We made a potent tea out of the psilocybin mushrooms. Travis bought an ounce of the drug and boiled it in four cups of water. I had never seen this done before; neither had Floyd. I don’t think Travis had either, but he was young: nineteen. Sometimes it is best to bluff your way to knowledge.
Floyd drove a 1985 Jeep wrangler. I rode in the back. We drank the tea, swallowing large chunks of the stuff as we turned the thermos up to the air for our share of the potion.
The road cut into the mountain, winding around the girth and up the incline. The sun was warm yellow and summertime. The sky was blue azure and crystal pure. The wind was gentle and the clouds were huge. This was BIG SKY territory – Olympus to the bear gods, high altitude; land of the shining mountains – as states go: fourth in square footage but forty-fourth in population.
Diamond penumbra supernovas imploded and exploded like dragons breathing. Techno-color music invaded by dullness. Magical beings began laughing and vibrating in the greenery. Fairies whispered scintillate kisses from unknown heavens. “I’m taking off man!” I shouted from the back of the cab.
Travis turned around to look at me. His mouth and eyes opened wider and wider, until I thought he might lose his face to the full expression. I wasn’t sure how much more whites of his eyes he could expose – how much farther apart his lips could stretch. I half expected him to unhinge his jaw and swallow himself in reverse, devour himself into nothingness. He laughed.
I realized my position. I had my feet and arms stretched out in such a manor that I wasn’t sitting down or standing up, but leaning over as if I was flying. My feet were wedged against the rear bars of the jeep somehow and I held onto an overhead beam. My memory of this position is not very clear to me, but I remember feeling that I was driving the machine with my psychic force. (Sometimes there is more truth in the sentiment than the fact.) While driving the jeep with my mind I made us go off road. The jolt from tarmac to dirt kicked me from my position. I fell into a lucky back seat.
“We’re here.” Floyd said as he got out of the truck.
There was no road before the one we had just made. The jeep could physically go no further. This was our cue to begin our journey in the forest on foot.
Travis gave us each a small leather pouch, the entirety of which could easily be hidden in your fist. “Mojo bags: While we’re out here – if you find something special, collect it. I’m going to wear mine around my neck.”
“What the hell is a mojo bag?” Floyd wanted to know.
I didn’t. I got it. I headed for the thick growth of the Bridger Mountains. I spotted a dying pine that was crisp and fragile and white with brown, like a disease or a curse. The limbs curled in on itself. The circular edges rested on the ground or curled stiff towards the trunk.
“A wizard tree!” Travis said after me.
Everything was symmetrical. The tree flickered a sizzling blue mist. I went to the center of the tree and stared out. Everything seemed different. I felt like Jonah in the belly of a cosmic spirit awaiting god’s communication.
I looked down. There was a tiny orange mushroom that glowed neon tangerine. I picked it and placed it in my mojo bag.
I believed this to be a very serious task now. I was to make some sort of secret concoction to serve as protection and good magic for me and my travels, my adventures. I understood. Beside the mushrooms I saw a tiny turd; as if a shy squirrel came here to shit in his own little john. I put the rodent waste in my bag as well, for the nitrogen. I wanted my bag to be explosive. I felt that tree corpse still vibrating and humming with some strange new energy that tingled and titillated my fingerprints. I broke off a piece of the trunk’s bark and bit into it. Why? Because I was high as hell on drugs. Anyway I spit out the bitter skin into my hand and placed the saliva soaked chunk of bark into my secret bag of tricks.
I found shiny glittery rocks, mica flakes and pyrite, mixed with soil and the shell of a robin’s egg. I inserted dead insects and rubies into the bag, snake skin and a mouse skull I found in a pile of owl shit. I picked leaves from rare bushes, rare wild herbs that only the shaman of The Blackfeet and The Crow know about, with weird psychotropic healing properties.
I collected the brittle wings of a dragonfly, and for a while I was on a kick where I would blow all of the dandelion seeds from the shaft in one breath and expect my wish to come true, meanwhile running ahead and catching the blown seeds in my little mojo bag. The bag was becoming pretty hefty with my magical efforts.
The three of us walked and walked in no particular direction away from our origin and in no straight line. It was early afternoon, and we found time to lie in a field of tall grass and let the wind bend the stalks, have the silk tickle us. We laughed and we laughed…
I could see and I could hear the cosmic dynamo vibrate and hum. I rested in a field of golden wheat, on my back, which was the surface of the earth. I felt my body was THE body of Christ, THE body of earth, THE body of man, THE body of god, warm and pulsing blood and cells and genetic material, heaven, hell and dream. I opened up all of my sensors and realized the infinity.
I let the wind tickle my neurons, my leg hairs, my eyelashes, the cilia in my nostrils, the dry chapped skin of my lip. My hair became golden wheat and blew with the wind. It was a fascinating blend of me versus the universe becoming one with the universe in a perverse magic spell of time and place.
You have to be brave when you’re young; that’s what matters most. You have to give yourself over to the adventure or you will grow stale and have no fun stories to tell.
I got up first from the breezy tickle-flight and found my way over to the little stream that trickled nearby where Zen toads croaked in silence. I smoked a cigarette and marveled at the demons and novas that swirled and whirled around in my hazy exhale.
I flicked cigarette ashes into my mojo bag – a combination of reverence and disgust is always needed. I wanted as much cacca as jewel, as much shit as brilliance – as much nitrogen as oxide. I wanted to swirl together the strongest forces from every small quadrant on the marble. I wanted crystal and skull, excrement and egg shell, bark and saliva, blood and oil. I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on this whole mojo bag thing.
I leaned against a giant Ponderosa Pine and inhaled the tree’s sweet piney flavor. The aroma was almost too much to bear. My lungs full of the fragrance, I coughed and spit out perfume rich saliva. I closed my eyes again. Now used to the smell I felt the fantastic tree with two open palms; the course bark, dark orange and black, like cracked terra firma, leather skin.
A strange music emitted from that Blackjack Pine; a creaking, a squeaking music like wet vertebrae cracking, or the popping ancient arthritic ghost-knuckles of Ramses II. It sounded as if the trees were stretching with a song. I could hear the water being sucked up through the roots of the trees. Thirsty cells were popping inside the tree rhythmically; POPpopPoPpOPpoP went the enormous tree’s trunk. The sound was like elves drumming a wild routine on the imaginary bongos of beatnik ghosts. POPpopPoPpOPpoP continued the gigantic tree.
With my eyes closed I continued to listen to that enormous Western Yellow Pine’s internal cellular structure burst in tones and music. When I opened my eyes I looked at my hands and found that they were covered in insects travelling north from the floor of the earth to the sky of evergreen needles, two hundred feet in the air. My hands were of no concern to the bizarre caterpillars and ants and beetles and whatever other insects thirsty, all eager for the sap of that great tree, scurrying and climbing over the warm barriers.
I wondered if that was a hallucination, as I have tripped pretty hard on bugs before. Whatever the truth was, it was a neat sight. That very tall Rocky Mountain Pine sprouted from the ground like an enormous missile silo, surrounded by many more of its kind; seed dropper, natural bloomer, strong bodied survivor, and each of the trees were singing; POPpopPoPpOPpoPing their bursting cellular orgasm.
The insects were here for the sap, the sweet excretions given by the Bull Pine’s xylem and phloem cells, previously creaking and POPpopPoPpOPpoPing and ringing out to the insect population that it is time to feed their hungry little bellies with the sticky ooze.
Soon the birds came. They must have heard the music of the trees, knowing the hunger of the insects. They swarmed like clouds and descended upon the trees like the hungry winged beasts they were. The birds ate the caterpillars, the ants, the beetles and whatever that creepy stick looking thing is called.
It was an orgy of music and feeding. The trees were being cleansed of their artery build-up. The insects were getting sugar buzzes and filling the bellies of the wrens, meadowlarks and cardinals with their easy meal. Powerful raptors circled above the enormous pines, ready for the freshly fattened birds to flutter from the treetops and into their talons.
The earth gave to the sky in this fashion. It planted seeds in itself and grew very tall. The next step was to draw in water and grow even taller; next bait the insects with creaking xylem cells that issue forth the sap. Now trading its scales for feathers and evolving for flight, a bird is called to feast on the feasting insects, and finally the high flying raptors are attracted to the scene for the arboretum feasting.
Beneath the trees, hunters waited patiently with high powered rifles that pierced the bodies of these magnificent hunters and brought the sky back down to the ground.
KABOOM! KABOOM! Shotgun blasts scattered the birds and the mind.
I was lost in the woods, high as hell on psychedelic mushrooms with two of my friends and no idea the source of the gunshots.
KABOOM! KABOOM! The fairies and dragons became quiet and invisible again. It was time to focus and assimilate the scene with the dream. Where we being hunted? Was it possible that we were targets? KABOOM! KABOOM! We hunkered down and decided to smoke a cigarette and maybe calm down and maybe isolate the direction of those shots. KABOOM! KABOM!
“Look man I don’t know what is going on – but uh – I say we try to find a way out of here” I was ready to move – I wanted to challenge this challenge and find a way out of the confusing maze.
“OK,” Floyd was in.
Travis nodded his frightened rabbit head up and down.
KABOOM! KABOM! I looked around to see what was what. We were in a basin that as far as I could tell held no threat in its bowl. We were high up on one ridge of the mountain. “I suggest we hike close to that ridge and listen for the gunshot source, maybe they’re just hunters.” KABOOM!
“Oh they’re definitely hunters! I just hope they’re not drunk and ready to shoot anything big.” Travis was worried, “Hey does anyone know where we are – like where the truck is or anything?” His buck teeth bit his bottom lip and his eyes were big with worry and fear.
KABOOM! KABOM! I looked at Floyd and could tell by his blank expression and aimless looking around that we were supremely lost.
We ran with our backs bent over, like we had seen soldiers do in the movies or perhaps just instinctively, as if we had weapons and could possibly engage the enemy in combat. We ran until we were certain we were running away from the gunfire. We all squatted by a tree and decided upon another plan. I decided to lie on my stomach and crawl over the ridge to see what I could see.
KABOOM! KABOM! Travis and Floyd stared at me with blank expressions. I didn’t wait for a reply. I crawled on my stomach over the crest. I inched myself slowly and carefully over the edge. I found the source of the gunshots. Three hunters were laughing and carrying on about fifty yards away. They were shooting the sky – sometimes killing a bird, mostly not – but retrieving nothing – feeding the scavengers of the earth with a gift from the human wastefulness.
Crawling back over the ridge I motioned for my friends to join me. I ran. They followed. I made sure we were far enough away from the hunters and then cut over the ridge in a full sprint. KABOOM! KABOM!
We made it to the road, and then followed the asphalt turns to the jeep, which sat fifty feet up on the ridge, in the middle of the thicket. The vehicle needed no push. Soon we were speeding down the mountain, listening to Jane’s Addiction and cheering our good fortune into the cool summer breeze.
