Trying to Slow Progress

Growing up in Lombard, IL, there was a lot of undeveloped territory. By the end of the seventies, though, the wheels of progress were turning and civilization was encroaching on our territory. Our territory was the land we built our forts on for smoking pot in the winter. It was the fields of prairie grass we could vanish in within seconds if the cops were about. We could walk out our front door and within 30 seconds we were out of sight and tokin’ away. This is where we experimented with growing the shitty homegrown we tried to grow every year.

In the summer of 1978, the construction equipment started showing up and we all wondered what was happening to our partying spots. At first we talked to them trying to figure out what they were doing and how much territory we were going to lose. At that point we found out that we were going to lose everything but we decided we would try and sabotage the construction.

We started with ripping out the construction stakes and once we pulled them all we would build a nice campfire with them and party away. This didn’t seem to slow anything down so we started trying to sabotage the equipment by smashing the controls and levers on the graders and bulldozers.

Our greatest accomplishment though happened when someone left the key in one of the bulldozers. It took us a while (probably longer than it should have because we were stoned) but we figured out how to operate and went on a destruction frenzy.

We destroyed as much of the concrete that had already been poured as we could. We used the bulldozer to push over as many other pieces of equipment as we could and did as much damage to the others as we could. When we were done, we drove the bulldozer into the manmade lake they had built. This would teach them to try and take our party spot away from us. The next day the police were all over us because they knew we did it, but they couldn’t prove it.

Trying to Slow Progress