Shroomed

Or

Back To The Future

I last took Magic Mushrooms thirty-two years ago.  My sister, Nan, had flown out to San Diego from Maryland for a visit and we decided to wander up into the mountains to a little village called Idyllwild high about the Pacific coast, on one side the Sonoran Desert, on the other, Idyllwild It is the prototypical, pine-ringed, kind of mountain town that nestles its quaint, rustic-laden shops and family cafes on two interesting streets.  Tourists wander through the cowboy hats and carved crap, perch on wooden decks and breath in the pine potpourri while eating healthy salads and recharging their bodies for a hike, more shopping, and a day of relaxation. It is still that way today, all these decades later.

As feral children raised in the horse farms and oak woods of rural Maryland, we were well accustomed to the wilds and thrived on the connectivity to nature that a forest, any forest, could infuse into our souls.  It was in those far away Maryland woods that we wandered while having our psychedelic-fueled youthful adventures.  Doing mushrooms was a coming-of-age ritual for so many of us as we came out of high school and into college, and beyond.  After I moved to San Francisco in 1976, shrooms were widely available (as was any other drug of choice in those heady days) and they came down the 101 from Mendocino County where they were carefully tended into life by the scores of entrepreneurial drug kings of the day.  Fresh off the farm.

A summer day in Idyllwild was a Southern California paradise. Warm sun, no humidity, a cool breeze, and the almost overpowering scent of pine forest that felt like it was imitating those hideous pine tree shaped car deodorizers which had come in the public domain at every carwash.  Only this was where the genesis of the scent really originated. We were in the real deal of Pinesol-like perfumeries. 

I no longer remember where we consumed our edibles, I do recall a joint may have been puffed at to initiate the high. I also cannot remember how we got onto the trail that meandered through the forests that we chose as our meditative walk.  What struck us both like an ethereal velvet hammer was suddenly, in our solitary reverie, we heard music.  Not a radio, not Musak. A lone saxophone was noodling somewhere deeper into the forest than we were, unaware of our vision quest and the fact that a saxophone in this seemingly inappropriate venue was starting to blow our minds, a little. But on we wandered, the beginning of the body-buzz was upon us and the very trees, their bark, the rustling duff on the forest floor, all were alive with an energy that we felt only we could engage with. Everything around us seemed supercharged with a life-source from within and we were rapidly assimilating that energy into our human cores.

It was familiar to us. It was grand

Further along the trail, the sax had faded, and we wondered aloud if it was simply a shared hallucination or a message from another world that we were on the right path. And then the violin began to whine its lonely melody.  Seriously.  A lone violin.  Now this was getting heavy. We literally felt that the Universe was serenading us, alone.  Was there a point to these musical musings?  Were we compelled to learn something here? Or could we just drift along the clefs while the soulful notes led the way? In awe we kept to our course and our path and continued on.  Soon enough, a rumbling bass began to reverberate, shuddering our inner selves and putting a bold but lingering note of sadness into the air.  But we felt only joy! The solitary notes of a flute joined at last, and each heard only by itself, and in our minds, perhaps only by us.

Back in the village, we were laughingly buzzed but needing some food to begin to ground ourselves for the drive back down the mountain to San Diego. I must tell you here that Nan was my laughter muse.  From earliest childhood, nothing made us happier or more hilarious than to purposefully go get lost.  As kids on horseback, we would ride off early in the day with a brown-bagged lunch and extra batteries for the transistor. We could never miss a single playing of a Beatle’s song, so music was a familiar companion even in the deepest lost woods.  Our only edict as put forth from mom was “be home before dark.” That gave us lot of leeway to explore, get lost, and found, before returning to real life.  Later, with driver’s licenses in hand, we would again, with purposeful intent, get really stoned and drive until we had no idea where we were.  Miles from our home stomping grounds and traversing only the blackest of back roads finally, when we had achieved the perfect degree of lostness and hysteria, we would stop, assess our situation, and break into the must gut-gripping laughter, ever.  We would eventually discover a town we recognized or a road that seemed familiar and finally, with sides split from laughter, we made our way home again.

Because of this shared history, I know for a fact we were sitting there reeling with visions in our heads and laughter in our hearts. And as was our wont talking, probably too loudly, in that long ago café. Someone, the waitress and another patron, it’s unimportant now who, but someone overheard our musings of woodland musicales and joined into our conversation.  They told us there was a nearby music school and on their breaks from class, the students would wander into the forest and find the perfect spot, that elusive rock promontory, that quiescent glade of perfect acoustics, and there they would sit in solitude with their instrument and practice.  A practice usually heard only by rabbits, soaring birds of prey, and the occasional really stoned traveler among them.

Solved but never forgotten

And now, Nan is gone from this plane for over two years.  Too young, too much missed laughter. She is getting farther away from my aging mind to pull into sharp focus sometimes.  The world is cluttered with flotsam and noise and disharmony.  I have now compiled and compounded too much; forty years of living with HIV and the dehumanizing treatments and traumas which that entails, forty years of deaths and diminishments, forty years of injuries and surgeries too many to enumerate but all, plowed through with a dogged determination to keep going, no matter what the cost, physical or mental.  Our family credo upon a diagnosis has always been, “Can you fix it?”.  If the answer is yes, then let’s do it.  But there is an insidious price one pays for full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Without a proper pause, each and every time, to contemplate, regroup, and buff up our soulful inner responses, we simply bury the lead, over and over. Too much dirt on too many wounds does not a healthy garden grow.

Now, today, after a lot of critical thought and advice, along with some special friends as guides, I embark on a Micro-dosing overnight, back to the scene of my last adventure 32 years ago, to try and recapture a memory and to unlock that special click in my brain that my therapist tells me is holding in over 40 years of PTSD-induced trauma. 

Houston, we have lift off, slowly

We brought with us two strains, one from a trusted source back in Portland, conveniently FedExed packed in surgical masks.  How Pandemic-appropriate.  And another strain my guides had on hand called Enigma…..how cosmically correct.

Mine first.  Pleasant, gentle, a smilingly good start.  We found a nature walk around a serene lake bordered by live oaks, pine, and mesquite trees. As we began our sojourn though two things struck our expanding minds. First the serenity seemed ethereal, predestined, made just for our adventure.  A mammoth rock outcropping that seemed to rise from the center of the earth and anchor itself to its perfectly still reflection on the dark water of the lake.  More stunning though was when we hear, all three of us, the notes of a lone flute playing somewhere in the woods nearby.  An omen? A confirmation? A serenade that felt rooted in the past and connected to the now. 

A further wander led us to discover groups of 5 or six young men, board shorts and towels slung lazily over their bare torsos.  What gods were gifting us let no traveler deny. They clambered up the face of the massive rock and flung themselves, whooping with 19-yo delight, into the black water below. And then another group appeared on the trail.  And then another.  We sat ourselves on a rock by the path and joking “charged” them $4 a jump, payable in advance since we were unsure whether they would all survive.  In all, almost 50 young men eventually formed a line to get to the jump while we watched in utter amazement at our good fortune. One young man stopped and told us they were from a “Sober House” and were camping nearby. It did occur to us that these boys were well fed, fleshed out, and had expensive haircuts.  We surmised to ourselves that they were from Los Angeles and their parents were summering in Europe and their over-drinking kids needed time at a Sober House so all bases were covered.  Just our working theory but it fit our curiosity and fueled our mental imagery.

We regrouped at our 1947 all wood cabin of a motel and decided to switch brands, try the next strain, and venture into town to see what we could stir up. We found a shiny new brew pub in the heart of town and thought maybe a little nosh was in order, we had not eaten all day and it was now late afternoon.  There was an outdoor patio slung out into the pines, some indoors tables, and a nice bar that faced the actual brewing tanks full of suds.  We thought we wanted a table but, luckily it turned out, none were available, so we opted for the bar.  To our delight, Casey was at bat, or at least on the taps!  Handsome, tattooed, 30-something Casey almost immediately became our de-facto guide and the focus of our gay-male fantasies and happily he wanted to play! There was not an innuendo or off-color jibe we could throw out that he did not, with a sly smirk, toss back at us.  Casey was born and raised in Idyllwild so, as he put it “I have seen some shit”. Almost immediately after sitting down Patric turned to me and asked, “Is my face melting? ‘Cause yours sure is!”

Let the laughter begin.

Casey did comment that we were having way more fun than he was but hey, it was our journey, and he was there strictly to provide visuals, wine, and greasy food along with witty repartee. Within minutes we realized that, like Alice, we were passing through the looking glass.  Actually, the glass wall behind the bar that was shielding the brewing tanks held its own surprises.  A changing light display that slowly morphed from color to color and it lit up the brewing room in and almost slow-mo disco light.  Did we order this?  Was it on the menu? Our laughter attracted a bit of attention, but Casey kept the wine glasses full and the conversation challenging. Nothing we could toss his was not returned with aplomb and further reinforced our feeling that we had exactly the right strain, in exactly the right place, with the perfect players to flesh out our psilocybin dreams.

Afterwards, as we drifted back down to the smiling earth in our knotty pine rooms, we felt complete, sated, and slept the sleep of the initiated.  Micro-dosing is a real thing. I have a new source right here locally now and a stocked cabinet of mason jars of Enigma and some bonus chocolate lollipop micro doses!

Stay tuned!