The West Campus Stakeout

It’s Sunday, the first of March when a fear I haven’t felt in over four months rears its ugly head over yet another semester. The time is roughly nine o’clock, my yoga partner and I having just left our first session of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Luckily the night is brisk but not unbearable as we make our way to the lake track across from West Campus for our weekly evening ritual. It’s a week before daylight saving time begins, so we’re safe under the cover of dusk.

Or so we think.

We are midway through our smoke session when a pair of headlights appears across the lake, stopping right at the parking lot from where we came. Though it’s too dark to make it out, my instincts tell me the vehicle is either a truck or an SUV, the latter likely belonging to campus police.

That hunch goes from likely to irrefutable when my partner whispers, “I think I see flashlights.”

“Stay low,” I say, and we make our way toward the more forested bend of the path. The whole track is a loop around the lake, with only two paved routes of entry and escape—the lip that leads to the back of the local high school and the sidewalk that leads down to the parking lot, where the cops are hypothetically waiting for us. Our trek down into the woods puts us into dangerous view of a road running parallel to the track for a moment, but we’d notice a second car. We’d certainly notice flashlights approaching us in the darkness.

That’s when I hear a sound that twists my stomach into throbbing knots.

Dogs.

They set out search dogs to track us down.

“What do we do?” my partner asks.

“We split up,” I say, deciding in milliseconds that the longer we stay near each other, the more risk we have of capture at worse consequence. “You get to your car and I’ll make a B-line to my apartment.”

At the exposed band of the track, we climb up the grassy slope and start down the road leading back to campus. No cars pass us by on the adjacent street, not a police car or search dog in sight. My partner has parked near the gym, far from my apartment building. We say our goodbyes and good lucks and make our way back to our separate residencies.

Granted, we were pretty high. I wasn’t in the best state of mind when I came back to campus from Atlanta that afternoon, so there’s a chance that my pessimism combined with our THC-induced paranoia added to the disparate outcome of our evening. However, the next day, my friend tells me that as soon as she drove past the lakeside parking lot, a campus patrol vehicle pulled out and followed her all the way back to the main wing of campus, only breaking away when she passed the public safety building. They were watching us, and they could have very well caught us, had we waited for them to come to us.

Thus begins my weeklong, sober stakeout at that lake across the street from my apartment. If the cops are onto us, I’m going to find out on own my terms.

Campus police versus college stoners.

This wasn’t my first brush with campus police my freshman year. Midway through fall semester, I’d foolishly let two officers search my apartment in order to clear my name of a crime I didn’t commit, though that’s a story for another time. From Halloween to Thanksgiving 2019, I stressed about the chances of student affairs ignoring my request for them not to alert my mother regarding my probation and possession charges in violation of student conduct. Did that scare me away from ganja, my go-to self-medication?

Of course not. But the probation made me sharper, more alert and almost invisible to public safety. In the deep southern heart of Georgia, I’d made the mistake of treating weed as I had the summer before college: a necessity for the productive work week. Far from Atlanta, the perception of cannabis by local law enforcement was rather a culture shock. While I may have been one of the first of my freshman class to fall under the long arm of campus law, I’d unknowingly become a figure of perseverance to a small community of my fellow stoners.

I should have started charging consultations for all the times I heard the words “I got raided” my first half of Spring semester. Most all of my vexed peers suffered the same afflictions—freshmen, Black, comfortable with cannabis—that rendered them easy pickings for campus police. The consequences ranged from required courses regarding alcohol abuse and two-hundred-dollar fines to physical arrest and suspension from classes. We who had never before faced serious repercussions for what we decided to put into our bodies felt grossly persecuted, but we were lucky in comparison to the penalties for experimenting with consciousness outside the student safety net.

A week on watch before campus closure.

Something most of us delinquent students shared was our adamant continued use of cannabis. Like me, my yoga partner had her dorm searched due to an anonymous tip from one of our less enlightened student body. This police raid cost her a bowl of sentimental value and a fine similar to what I was issued. And yet we still continued our nightly ritual of imbibing in marijuana, either before yoga or after jiu-jitsu.

But when that police vehicle appeared at the scene of our supposed crimes (the first time our lakeside location had been of interest to campus security in months), this was no longer a matter of evading law enforcement. Rather, we were defending our turf that we’d claimed ours for as long as we’d been friends in college. Giving it up was something we were willing to do but not without good, absolute confirmation that we’d been compromised.

So, the day after the night of jiu-jitsu, I begin to spend my hours between classes at the lake. I post up right where we would normally stop to smoke, and there I sit, waiting for campus police to stop through. In place of ganja, I bring printouts from my English courses and make revisions with pen and paper beneath the pine trees and azure sky, overlooking the remains of a once-natural lake.

Every so often, somebody does indeed pull their car into the parking lot, usually to jog or walk their pets or, of course, disappear into the woods to use his or her drug of choice in peace. Though most of those who stop by are the campus majority: Caucasian students of varying class. Police aren’t startled by their decision to stop by a lake right across from campus. No, they’re watching people like me, who look like nice enough African Americans, but still, can’t be too careful.

Monday passes without a police sighting. My friend and I go to another, more overlooked location to imbibe before yoga. The next day, it’s late afternoon when a pickup truck arrives at the lake. By the look of it, this could be the same vehicle from Sunday night. I lower my homework and watch from my unconcealed vantage point. The driver’s side door opens, and out climbs a small white girl and her dogs. She opens the bed of the truck, retrieves a fishing rod and bait. The dogs are ecstatic, having been cooped up in an apartment for God knows how long, so they’re barking and carrying on while the girl goes to work on the local marine life.

Could this have been what two nights ago I’d believed was a preemptive strike on me and my friend? Just some girl fishing while her dogs got some fresh air? It’d be a relief if it was the case. But, then again, who goes fishing at night in college? I wasn’t convinced, so I decided to surveil for a while longer. I never saw the cops park at the clearing before the lake. But on my way to the gym one night for rock climbing, as I contemplate taking a detour to the lake afterward, what do I see parked across the street, positioned perfectly on the side of the adjacent road?

Their brights are on, so I can’t make out the vehicle all too well, but I’m sure had I looked hard enough, I’d read campus police on the side of that SUV. I only glance over for a moment, unwilling to keep my eyes on the police van for more than a few seconds, seeing as they’re idling right on the stretch of road my friend and I had previously went our separate ways when we thought search dogs were released after us. The gym is closed, so I walk back. They’re still there. I stay in my apartment, enjoy my one-hitter in the ventilated stairwell and go to sleep.

The next few days, the campus recreation center remains closed. Student e-mails state it’s due to the risk of COVID-19. A whole weekend without going to the gym, without risking our enrollment with our lakeside ritual of smoking whatever blunts, joints, or bowls we have to offer. Near the end of the second week of March, right before Spring Break, classes start getting cancelled. My parents start to send ominous texts, “COVID-19 is everywhere,” and “start wearing a mask.” With the added discomfort of people openly coughing on public transportation, my suspicions about the apparent impending pandemic begin to rise.

Come Friday, March 13th, it becomes obvious that something is very wrong. Why else would they keep campuses closed for an additional two weeks after Spring Break? I’m grateful for my sobering night before, in which I packed not only clothes and supplies for a three-week vacation, but also most of my belongings I’d brought to college. Items that I wasn’t willing to leave behind in the event we weren’t returning to campus come April.

The start of 2020 was lifechanging. Had I known that the first two weeks of March, my priorities would go from protecting my smoke site to safeguarding my immune system, the time I wasted stressing about my right to imbibe on campus would have been spent much more productively. On research, mostly. For what, well, that’s for another time.