EARLY EXPERIENCES

After picking up my best buddy Roger and loading up his backpack, we headed off to Harvey’s to pick him up and then we were off to the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia each with 7 grams of psilocybin mushrooms. I had received these via the US postal service from a friend who was going to school out in Boulder, Colorado. This was summer of 1979. Harvey came loping down his front steps and his backpack looked comically small. He held it in one hand and it sort of swung effortlessly. He was 6ft 4” or 5” with broad shoulders, lanky more than thin. To me there was always something wolfish about him. To imagine his gate just recall one of those national geographic films of a wolf loping along the tundra and you have got it. We knew he was insane. One moment he would be looking down at us with his big, wolfish grin and the next he would be screaming obscenities and maybe ripping a car apart with his bare hands. In such a case, even if there were four more of us around him, no one dare lay a hand on him but we would just plead, “Harvey, cool it! Please man, chill out, its okay.” And usually we would be concerned about cops. “Please man stop tearing that car apart, that’s just uncool, that’s someone’s car, man! Harvey, please!” I never saw him once attack another human, only inanimate objects. We all understood at deep, unspoken level that the first one to lay a hand on him would most likely be beaten to death. Obviously, we didn’t believe that even three of four of us could stop him so all we could do is plead. He was a classic silent type but his silence hid an amazing intellect and a stunning artistic ability. He spoke, read and wrote fluently in Spanish and French. We might be debating some point of history and trying to recall who penned some euphemism and maybe after five minutes of stoned debate, he would drop the answer casually.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I would ask a little annoyed.
“You guys are funny,” he would grin.
And he played classic and flamingo guitar like Segovia himself, his enormous fingers flittering across the strings literally faster than the eye could see. He could do this seemingly with equal alacrity even after eating 500 mics of Acid.
As soon as I looked in his eyes, I knew.
“Harvey, what did you do?” I asked. It was maybe 8am in the morning. I had no experience with mushrooms but had done a good bit of Acid by then and he had those eyes.
He laughed. The laughter was long and deep and his eyes laughed even harder, bright as car beams, twinkling like stars in the clear night sky. His laughter went on and on crashing around us until becoming uncomfortable. Roger and I began to look nervously up and down the quiet, Saturday morning suburban street. This was now a familiar position for us to be with Harvey. I thought, well we’re off to a good start.
Finally Harvey managed to get out, “I already dropped it”.
Something about the way he said that was ominous. “Harvey,” I asked the way you might speak to five year old lost in a department store, “how much did you eat?”
“All of it.”
“Holy shit,” Roger exclaimed, “the whole 7 grams!”
My friend in Colorado had sent a warning with the mushrooms. He warned not to take more than 3 grams at a time. These were the same mushrooms that evidently had made one of his dorm mates insane after eating 4 grams. I had dutifully passed this warning on when I handed them out to both Roger and Harvey a couple days earlier. Our plan had been to eat them after backpacking into the wilderness and setting up a proper camp. Testosterone is a funny poison. Roger and I looked at each other meaningfully at one point and it didn’t even have to be said: we were going to eat all seven grams, too. After all, Harvey seemed to be full on at this point and he was doing okay and after all, he was insane and we were not.
Harvey insisted he could drive and even though he had demonstrated time and again that his driving was little more than Russian roulette in a car. He was hard to say no too so once again I let him drive. He really loved to drive. We went first to a 7-11 and Roger got some coffee and I got a Pepsi and after some debate we each got a donut. Then back in the car and one bite of mushroom, one bite of donut, wash it down and repeat. It took us maybe fifteen minutes to get down the whole 7 grams.
“These things taste like dirt,” Roger commented. This sent Harvey into another fit of laughter.
“You guys are such pussies,” Harvey admonished as we laboriously munched away on our mushrooms and donuts, bitter expressions on our faces, I’m sure. “I powdered mine in a coffee grinder and then wolfed down the whole thing with a glass of water.”
I couldn’t help but notice that he actually used the word, “wolfed”.
I directed Harvey to a location on the Maryland side of the C & O canal that was only a twenty minute drive from where we were. As preposterously irresponsible as all this was, I knew it was now out of he question to drive all the way to the mountains. I had never in my life camped or backpacked on the C & O canal but had day hiked there and knew that it was only a couple miles from this trailhead to a campground right on the Potomac River. Mainly, it was the closest place I could think to go that would get us away from the public and there was little traffic this time of morning which could only lessen our chances of a catastrophic automobile accident. Harvey drove with unusual alacrity as if the mushrooms somehow calmed him down. Once when tripping on LSD, I had driven home from work in Washington DC at 5am in the morning upside down the entire way. Once I accepted that the world was upside down, it was just like driving normally and I passed numerous police vehicles, all upside down as well, and they didn’t give a second glance. You don’t have to tell me that we have angels!
We parked near the C & O canal after driving down a long, gravel road. The last quarter mile felt like driving down through a maze as five foot high lines of bushes framed each side of the narrow road. I had an intense “body high” the likes of which I had never felt before – this would be my first – and only – “early” mushroom experience and I found it very different from LSD. LSD was much sharper, much more cerebral and very different from the soft, fuzzy body high I felt. I had heard that term, “body high” but had no idea what it meant until now. It reminded me of the time that I had “fluffed” 3 grams of hashish and then drank it all down in a gulp after steeping it in hot water a couple minutes. I recall bringing my Pepsi bottle to my lips and the bottle felt as if it were the size of a 80 gallon hot water heater and my lips and mouth were equally as large easily accommodating the gargantuan hole from which the Pepsi cascaded like the very flow of the Potomac river only a few hundred yards away. As I tilted the Pepsi bottle up, I could not understand why it did not bump into the top of the inside of the car – tilting it higher and higher as it emptied, very slowly and gently raising it, waiting for the top of it to bump into the inside of the roof and wondering why it never did. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I thought, “it’s not hitting the top of the roof”.
There were a few houses around and between the gravel parking area and the C & O canal was a stubbly, harvested corn field with six inch dry stalks sticking up in even rows. As soon as we got out, Roger ran into the field with a pint bottle of whiskey that he got from God knows where and he began to gleefully throw the bottle in an arch ahead of him and then chase it down, giggling like a child. Harvey put our Boom Box on top the car and cranked it up. I had a Doors tape in. Harvey was a music man and I looked uneasily at the houses nearby but did not dare to turn it down. I thought dreamily that we needed desperately to get our shit together and get away from here but instead Harvey and I stood watching Roger. It appeared that he was endlessly happy to throw the whisky bottle and retrieve it, laughing and giggling all the while. There was something beautiful about it, something so childlike and simple. Substitute a ball for the whisky bottle and he could have been six years old. I did not realize it but began to experience my first taste with the way time could squirm out of your grasp with the mushrooms. It was like trying to grasp a snake or get a firm grip on a water balloon.
This time phenomenon came to a crashing halt when I looked down the road and here came the silent flashing lights of a police car. I could not see the car at all but only the flashing lights. The lights seemed to be disembodied and sort of drifting along the top of the hedges that lined the road, those hedges perfecting hiding the body of the vehicle. At the same time that I thought clearly, “Oh, man we are so fucked,” I really wondered if I might not be having a mushroom inspired hallucination? When the disembodied lights finally turned magically into a full blown police cruiser pulling into the parking lot, it became instantly very real, indeed. The Doors were now blaring out, “Roadhouse Blues” and as the two cops stepped out of their vehicle, Jim Morrison was screaming out, “We’re going to the Roadhouse, we’re gonna’ have a R E A L good time”. It was only then that I thought to turn off the Boom Box, which I did of course by sort of punching it and nearly knocking it off of the roof of the car. It seemed my lot in life no matter who I was with was to be the one to inevitably interface with authorities when necessary and I assumed this role without a second’s thought.
Harvey stood towering over me grinning his now wolfish and maniacal grin and giggling softly, trying his best not to laugh. As the two offices slowly made their way to stand before us, one of them my size and one almost as large as Harvey only much more heavily built. He had that ease that a lot of big men had whereby they seemed to have nothing to prove and once you got past their massive frame, could often be found to be the most easy going men of all. So I instinctively addressed the smaller one. It did not help that Roger continued on throwing and chasing his whiskey bottle as if nothing at all were wrong. This was why Harvey could not stop giggling.
As I addressed the small one, the big yelled almost good naturedly at Roger, sort of the way a father might yell at his always mischievous boy, “Son, get over here right now!”
“Sir, I am so sorry to have to bring you officer’s out here,” I dove in head first, looking over at the nearest house, “we didn’t think anyone was home in that house or we wouldn’t have had that up so loud. We’re really sorry, Sir. We were just about to go on up the canal on a little backpacking trip.” And as I was speaking I was definitely thinking how hopeless was our situation and that I was about the experience my first night in jail. Roger sort of skipped over with his whisky bottle held unselfconsciously as if in his mind, he now really did think of it as simply a child’s red rubber ball. It was really hard to speak normally and at this moment I was experiencing a weird mushroom trick whereby instead of looking out at the two police standing before us, I was looking back at the three of us standing there before them exactly as if looking out from their eyes.
Man, you talk about a motley crew. We Stood now in a line along the side of the car facing the cruiser. Harvey with his 6.5 inch frame, me with my 5.9 inch frame and then Roger at six foot, whisky bottle held down now in both hands very casually in front of him. I was the only one without a shit eating grin on his face. I noticed how uncomfortably Harvey held his arms and then thought how I had not noticed this about him before; how his long, awkward arms always seem to be physically at unease, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them if they were not holding a classical guitar. At first two things really stood out as I looked at us. One, our eyes were glowing with to me a very obvious drug induced brightness. It was as if I had just swung a flashlight beam onto three owls sitting in the dark. Two, the whisky bottle. I couldn’t tell which was more damning and my gaze jumped nervously from the whisky bottle to one or another set of our bedazzled eyes. This all transpired much quicker than the time it takes to read this paragraph, within seconds.
Then it hit me. I was looking at the whisky bottle from my perspective, not officer’s. It had taken every ounce of self discipline that I possessed not to stare at that bottle. In my mind, it was like a large sign that read: “Arrest us”. But suddenly I realized that the little pint bottle was the key to our fate at that moment. Wires reached out from that bottle attaching themselves to each of us. If you looked real close instead of tiny control numbers stamped upon these wires every few feet, there was the word, “fate” stamped there. Both officer’s assumed that we were high on whisky. This was odd because the bottle was full, Roger had not ever broken the seal on the tough little pint bottle. I guess they thought that we had already polished another bottle off by then. Hell, it was only 9:45 or 10am! Ridiculously, I felt a little insulted that they would take me for such an alcoholic.
It was what happened next that sort of caused my mind to disconnect.
The big one stood in front of Roger and looked him right in the eyes. “I know what is going on here, son. You can’t hide it from me.”
I thought of a father saying this to a son meaning that he “knew” that the son was gay – God only knows what weird connection led me to think this but this finally broke my composer and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was something about the way Roger looked at the cop, too. It just struck me as really funny.
Then he told us to gather up our stuff and get on down the canal. What? We did exactly this, opening the trunk and gathering up our packs quickly. They stood and watched, amused. The way you might watch a sitcom on TV. As we started off, the little one said helpfully, “better lock up the car, son”.
I hurried back the few feet and went around opening and locking the doors. Open door, wham smack down on lock button, open door , wham smack down on lock button. It seemed to take forever to get to the four doors. It was not real to me at anymore. Surely I was dreaming and again I was watching myself through their eyes. I did look far more like a buffoon than a criminal, especially scurrying nervously around the car – no remote locking devices in 1979. Maybe it was not entirely the whisky bottle that saved us. Maybe it was also our resemblance to the Three Stooges. Who could arrest the Three Stooges?
After the three of us were about a hundred feet away and about to cross the bridge over the canal, I whispered out of the side of my mouth to Harvey, “Is this real?”
He laughed.
“Goddammit, Is This Real,” I insisted, feeling a little like I was about to lose my mind.
Harvey glanced down at me. “It’s real, Dave”, he said flatly, not laughing this time.

Shit, I thought. None of us dared look back but I am sure they stood there until we disappeared up the canal. This was at a time when law enforcement and society in general had not yet accepted the true horror of drunk driving. The fact that we would not be driving seemed to be their main concern. Boys will be boys, they thought.
“They didn’t even take the whisky bottle,” I marveled to myself. I could not understand this for the life of me except that they were Park Rangers and not “real” cops and I knew that if we had not been on national park property, the story would have had a different and more predictable ending.
For me the whole thing was a real buzz kill, as they say. Maybe a quarter mile up the canal we engaged in a little high-fiving but my heart was not in it. I thought how you never really win a dancing contest with the devil and an uneasiness squatted uncomfortably in my belly the remainder of the day. It was raining ever so lightly but we never considered rain gear as the campsite was close and we figured just to set up tents and tarp when we got there. The only person we saw was an older fellow with big, black horn-rimmed glasses who engaged us briefly asking if we had seen any Beavers.
None of us could respond to this through our laughter and finally without responding to him at all, we continued on our way still laughing. I felt bad never liking to hurt someone’s feelings unnecessary but damn, “Beavers”. That was just too funny and we pretty much kept laughing at it until reaching the campsite.
Just about the time we reached the campsite the rain picked up a little to a medium hard but fine drizzle. Roger and I donned rain gear but Harvey did not. My backpacking habit is to set up my tent the moment I stop and as soon as I had my jacket on, I dug into my pack for my tent. I managed after much difficulty and time to get the tent out of my pack. It lay on the wet ground before me. I looked down at the nylon, tent poles askew, bag of tent stakes, cord snaking out in every direction from its various attachments to the nylon tent body and fly. It dawned on me after an indeterminate amount of time that I could no more set up that tent then successfully negotiate a trigonometry problem. It just was not going to happen. Finally I sat on the pile of nylon, pulled my hood up over my head and looked out at the wide, brown flowing waters of the Potomac River only twenty feet away.
Roger knelt almost on the bank looking out across the river. Harvey squatted near me and he was thoughtfully unraveling small leaf branches from a bush. It was late summer and everything was still very green except for the brown waters of the Potomac. I noted idly that Harvey’s arms did not look awkward now. Something about him seemed physically very composed and serene. He did not say a word but that was not unusual.
“I hate myself,” Roger announced out of no where, still staring out across the waters. He didn’t seem to be speaking to us so much as just speaking out loud to himself.
Well, at least one of us had a realization in all this, I thought. I couldn’t understand how the mood had turned so somber. We had miraculously survived the cops and even though raining it was really very beautiful out. If we could only get the tarp up, we could make a fire and enjoy camping by the river. I had never camped on the Potomac before. Maybe later after coming down I could actually figure out how to get my tent set up. The thought of hyperthermia crossed my mind as I watched Harvey worry his leaf and sticks, slowing getting soaked by the fine but constant drizzle. No, it was a good seventy five degrees out and that shouldn’t be a problem. There was no wind and the drizzle fell straight down. At some point I asked them if either of them could set up their tents or at least our tarp. This set Harvey into another long bout of laughter which was an answer in itself. Roger and I finally decided that we should go back, discretion the better part of valor and all that. On the way back we ran into the Beaver guy again.
“Have you seen any Beaver?” Roger managed to get out before convulsing again in laughter which of course set us all off. The Beaver guy pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose but didn’t’ say anything and stood aside, still and silent, giving us a wide birth, the way any experienced backpacking might do if horses were coming down the trail. As we passed him he pointed out to me politely that my tent was dragging behind me in the mud of the C & O canal. Sure enough when we all turned to look fully two thirds of my tent was not in my backpack but dragging behind me. This made us laugh even harder and again we could not even speak to the Beaver guy. Most unlike me as I am typically almost meticulous about my backpacking gear, unlike anything else in my life. It dragged behind all the way back to the car where I stuffed the pack and whole muddy mess into the trunk and we quickly and unceremoniously drove out of there.