Cross Country
May 1980
A fat roach beckoned from the ashtray. I fired it up, as was my custom on the drive home from work. It was a juicy little remnant that had begun its day a full-grown joint on the morning edition of my commute. Life just seemed to go better with a little buzz on. And at the moment, life was going just fine.
I was employed as a senior copywriter at El Paso’s largest ad agency. Mithoff Advertising was a mid-size shop that put a premium on good creative and held tightly to a prestigious roster of regional and local accounts. I had built a nice portfolio in the course of my two-year stint and was earning a surprisingly good living creating thirty- and sixty-second radio and TV commercials, writing print ads and outdoor boards, and cobbling the occasional catalog.
In advertising, all roads lead to major markets. That’s where the best brands and biggest budgets reside. And that’s where my new wife and I were determined to go. Debbie had been a broadcast producer at the agency where we met and fell in love. Once married, we began to discover the pitfalls of relationships in the workplace. Two voices heard as one might have worked for Simon & Garfunkel, but it was sudden death for a career-minded couple. So I stayed put and Debbie took a job producing for Channel 9, the local NBC affiliate. It was a temporary solution. We were determined to pursue the limits of our uncluttered ambition. Of course, we had no idea where that might take us. But we believed it would be a long way from El Paso, Texas.
It was a pleasant afternoon in the high-desert spring. I was looking ahead to tonight’s game. I played fast-pitch softball in a competitive men’s league. The games were hotly contested, but never hotly enough to stand in the way of a few cold ones to wash down the residue of the results. It was as much a social occasion as anything else—an evening among friends under the welcoming lights of a neighborhood ballpark. Debbie, who never missed a game, was probably already home packing the cooler.
I pulled off I-10 and headed west into El Paso’s upper valley, our little slice of which was a red-brick shoebox in a small clearing of gravel and weeds just a six-iron from the Rio Grande. Two large pecan trees shaded the long, narrow lot. The house sat back about forty-five feet from an irrigation ditch that fronted the property. It was hardly more than a human file cabinet, but the location offered precious shade and scenic relief from the scorched desert landscape. Driving up to our little place on Elmwood Road, I was happy to see Debbie’s yellow Volkswagen already in the driveway.
Parked next to the ditch in front of the house, I noticed an unfamiliar sedan, totally generic but for the clear signal of its whip antenna. Side by side in the front seat a pair of casually clad, clean-shaven guys about my own age were conspicuously reading the newspaper. The silent alarm of paranoia began to sound as I was struck by the certainty that despite their apparent interest in current events, they had come in regard to events of the past.
I swung into the drive and heard their engine crank and fire. By the time I rolled to a stop, their sedan had pulled in behind, effectively blocking my retreat. I got out with my hands in plain sight as the two approached cautiously, identifying themselves as agents of the El Paso DEA. My pulse was headed for terminal velocity, but somehow my brain overrode the panic, clearly reciting the mantra from long ago: Say nothing.
I expected at any moment to be thrown onto the hood of my Honda, aggressively frisked, and paraded in front of the neighbors in handcuffs. Obviously, these guys hadn’t watched as many cop shows as I had. There was no drama, no hostility, no handcuffs—just a cursory pat down by a painfully polite pair of federal agents who kindly suggested we go inside so I might be spared the reading of my rights in front of the neighbors.
Debbie, who stood at the front door struggling to process the sudden death of our dreams, seemed to be searching for any explanation beyond the obvious. I had never concealed the truth of my past, but neither had I gone into much detail. We shared the conviction that our former lives were best left to history. Unfortunately, history had suddenly come calling, hungry for a bite of our future.
For me, the offense in question was a brief but eventful detour from which I had long since retraced my steps. In fact, my arrest came four years and ten months after the alleged crime—just two months shy of the statute of limitations. But ours is a government with a long memory and a longer reach. And my name was etched in consequence at the end of the dreaded phrase, “The United States of America versus…” I was looking at a maximum of fifteen years in the federal penitentiary. I was on my way to the El Paso County Jail, and about to be reunited with some old friends.
The story behind that day is one I have put off telling for nearly forty years. It has always been there, residing quietly on the back burner of my life. I just never seemed to get around to it. No surprise, really. When I look back, I realize it was never my story to tell. It belongs to others who were far bigger stakeholders than I. Some have remained friends for life. Others have drifted away on the prevailing current. Still others have died. But enough of us remain to share the unlikely tale of a loose confederacy of homeboys who chased their first life-altering high from the mountains of Mexico to the desert Southwest; from the growing fields of Sinaloa and the coast of Colombia, all the way to the edge of Massachusetts and a place called Folly Cove. It was there that we endeavored to pull off the most audacious pot smuggle yet attempted.
Folly Cove, however, is not where the tale begins, but the apogee of an arc that originated in a wide-open border town on the forgotten edge of nowhere—El Paso, Texas. Against a 1970s backdrop of Vietnam and Kent State, political corruption and radical activism, this is how a brotherhood of border rats rode the adrenaline high straight to the fast lane of America’s Cannabis Road. It is the story of restless youth meeting illicit opportunity at the right time in the perfect place. And it is a story we will tell together, just as we lived it.
1970—1974
1970
Jack Stricklin, ca. 1970
With the foothills of the Rockies on the horizon and Sandia Peak at his back, Jack Stricklin rolled south through Albuquerque on his way to El Paso. The yellow and white four-wheel drive International Scout hummed along I-25 at a steady pace, its knobby off-road tires whining in protest at the civilized
