1994
I think I felt every breath that year. Each breath was a labor...painful and difficult to take. I had just bought this CD.
I had recently come into a circle of amazing friends, and it was one of those groups that are more like a family. I was just a tourist. We had set up an adventure: two days of eating psychedelic mushrooms in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, a 1,000 plus acre virgin forest. I got there a day early to have the place to myself first. Clay showed up early too, and we were both surprised and got a good laugh out of it. We spent the day by a broad, crystal clear, cold mountain creek, hopping from rock to rock, exploring. Clay brought some really powerful opium and the dankest bud I had ever seen, and we smoked on top of the grooviest formation of rocks we could find out in the middle, with deep pools cascading into other deep pools all around us.
We got zooted!
Clay dropped the last of the bud in the creek, and despite our scrambling to save it, it became lost to those pretty waters...leaving us with no more reefer. I was pretty disappointed, but this was one of those moments that readjusted my paradigm - Clay stood out like that - in this moment of disappointment, he was laughing. Big healthy full laugh.
I played this album that evening from my Rover, softly, straining for every note that woman's voice was making. Every smooth slide. Wispy and yet solid. Her notes seemed to carry me across something, and then drop me, with like...a relief?...at the ends. A strange new sad beauty to behold. Clay was patient, but eventually he asked me to turn the music off, so that we could hear the night.
We met the rest of the group the next morning and dosed up. I had been fasting for two days. I ate a lot of mushrooms. What constitutes "a lot of mushrooms" is relative to who you're talking to. There is such a thing as the concept of "a shit load" that seems to be valid in any circle, and that's what I ate - a shit load.
Before I go any further - I just need to say that I'm a bastard.
I think we got on the trail around 11:00. We had a pretty walk from the campground to the trail head, and I could feel the 'shrooms a little by the time we entered into the park.
I was blown away by what I saw. Even today, when I think about it, my mouth drops a little. It's just wowing. I think that's about all I said! "Wow..." There was this entirely different world here, before our culture logged everything off, and this forest is like a painting - or a museum piece. I was stepping into a different planet. The 'shrooms were coming on hard.
We sat on fallen limbs that had laid on the forest floor for hundreds of years, limbs we had to climb up to sit on. We talked with that nervousness and anxiety, a higher pitch of frenetic energy that comes on with a trip rising. We held hands and linked around some of the trees for group hugs. Some of the trees, even the six of us couldn't wrap around. I didn't know poplar trees could grow like that. The plants on the floor of the forest seemed to be plants that could only live in that sort of untouched environment...only under trees that old and well established. I had never seen anything like them.
So...eventually I was overcome. My trip was too much. I was coming unglued, turning inside out, and I hadn't even peaked yet. Wave after wave washing me off of my feet, squeezing me and twisting meeee....
I began running.
I took my shirt off - was I panting before I started running? - and ran in sandals for the first time in my life, with a very very cool mountain breeze blowing across my body. I remember that part well. The trip towered over me from behind like that, like a dusty, raging, snarling team of unearthy, giant wild horses. I began sprinting with all my might (and let me tell you now, I can run), but they overcame me, hooves crushing the edges of me as I sprinted, barely ahead, mouth wide-open, lungs full, and also...barely overcome with the first trampling. Desperate.
In this several mile long sprint, that I somehow couldn't tire from, I found out a lot about myself.
Things are so much better after you peak!!! What is it with the yawning??? Is that just me? I had reached that spot, the peak, at the exact same time as returning to where Clay and I lost the weed. I laid on the sunny rocks in the middle of the very broad creek, soaked in sweat, and breathed back down to calm, with another alternate universe playing out before my eyes...giant hemlocks breathing liquid air above me while birds swam...sprawled out as I was, across the bony floors of the basement of time. In the sun. With that cool breeze across my hot, sweaty skin.
From there, I made my way back to the Rover and played "Fade Into You" over and over, trying to pierce into every mystery. It seemed like hours went by before my friends returned. And her - a tall, dark, smiling beauty. I'll never remember her name. She always locked eyes with me in this very warm way. And was subtle, gentle, and smooth, like Nature herself when flowing through sunny pools, carrying upon her surfaces a random leaf that is me.
I returned her look, always. But no more.
We talked through the night, perhaps the most wonderful crowd of people I have ever known. She sat next to me, and our laughter was as easy as that early summer night's breeze between us. Minds dancing.
I left while everyone slept that night, and I never saw her again.
Thank you, 