Stupid Arcata.

Arcata.

The worst experience of our trip.

I am never anxious, It happened for the first time to me earlier this year when i was at home and i had no idea what it was at the time, having never experienced it before but it terrified me, it is such a terrible and unsettling feeling. I associate Arcata with this feeling with a huge splash of paranoia.

I cannot believe how helpless it can make you feel… actually. 

I hate telling this story but people find it hilarious and it is something that is apart of our trip, peoples disbelief at how insane i was gets some good reactions .. so here it is.

My first time 

a) smoking a bong

b) getting paranoid because  of pot.

Jaymee and I didn't realise how long it would take to get to Portland so instead of driving 14 hours (we have done it before and it was not a good time) and missing all the Redwoods we decide to find a last minute couchsurfer for the midway point.

I might add right now that my version of this story is significantly different from Jaymee's and the story usually has her giving her 2 cents BUT she isn't here right now and trying to convey both sides would be pretty hard in writing.. maybe i will get her to do a rebuttal.. i might not also so you believe me instead of her.

ANYWAY…

A guy replies to our request and his lives in Arcata.. a small  town right off the Highway, we arrive pretty late as we had been driving all day/ stopping at things like

- the drive through tree, a tree that has a hole to drive through it, the tree was a Redwood so it was huge

-The Ave of Giants. Giant Trees. Huge Trees. Massive trees. Trees to make my friend Matt look my size and he is a very tall boy. 

We also picked up our first hitchhiker, Jaymee made me speak to him the whole way and he stunk the car out but at least we crossed that off our list of things to do.

A quick stop at the supermarket to pick up dinner supplies and we get to his apartment where his sister lets us in. 

She is lovely, talks to us and does the usual hosting duties until her brother comes home, she explains that they don't have many things in their apartment because they are slowly moving.. her to a new place and her brother to Japan to teach English.

He comes home and we chat for a while over dinner, we inform him that we cant actually hang around in Arcata tomorrow as we have another huge day of driving and we want to get some of the Redwoods in, he wasn't so impressed that we weren't hanging around, i think it pissed him off a bit, he obviously had a huge passion about his town and it did sound amazing but due to Sal dying we had to cut so much out of our trip so it could not be helped.

I start to do the washing and he brings out his Bong, its quite large and about the height of my legs, jame has a hit and as it is my first time i get a bit shy and it  takes me 5 minutes to understand how to work the fucker and then i have to hit it with my back turned.. so much pressure.

SO HIGH. like a fucking kite, man. it was crazy and i finally understood why people smoke Bongs, i have never been this high off pot in my life, not that i am a huge smoker but usually it just sends me to sleep.

all i want to do is laugh and talk but talking is too hard so we just end up laughing at my inability to speak.

This is all well and good until something clicked… something didn't seem right and i felt unsafe. enter paranoia.

This guy is going to rape and kills us, that is exactly what i thought and from that point in i couldn't think of anything else.. everything that they had said made me think that they were serial killers.. small town, brother and sister disguise, using pot to get girls fucked up so they couldn't defend themselves.

My mind was going crazy, i thought that at a certain point in the night some of their friends would come over and join, i was looking for doors and exits, i was scared because no one knew where we were, i didn't know where we were, i didn't know if Jaymee would be in the right state to defend herself if they attacked, he wasn't talking much and i didn't know why.. was couchsurfing the perfect way to trap people to fulfil their desire to kill people?

it was so fucked. So at this point i was trying my hardest to seem sober and it was so hard that i was shaking trying to supress the high, i was getting a headache and it hurt to concentrate.

I was trying to make myself seem fine to this dude but  Jaymee was having the time of her life next to me, she had found a book on the table about a Cowgirl that rode mountain lions and horses and it was the perfect book as some parts of the story had actually happened to us on the trip.. for example the girl whipped this lion into a Cactus bush.. i kicked a Cactus.. to Jaymee this was the most amazing thing in the world  and i wanted to laugh but i had to push through and continue with whatever story i was trying to tell to seem normal. 

What kind of a 27 year old man has a childrens book on his table when his in the process of moving out? He also had this hand clappy plastic toy which made a noise when you slapped the hands together.. i saw it before he picked it up to distract Jaymee and this only fuelled the fire, it didn't make sense to have it there, he was talking about really serious topics that i felt if we disagreed with his views he would be very annoyed.

Topics were changed and for some reason i went to my bag, on the sly i got the car keys and hid them up my sleeve just incase we needed to run. he offered another hit, i said no to me and Jaymee, he offered  a drink, i declined for both of us. It was about midnight and he asked what we would like to do and i said we should go to bed as we had to get up early and we had a big day ahead of us, so what does he do? he turns on the TV to watch a movie, he finds one on the the Redwoods which Jaymee is SO delighted to watch and so much so that she basically collapses where she is and doesn't move till its over, i try to distract her from taking out her contacts because i don't think either one of us should be alone with this guy. The movie finishes and we say good night and he heads to his room, we set the alarm for early the next morning and without Jame seeing i hold the phone in my other hand just incase its needed. Keys in one phone in other. I stay up for at least 30 minutes longer to see if i can hear anything, which is so hard to do when you're high, I let myself sleep once i feel he has gone to sleep.

We are alive the next morning, we have showers and i hurry Jaymee out. I am still very anxious and i would prefer to leave before he gets up even though we survived the night.

I write a note to apologise for leaving early.

You may think i am crazy and i know Jaymee thinks i am for this but if you have ever been paranoid with drugs before it is a hard feeling to escape.

I made a promise to myself that night and i know i will stick to it. I will never do drugs in a place where no one knows where i am or even if i feel slightly off before  offered the drugs because one slight change can alter your mood and once you're there is is very hard to get back to normal.