On my way to meet my folks for a weekend camping trip in 1998 I was stopped on a corner crossing a bridge by a hippy with a german shepard. There were 40 or so others milling around on the bridge. I rolled my window down thinking something was wrong and he needed help. The dog jumped up on the side of the door of the F250 4x4, which sat high. The guy was screaming and basically being incoherent while the dog was barking a foot from my face. I was coming off three days of hard work and 7 hours sleep in the same time so my nerves were frayed to say the least. I calmly reached over on the seat and placed the revolver on the dash out of his reach but in plain sight of all who watched. He pulled his dog away, but never stopped yelling. The seas parted and I proceeded thru. A mile up, stopped at road construction, the road crews told me they had had their equipment sabotaged (sand in the fuel tanks, etc) and that there were hundreds of hippies camped out under the bridge.
I spent the weekend sitting around the campfire carving what I named my "Timber Town Tenderizer" expecting grand fun on the trip back out on Monday. Turns out the Feds arrested 300 hippies that weekend on various offenses, including charging people a toll to cross the bridge and robbing them.
Never got to tenderize any hippies with my big stick. Was a little disappointed at that.
