Cherry Lights

We were somewhere along US-89, the stretch that slithers through Snake River Canyon like it’s trying to run away from something. The cliffs lean in like old men eavesdropping. The water below moves slow and threatening, like it knows how the day ends.

Everything was quiet except the tires chewing the road and the kind of sky that doesn’t promise anything—just hangs there, low and disinterested, like a drunk who forgot what he was mad about. I wasn’t driving. Let me make that clear. I was just the passenger, sick and trying to feel something close to okay.

Then came the lights. Red, blue, red, blue. And a man with a badge and the early-morning energy of someone who enjoys the smell of his own authority.

Sgt. Faicco, Teton County Sheriff’s Office. He walks up to the window, sniffs like a bloodhound with tenure and says, “I smell weed.”

I told him I had an active med card from Arizona. I told him it was for the nausea, the pain, the existential ankle weights that come with dragging a tumor named Richard around my rectum. I wasn’t high. I wasn’t belligerent. I wasn’t driving. I wasn’t anything except tired and partaking in the one medicine that made me feel better without a bunch of side effects.

But he didn’t care. He took it. All of it. Two joints. Some sleepy little 1.5mg gummies—barely enough to lift a thought, let alone a body.

“Get new meds. Weed is illegal here, you’re lucky I’m not arresting you.” Get new meds? Sure. Let me swing by the pharmacy and pick up some. Because, of course, as a cancer patient, I’m swimming in functional, appetite-boosting medication options, aren’t I?

Half of Jackson smokes weed and he knows it. But he saw me—out-of-state plates, female, puffy-eyed from life—and figured, why not? A little morning confiscation to feel tall. In a moment of sarcastic surrender, I replied, “Enjoy the strain, it’s a good body high,” half-convinced he might stash it for personal use.

It’s funny—everyone loves to say “cancer doesn’t discriminate,” but the people in charge sure as hell do. They look at your license plate. They look at your face. They smell weed and they don’t smell a patient—they smell power. And they take it. I hope Sgt. Faicco sparked up my joint and coughed so hard he saw God. I hope God looked like me. And I hope she was pissed.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer.