I started reading natural history, biogeography, and field guides to learn the names of local plants and animals. In turn, this led me to nature writers such as John Muir, Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, and Edward Abbey, which led me to introductory texts on Native American culture, and to Western existential and moral philosophers such as Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Hume, and later, to mysticism.
As a budding mystic, I had long been attracted to certain oddball terms: “astral glow,” “dark arts,” “the seventh son,” “spirited away.” Certain movies, too: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Planet of the Apes, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Here kids turned into blueberries. Giant lizards filled the frame. Colors flared to artificial shades of near solar-intensity then smeared across the screen, leaving tracers. Watching them as an adult, I could almost feel the tab of lysergic acid on my tongue.
After I’d started smoking pot at seventeen, I noticed a warping of my sonic predilections. The long, hypnotically repetitive instrumental end of the Butthole Surfers’ song “Pepper” mesmerized me. So did the trailing echo-effect on Perry Farrell’s voice in early Jane’s Addiction. And Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Many Meat Puppets lyrics expressed an acute awareness of nature, like the chorus on “Leaves” where the lead singer, Curt Kirkwood, sings: “Something that’s been around for so long . . . Every minute on the calendar is wrong.” And lines like in the song “Things”: “Ancient things’ design.” Whatever that did or didn’t mean to the band, I knew what it meant to me: nature was big, human life small, the scope of time too great to comprehend.
As my THC-intake increased, so did my reading of anything that sounded remotely “mind-expanding”: Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the Tao Te Ching, Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan, William Burroughs. When I stumbled on the term mysticism somewhere around 1995, it confirmed what I’d secretly hoped: that potheads weren’t the only ones who sensed the supernatural. People around the world from all cultures had apparently been seeking insight into their surroundings for centuries. Loosely defined, mysticism was the awareness of, and attempted union with, an ultimate reality or spiritual truth through heightened awareness and direct experience. Mystic sub-traditions existed within many popular religions: Vedanta within Hinduism, Kabbalah within Judaism, Sufism within Islam. Even Christianity had Christian mystics. While I wasn’t concerned with the complex historical details, I was interested in the tradition’s accessibility: regardless of your religious affiliation, the experiences of enlightenment, divine consciousness and union with God were available to anyone willing to practice a specific mystical discipline. This was a huge relief. I already practiced my own system of psycho-pharmacology. Rather than doing yoga or meditating, I continued on the lazy route of self-medication.
In one of my many surveys of Native American culture, I’d read that Native peoples had used certain psychoactives, particularly hallucinogens, for religious purposes since prehistoric times. Peyote use dated as far back as 5700 years. Yokut and Chumash Indians shamans in California had administered parts of a flowering plant called sacred datura to induce visions. The Mazatec of Oaxaca used morning glory seeds and psilocybin mushrooms for divination. The Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia used the drug Ayahuasca for ceremonial rites, same way prehistoric Europeans used the amanita mushroom. It worked for them. Couldn’t it work for me?
I started small. After college classes ended for the day, I frequently climbed atop one of Phoenix’s desert mountains, like Camelback or Papago, smoked a bowl of weed and stared into space. High above the city, my mind was flooded with abstract thoughts. Bright geometric patterns appeared and shifted into glorious abstractions at speeds so fast they were difficult to track. I filled spiral notebooks with environmental diatribes, seasonal observations, ideas for books I should write, digressions on ecological principles I’d just read about in Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and hummed the melodies of music I didn’t know I could compose. Seated in the sunlight on pink granite outcroppings, these moments were monumental. When I reviewed my notes later in my bedroom, I mostly found cryptic ramblings: “Values, morals, ethics, belief system,” and “Life exists → evolves to fill niches & utilize available life sustaining properties.” What the hell did that mean? Trying not to despair, I would flip the journal page, light a joint and start a new entry. I did this for nearly two years. By the time Dean and I took our trip in the summer of ninety-five, I had begun suffering the law of diminishing returns: the more I smoked, the less I felt, and what I felt when I felt anything was confused, numb, and unenlightened.
Every drug I took failed to deliver mystic insight.
Mushrooms amplified colors and produced amusing tracers, but portals never opened inside bedroom closets as in the film Poltergeist.
Acid made wallpaper patterns swim like living MC Escher prints, but whatever world it hurled my friends and I into, I wasn’t disembodied enough not to feel the strychnine in my achy spinal column, and police still left tickets on the windshield of my Volkswagen that I illegally parked on a busy commercial street while we stumbled around high.
The mescaline I once ate while camping near Sedona made me see red eyes in the forest all night. But the mythic creatures I hoped they were attached to never emerged to deliver wise messages, and the one other person who thought they saw those eyes was tripping on acid. Still, I always stayed on the lookout for new interdimensional transport.
After crossing the border, Dean and I drove through the darkness past Bellingham, looking unsuccessfully for places to sleep. The air was cool and moist, the night still. Vast networks of tiny country roads filled the woods, but we found no overnight options. The trick, we discovered, was to locate a hotel in a relatively safe neighborhood whose lot was filled with enough cars for ours to blend in. We needed to roll in, park between paying customers’ cars and rearrange the luggage to make room for our beds without attracting security guards’ and other patrons’ attention; otherwise, guards tapped on the window and kicked us out.
That night nothing felt right. What chain hotels we found along I-5 were largely empty. Gas station parking lots were either too small, too vacant or too exposed to truckers, travelers and highway patrol. The forest roads we found outside small towns had gates on them, preventing access to the secluded spots deep in the woods. Sleeping on the shoulder wasn’t an option. Two summers before, Michael Jordan’s father had been shot to death while he napped in his car at an Interstate rest area. We kept driving.
The serrated points of evergreens loomed on the roadside. The tops of firs, cedars and spruce were black silhouetted against black. My eyes itched from fatigue and my calves ached. Dean drank Diet Coke to stay awake. I slumped in the passenger seat.
I hadn’t stayed up all night since I was a kid, and even then it was only to consume countless sodas and watch horror movies until my middle school friends and I passed out on the living room sofas at dawn. This was different. Here we moved in a hushed, eerie realm of limited-visibility populated by truckers, druggies, coyotes, and those damned to the graveyard shift. Who else walked the earth at this hour? In European folklore, this was the witching hour, the period after midnight when supernatural creatures were thought to be at their most powerful. Tearing down the highway as the rest of Skagit and Snohomish counties slept, I felt like an undercover operative, someone with a mission and an accumulation of secrets. I savored the feeling.
I needed to feel this. Already my routine was: eat, sleep, watch TV, go to school, drink on weekends, week after week. I could see the writing on the wall: two more years of college and it was off to the work force. A nine-to-five job. A cubicle. Florescent bulbs hanging from the office ceiling. Then what: marriage? Mortgages? Kids? Then cancer treatments, bladder control issues, erectile dysfunction?
There had to be more to life. We weren’t tadpoles, we were humans. Yet even something as atypical as a roadtrip got mired in the mundane: find food, get sleep, pump gas, brush your teeth. I wasn’t sure what I expected, only that I expected more.
Thin clouds formed a sheet over the highway, blocking the stars. Dean said, “I bet there are tons of bats out tonight.”
With all the farms in those fertile volcanic lowlands, I said he