Creative Outdoor Teenage Partying.

There’s a Facebook group for my high school town, and someone added a “You Know You’re From Concord When…” thread a while ago. Obviously, the group is predominantly much-younger people, but I was curious and added my own point to the thread. You know you’re from Concord When: “Being told to meet your friends at ‘Eden’, ‘Boonyards’ or ‘Mayflower’ makes perfect sense to you.”

Someone from the class of 2004 emailed me today and asked me to elaborate, so I did. This email is extended a couple paragraphs for the sake of the blog and reprinted with express written permission from… myself.

All three were nicknames we had for secluded outdoor places around Concord where we used to “par-tay”. Eden was along the river and accessible from behind the strip mall just off Lowell road near the center where Stop n Shop used to be. I worked there for a summer until they found out I was Canadian and didn’t have my greencard yet. It’s still a grocery store but has a different name now. There was a narrow path that wound through the underbrush for a bit and came out on a nice public lawn on the riverside with a decent amount of tree cover overhead. You could also walk down to it from the bridge down Lowell road a bit.

Anyway, Eden was a huge cop magnet and we only used it as a last resort when nobody’s parents were out of town. My friend got arrested one night, fully cuffed and stuffed, for peeing on the fire after the po-po told us to put it out. “I don’t care how you do it, but put that fucking fire out!” Well, my pal got a night in the docks and an embarassing Concord Journal Police Log entry for his efforts. The worst part is, the Journal listed the charge as “indecent exposure”, with his real name and age. That could have meant a million different things, and I’m sure his grandparents enjoyed reading it over Sunday breakfast while envisioning him running through a local preschool with his pants around his ankles.

Boonyards was a field that accessible by an overgrown dirt road just over the Bedford town line on Bedford Street that extended out from the Concord center rotary. Technically it’s located on Hanscom airforce base which we learned the hard way one night when soldiers with M16s on jeeps showed up to break up our bonfire. I was off in the dark fiddling with a British exchange student and made an easy escape.

Mayflower was in West Concord technically, and you had to go through the back of Thoreau hills to get to it. I don’t think the police ever found it during my CCHS career, but we accidentally rolled a full keg down into someone’s backyard one enchanted evening. That attracted a lot of attention and I don’t think I ever returned.

Glad I could impart some history on my wee descendants. Concord was a strange place in the early 90’s era. When I got to college in 1992, it bored me to tears. I’ve had this conversation with dozens of my friends who had the same freshman year blues. We’d wonder why people in our dorm got so excited over a lame frat keg party, and the rest of the kids on our floor wouldn’t believe our high school stories. The classes of 89 and 91 especially – we’d already fucking done it all. We kept Mr. Kryple and Ms. DiCicco on antacids – that’s for sure. The outdoor spots were backups, and the tip of the iceberg. Good times.