Free Against the Country by Ben Metcalf

composition
    Do I go too far? Is it wrong for a grown man, no longer a boy, to argue that the American schoolbus has been cruel to humanity when in fact it has not been wholly cruel to him, and regularly got him away from a panic-stricken home, and drove him on occasion to a teacher of some worth, and once even showed him an uncalled-for mercy that altered and perhaps even bettered the course of his life? What consideration is then owed this vehicle, and this situation, by one who to this day blames the vehicle, and the situation, for the very peril from which it eventually delivered him? what praise should he bestow upon an entity he knows full well to be a destroyer, by proxy if not by nature, when he finds that he himself has not been destroyed?
    Marijuana first entered this boy when he was thirteen years old, and for that I might in good conscience blame the schoolbus, or at any rate its back-road emanation. I might upbraid it as well for the fact that the boy began to attack girls a year or so after the plant’s first attack on him. A familiarity with alcohol followed the onset of the girls (or, from their perspective, the onset of the boy), and this too I lay at the beast’s accordion door. Were it not for the constant watchfulness required of him between home and school, on top of what vigil he was forced to maintain at either destination, he might have adjusted to his lot with less grief and more grace. He might have understood thatin the country, and possibly even in town, alcohol was meant to
precede
relations between the sexes (and certainly relations between the same) and that anyone who did not know this had failed to approach either hobby soon enough. He might have understood that such a child was bound to be left out when better-prepared students snuck off to drink in the woods that surrounded the elementary school and just about everything else in that insipid county, or when older girls, the ones who had flunked, grabbed boys of his acquaintance and forced them to simulate (or, rumor had it, actually to perform) intercourse on the multihued yet drab bathroom floors. He might have understood sooner that a natural life, such as the naturalists promote and fail to comprehend, has little to do with a moral life, such as the moralists promote and fail to comprehend. He might have understood that ten or eleven, and not a hopelessly retarded thirteen, is in fact the proper age of introduction to dope.
    I did not meet the hydroponic kind but rather what bored country children will cultivate in a clearing out back: small and pathetic plants, without sister or brother, that seemed well acclimated to the dew and the mist but surely found the sky’s unregulated heat lamp a hindrance to maturity, as did we all, and were anyway slaughtered well before they amounted to much, yanked from the earth to be dried and chopped up and fired and inhaled by higher beings whose boredom and desperation could not be undone by so spindly a remedy and could only (the boredom) be enhanced by what lethargy as the plant had to offer, or (the desperation) by what whiff of paranoia had crept up into the twigs and seeds from the awful clay below. Later encounters with industrial improvements to this weed would impress upon me the value of basic environmental controls and would secure in me the notion that I might not have troubled with the outdoor stuff at all.
    I saw no natural prototype, though, beyond the berry or the nugget of gold, for the pills these children passed among themselves,and bragged about, and fought over, and built great reputational fortunes upon, and eventually gummed and swallowed, just as I could see no rustic model, beyond the leather saddlebag or the tin bucket, for the plastic containers in which these psychotropic treats were kept. Identified from without as aspirin or Tylenol, and from within as dosages lifted from a parent’s understandable attempt to overcome the realities of the simple life by an appeal to what