desert. There were only ever two paths for her. We'll call her Hannah.

One fall, Hannah and I realized we had both been working on the same river, and then we realized we'd both worked with the same guy, a guy, who, when I was in college, was ancient.

We'll call him Roger. Looking back at this as an adult, he was probably in his late fifties or early sixties when I was in college, but to twenty-year-old-me he'd been alive with the dinosaurs. He was trim, only wore jeans, a button up and aviators, and his hair was perfectly quaffed and suspiciously devoid of any gray.

In three summers of working with Roger, I saw him only consume five things:

• Water
• Whiskey
• An occaional pre-cut up square of fruit, usually cantalope
• Hotdogs, but never a whole hotdog
• Cigars

And because we were insolent teenaged shits, we used to say, you can't get cancer if you're made of cancer. But Roger, much to the chagrin of my male co-workers, was consistently going home with women of his generate far, far more often than they were.

So after Hannah and I realized we'd both been on the river with Roger, watching him pilot boats with his aviator glasses and movie star hair, we moved on to the discussing the end of our summers.

"I went to Burning Man," she told me.

"Oh yeah? Was it cool?" I asked, totally stupidly. Because I knew it was cool. Hannah was cool. So much cooler than me. I had never been to Burning Man. (Spoiler, I still haven't, but that's by choice, not due to being uncool. I am uncool for reasons outside of my lack of Burning Man attendance.)

Hannah looked at me with her self cut bob and nodded like it was just another Tuesday.

"Yeah. I got all these watermelons from a friend who works on an organic farm. We traded the watermelons for opium."

She was so, so, so much cooler than I would ever be. Who flippantly traded melons for opium? Hannah did.

"What was opium like?" I asked.

She looked over my shoulder, as if considering an endless horizon.

"You know when you stick a piece of Velcro to your ass and then sit on a couch?" Luckily she didn't pause long enough for me to say, no. "It's like that."

And then she walked away. And at the time, I figured that opium was one of those drugs that if I were into drugs, I would encounter.

But now, nearly twenty years later, I realize, I have never met another person who has told me they've done opium, casually or due to an addiction. Perhaps this is because I live on continent on which Papaver somniferum isn't native. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that the American opium rage died out once the railroad was completed and chemists boiled enough of it to produce heroin which was then marketed as 'medicine', for everyone... Hysterical upper class women, crying babies, everyone.

"Did she time travel to the wild west?" an adult friend asked me, years later, when I told her this story. "And what does that even mean? Ass Velcro and couches?"

And I still don't know. But maybe it wasn't that Rodger had been raised on pterodactyl eggs, and Hannah had been living it up in gold rush opium dens. Maybe I was living a life out of time. Because when I think back to those summers, they are intangible and liminal. They exist in a place lost to me. A place where melon is on everyone's menu.