In the hazy freedom of the 1970s, we were a posse of dope-smoking girls in our junior year of high school in Seattle. With keys to Mom’s orange Volvo station wagon, we took off for a weekend at Money Creek, a little campground just north of the city. It’s a beautiful spot, right next to the South Fork of the Skykomish River. We made our way up the Two Highway: Susan, Xan, Karma, Margaret—with me at the wheel, a girl who just got her driver’s license.

A few hours out of town, we arrived to pick a cozy little spot, riverside, and set up camp: tent, sleeping bags, cushions, blankets, pillows, cooking station, tunes, chairs set around the fire pit, a bounty of wood from my dad’s driveway. Car camping at its finest. Xan had copped a few pint bottles of her dad’s home brew for the journey. A yeasty and potent bootleg, before its time. The whale-tail bong displayed prominently in the center of the picnic table, ready to commence the weekend in earnest. It was a white bong, maybe a little short of a foot long with a bowl of a spout and the intake valve in the middle of the tail. A well-used homage to our high school years, with an infamous reputation among our peers. We were set for chillin’, teenage-girl style.

We all still lived with our parents and maybe it was our chance to play house. A cannabis friendly house. As we set the scene for just that, we noticed a young couple in the campsite next to ours. They probably smelled our weed and invited us over. We grabbed the whale tail and joined our new friends around their picnic table.

We hung out for a while, it was getting to be dusk, the couple seemed nice, friendly. We were chatting it up. She was very pretty, boho with long brown hair, quiet. He was a little scruffy ‘round the edges. That’s boho, right? So we shared our bounty. After a while, they put some in the tail too. We’d been hanging out maybe an hour or so when the dude turned the conversation to us. “So you mean your parents let you take their car and come out here by yourselves to camp for the weekend alone?” Um, why dude? Are you a rapist? Nobody missed that one. Confirming his question seemed wrong, even though the answer was obvious. And I started thinking this was some kind of wacky weed.

I aligned my mind around this fact, almost literally, like an out-of-body experience. My mind hovering over the table, I noticed: this dude was filling the bong, but he and his girlfriend were very subtly not partaking. Stall, fuss, bong to mouth, not hitting. And we were starting to get demented.

That was the moment my gut started doing summersaults, and it’s worth saying that instinct doesn’t follow stereotypes. Sometimes it cuts straight through them. The clearest proof of that comes from a dealer we trusted completely.

Back in the days before THC percentages, we didn’t buy weed in tidy little packages at the store, we bought it from a handful of dealers, usually one gram at a time. And you mostly never knew quite what you might get, some dealers could be trusted for consistency, others less so. We always felt lucky if it was hitting. We were living the lucky years because mostly the dealers we used were pretty trustworthy.

One of our dealers, let’s call him Mike, was also a scruffy guy with a man-cave of an apartment and meathead of a standoffish pittie—he carried a big black Glock in his waistband. You know, a twenty-something stereotypical drug dealer. And we were 17-year-old girls. As was the custom of the day, we would drive over, paging first for the go-ahead, cash in hand. Usually, just a couple of us would represent while the others stayed in the car. It could be socially awkward, and the short straw had to fly.

After knocking on the door of this guy’s pad, we’d follow him inside and sink onto his worn couch, shooting the shit while he measured out a gram.

It sounds wild now, but back then it was simply how you bought weed. Two young women alone in some guy’s apartment— vulnerable as shit—and yet nothing in my body tightened. Mike made an impression, sure, but he never set off our alarms. At that age, your instincts are already calibrated, and ours stayed quiet.

That thought snapped me back to the picnic table, to whatever cells were still firing. Fight or flight kicked in, and I blurted, “It’s been fun hanging out with you guys, but we gotta go.” Back at our own campsite, we huddled into a whispering buzz of freaks, wondering what the hell was in that weed and knowing—no question—that guy had been masquerading as a stoner. Freaky as fuck.

Paranoia? Serial killer? We packed up our entire camp of gear inside two minutes. Climbing on top of the mound of chaos inside the car, we didn’t give a shit if our camper friends were watching us cruise right on past into the dark of night. We were dilated-pupils straight ahead, driving about two miles per hour while Susan screamed, “Watch out, don’t hit the ship!”

We ended up at some riverside rest stop a ways back down the highway and slept in the car. It just goes to show you, danger lurks in surprising places. We were totally comfortable with the Glock-toting dealer. But the young innocent-looking boho couple in the campground? Terrifying. We were young, but we knew our shit. Always trust your gut.