Coming Home Three - Black Pete

Third post of a four-part narrative.

  Now I am back on the trail that leads to my cabin., I rode my first draft horse home on a late afternoon down through these woods with the sun setting over the valley below me. This is one story I have rarely told and never written down because I traded a pound of home grown for that horse. At the time it felt like a big deal. Now? Kind of late to worry about it. So here’s the story.

    Home grown in those days was grown from seeds we saved from pot we bought. It was all Sativa which doesn’t mature in our short growing season, so it was all leaf and all bad. Nowadays Vermont outdoor growers grow Indica which does mature, but that was unheard of at that time. Josie’s and my friend, Terry Danner, sent me an article from High Times magazine explaining how to cover plants with black plastic in the afternoon to shorten their day and fool them into flowering early. A friend living in Washington state gave me a handful of seeds from some terrific Hawaiian pot which I used for this experiment. I grew maybe 20 plants in a group that I covered dutifully in August. Got rid of the males and ended up with a couple of pounds of beautiful bud. This was fall/winter, ‘75 / ’76.

The energy crunch had caused gas to zoom up to 50 cents a gallon and I had the “back to the land” bug as well as a life-long love of horses, so I was longing to farm and log with horses but I was too broke to buy one. Firewood was suddenly a commodity again and there was a horse powered firewood operation on Huff Pond road. If you take the trail from the cabin, by the reservoir and up the old hotel bridle trail, you come to Huff Pond. I did just that— often. The horse operation was run by Piero Tonzini, an Italian transplant, pot connoisseur and dealer who had used ill gotten gains to buy a couple of horses and chain saws and a stake body truck, hired a couple of his young customers and was skidding out tops from a log job of Bucky Dragon’s. Bucky and his brother, Clifton, were working the lot right across the road. Bucky was pretty much all about vodka, but Clifton was a serious pot consumer. I would stop by the log landing at seven in the morning before they went to the woods. Clifton and Tonzini seemed like some kind of spiritual brothers. They were both dark, long haired and lean and shared some kind of metabolism that allowed them to smoke a fat joint, tell a story you knew wasn’t true but you wanted to hear anyway, and then in shirt sleeves, regardless of the temperature, throw a chain saw in the skidder and head for the woods.

Meanwhile, Tonzini and/or the boys he had working would try to skid out tops with the horses. Dick was all right, a nondescript dobbin sort of bay, pretty old and very slow. But then there was Pete. Big, tall, black Percheron. Beautiful to look at. You could easily picture a knight riding into battle on Pete. But instead the battle was between Pete and a couple of stoners with no horse experience. Pete won every day. He had been a “pulling horse”, meaning he had been used in the pulling contests at County Fairs. Pulling Horses are generally useless for anything else because they have been trained, sometimes with electric cattle prods, to explode at the sound of a log chain and slam the load forward. This is not a preferred behavior for skidding firewood. It is, in fact, dangerous in the woods. So Pete was spending most of most days tied to a tree.

One morning, I offered Clifton and Tonzini a joint from my home grown. They are appropriately impressed and, of course, don’t believe that I grew it. Next morning, “So Ted. Got any more of that ‘home grown’?” Eventually, I have to bring Tonzini to the cabin where the loft is full of hanging plants and that unique and, to some of us, wonderful smell. Now he believes me and he wants to buy a pound. I had never sold any drug. Pot was still a big deal legally and people were going to jail for possession, never mind selling. Tonzini and the Dragons are professional crooks. But I have a terrible case of the wants and no money so with my heart rate pretty high I tell him “No, but I’ll trade a pound for Pete.”

   “Absolutely!”

   Next day I deliver the dope. Jump on Pete bareback with a lead rope and a halter and ride off into the sunset. Literally. West, winding down through the bare hardwoods into the valley.