Advanced Hippie Technology Befuddles Bomb Squad

Seattle Police, or the Washington State Ferry system, or the FBI, or whatever shadowy anti-terrorist unit is in charge of this particular investigation hasn't contacted Seattlest at this time. They haven't asked us into the evidence room in the basement of some nondescript building and opened the box containing the suspicious device they found in a Seattle/Bainbridge ferry bathroom and asked us to identify it. We can identify it, however, and you probably can too if you ever smoked pot in a college dorm.

A suspicious item -- which officers later determined might have been used to smoke marijuana -- was found aboard a Seattle-to-Bainbridge ferry Wednesday, shutting down the Colman Dock and prompting an evacuation of the boat at the height of the morning commute.

A State Patrol bomb squad removed the item and determined it posed no threat. Service on the ferry Puyallup resumed about 90 minutes later.

State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins said officers aren't sure exactly what the item was. He described it as a cylinder of duct tape wrapped in carpeting. It smelled of marijuana.

It might have been used to smoke marijuana, he said. But in doing so, the smoker also would have burned the duct tape.

When we first showed up at Moderately-Sized Midwestern University for Marginal Students way back when, there was a revelation around every corner. Girls wore pajamas in public. Beer was easy to obtain, although nearly impossible to afford. We didn't own the sole copy of Gish, and other people had even more ridiculously loud stereos to play it on. Hippies weren't raised from the dead exclusively for Dead concerts at Soldier Field--They walked among us! And they taught us something about smoking pot in the dorm. They had a tool. It was the cardboard insert from an expired paper towel roll, stuffed with fabric softener sheets and decorated with a bunch of hippie designs so that if it was ever discovered by an R.A. it could never possibly be mistaken for anything besides what it was. You inhaled your little puff of burnt brown seeds and stems, capped the bowl, and exhaled through the tube leaving the room, and the hallway, and the elevator and stairwell and lobby smelling of freshly washed laundry instead of the tell-tale "burnt rope," and yourself comfortably and undetectably high. We called it a "buster," and we danced around it like the monkeys around the monolith in 2001 with Corgan ripping Tristessa in the background at an unhealthy volume.

So, State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins, that's what you found in the bathroom of the ferry Puyallup. A buster. Hopefully our dormroom Omerta code allows us to share that information with you.