EAST HADDAM

EAST HADDAM

BY ELI MENNERICK

For our day trip, we drove to East Haddam—forty minutes from New Haven and home to the Devil’s Hopyard State Park. Supposedly, The Devil grows his hops there. We hiked around for a while—past a waterfall, over some boulders— without seeing anything very satanic. For lunch, we stopped at a café called Higher Grounds. Along with our fifteen-dollar breakfast burritos, the barista placed on our tray a fresh marijuana leaf. We sat out back at a damp picnic table; the other patrons sat in a circle and passed around a joint. Drew found a hair in his burrito, then a small, wiggling worm. None of us found the courage to ask for a refund.