The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (12 page)

Like most Americans, my brother and I had little sense of what forms this change would take. But the signs were there, discernible at least to a few astute observers. With respect to psychedelics and their impacts—both on us personally, and on the wider culture—there were only hints. Although the effects of LSD had been known since the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally exposed himself to the drug in 1943, five years after he’d discovered it at Sandoz, it remained a curiosity, the plaything of a few psychologists, writers, artists, and covert researchers at the CIA. In 1953, William Burroughs, the literary icon of the “beat” generation, had wandered the Putumayo region of the upper Amazon looking for ayahuasca; his correspondence with the poet Allen Ginsberg on the topic became a book,
The Yage Letters
, a decade later. That journey prefigured our own quixotic quest to the area in the early seventies. Though Burroughs was often out front when it came to drugs, ayahuasca was already old news by the time he went looking for it, at least to R. E. Schultes, the Harvard ethnobotanist who had been documenting the region’s plants and their pharmacological properties since 1941. Aldous Huxley’s classic 1954 essay on his experience with mescaline,
The Doors of Perception
, stirred interest and criticism, though largely at first among philosophers and theologians. Timothy Leary’s fateful encounter with magic mushrooms at a resort in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960, radically altered the direction of his life, but his name was not widely known until the scandal that led to his dismissal from Harvard in 1963.

In the McKenna household and surely many others, there was one outstanding exception to this blackout: R. Gordon Wasson’s report on his rediscovery of the long-suppressed tradition of shamanic mushroom use among the Mazatecs of Mexico, published in
Life
on May 13, 1957. With its millions of subscribers,
Life
was the epitome of the era’s glossy photo magazine—and the unlikely portal through which awareness of the magic mushrooms and the strange realms they rendered accessible filtered into mass consciousness. It was a rather stealthy debut; there was no pejorative spin to the story, no cautionary warnings about the dangers of drug abuse, the risk of insanity, leaping out of buildings, or chromosome damage. All that came later, and in any event was mostly aimed at psilocybin’s more potent, scarier cousin, LSD—itself the subject of a
Life
cover story in March 1966. No, the 1957 piece was presented as a gee-whiz travelogue in the best
National Geographic
style. The intrepid explorers were on a fearless quest to be “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.” A New York banker turned ethnobotanist accompanied by a society-photographer friend, Wasson summed up their first ritual succinctly: “We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck.” A day later, Wasson introduced his wife and daughter to the remarkable fungi, with the same results. Along with Allan Richardson’s photos, the article was accompanied by stunning watercolor paintings by the mycologist Roger Heim of the seven types of psychoactive mushrooms that were then known. (Today the count is close to 200.) Most readers probably overlooked the article, but the magazine’s wide circulation assured an audience amounting to hundreds of thousands.

Among those intrigued was Albert Hofmann, who soon afterward isolated the psychoactive molecule in the fungi—psilocybin. Directly or indirectly, Wasson’s account jettisoned Leary out of a mainstream academic career and into a new role of bringing psychedelics to the masses. Terence and I were influenced as well, though I must admit the article was of more interest to him than to me; I was only six. Terence was ten and curious about everything—and because he was curious, I was curious, without really knowing what the piece was about. I do remember him trailing our mother as she did her housework, waving the magazine, demanding to know more. But of course she had nothing to add. Terence’s curiosity would linger, even if at the time he had no intimation of how important psychedelics, and especially mushrooms, would become for us, in events still years away.

Chapter 10 - The Big Picture

Television, glorious television, found its way into our home around 1958. In many ways, its appearance marked the true end of the innocent era I’ve described, an era when local preoccupations were paramount. Like so many western towns, Paonia had its initial emblazoned on a nearby hill. If you looked out past the end of Main Street, there it was, an affirmation of local identity tied somehow to the high school football team. As the only point high enough to receive the signal from stations in Grand Junction and Montrose, that hill, known as the P, was destined to have a role in plugging us into the Global Village. So were Joe and George Abseck of A&M Electric. For better or worse, they took the initiative to set up and maintain the booster station atop the P that captured the broadcasts.

The picture was black and white, of course, and its quality was dismal: grainy and full of static. I know we got CBS and some other programs, but it would be a while before all the major networks reached us in full. Nevertheless, TV opened a window onto the wider culture, formerly accessible only through radio. We could watch
The Ed Sullivan Show, The Twilight Zone
,
Gunsmoke
,
Have Gun–Will Travel
,
Rawhide,
and
Sea Hunt.
Another favorite,
The Outer Limits,
arrived later. I remember the first televised presidential debate in the fall of 1960, when John F. Kennedy, the shining knight, vanquished Richard Nixon with his five o’clock shadow and threatening frown. Three years later, we’d watch the somber pageantry of Kennedy’s funeral cortege: the coffin on the caisson and the prancing black horse in the dreary November gloom, the whole country in mourning, stunned, wondering what the hell had gone wrong with America.

The Kennedy era had begun on a note of optimism. There was a feeling of welcome change in the air as the staid Eisenhower administration came to a close, and a vibrant young president and his stylish wife moved into the White House with their two young children. The Cold War still loomed, as it had throughout the fifties, and so did the threat of a spreading proxy war in Southeast Asia. But the general feeling was that the nation had entered an era of prosperity, innovation, and scientific advance.

Those years were marked by events and tensions that would shape American life for decades. In January 1961, Ike bid farewell with a famous speech that warned the country about the dangers posed by a growing military-industrial complex. A few days later, Kennedy gave his famous “Ask-not” inaugural address, encouraging Americans to look beyond self-interest to what they could for their country. Making good on a campaign promise, he started the Peace Corps in March. Just before he took office, the country had severed diplomatic ties with Castro’s Cuba. The new president’s first major blunder occurred in April at the Bay of Pigs, a failed Cuban invasion mounted by anti-Castro exiles with American help. In November, Kennedy made a second profound mistake, sending thousands of “advisors” to Vietnam. By year’s end American helicopters were providing support for South Vietnamese troops. Declared or not, the Vietnam War, and the number of Americans fighting and dying there, would grow for years.

That wasn’t the only action in 1961 with a long, lingering effect on the national psyche. A treaty known as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was signed in March, codifying into international law a number of bad ideas that have plagued drug regulation ever since. In May, the civil rights movement entered a critical phase when the Freedom Riders, challenging racial segregation on a bus trip through the South, were assaulted by mobs in Alabama and later jailed in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, despite Supreme Court actions that should have protected them. In October, the Soviets detonated a 58-megaton hydrogen bomb in the Arctic Ocean—still the largest explosive device ever triggered. The United States continued to expand its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles with the first test launch of a Minuteman-1. Meanwhile, the country deployed numerous shorter-range missiles in Italy and Turkey, putting Moscow within range of a nuclear strike.

The Beatles began the string of appearances at Liverpool’s Cavern Club that led to their global renown. The Rolling Stones formed a year later. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, with Alan Shepard making the first American space flight—a short suborbital one—within a matter of weeks.

The Space Race had begun with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in October 1957, but now it suddenly dominated the popular consciousness. If the Red Menace had pulled ahead at first, apparently endangering our cherished way of life, John Glenn’s orbital mission in early 1962 made it feel like a dead heat. Satellite communications began, and one of two Mariner probes successfully sent back data from its flyby of Venus. Kennedy’s agenda for his “New Frontier” would find its most potent symbol in his plan to land men on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” he declared in Houston in September 1962, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Within a month, the Cuban missile crisis became the world’s first nuclear showdown, a confrontation averted when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove those weapons, backing down from Kennedy’s ultimatum.

For my family, these and other events amounted to the background murmur of our daily lives. At the time, neither Terence nor I paid much attention to the news. Our concerns were still personal and local. Though the arrival of television had a huge impact on us, by then we were already bookish geeks, firmly ensconced in the Gutenberg era and under no real threat of TV taking us over. Television was entertainment, distracting fluff. For us, real learning and knowledge would always come from books.

The major exceptions to our disregard for current events were the space missions and the tense weeks of the missile crisis. By the time of Gagarin’s historic flight, Terence and I were already steeped in the lore and excitement of space exploration, thanks to our father’s interest in space and aviation, and to the pulp science fiction magazines he’d leave around the house for us to read, along with the occasional issue of
Popular Science
and
Scientific American
. He was a great believer in technology; like many in his generation, he envisioned a scientific utopia on the near horizon, powered by atomic energy and replete with space stations, robots, and flying cars. Computers and their transformative effects on society weren’t yet on the radar for most, and wouldn’t be for at least a decade. But thanks to science fiction, we lived in eager anticipation of such marvelous advances. In our imaginations, we were already well beyond the solar system, having long since left behind such mundane scenarios as orbital space stations and voyages to the moon. We were enthralled by the idea that mankind’s unknown destiny lay far beyond this planet. Years before
Star Trek
mass-marketed our mix of optimism and yearning, we were certain that humans were bound to explore the trackless reaches of outer space, and that we’d be among those who would go.

No wonder amateur rocketry was one of Terence’s main pursuits as a boy. Though I participated in those exploits with him, amateur astronomy was my major preoccupation. I dreamed of someday becoming an astrophysicist and spent many a crystal-clear winter night freezing my keister off in the city park, trying to adjust my Edmunds Scientific 4½-inch reflector telescope to the celestial coordinates needed to capture some nebula or galactic cluster. I never did really get the hang of that, but I managed to find, by lucky accident, an abundance of marvelous celestial objects; cold or not, I was hooked. I still am, though now I do most of my sky surfing with an iPhone app. These days, you don’t have to search; you just hook your telescope up to your laptop, dump in the coordinates, and it finds the object for you. Where’s the fun in that?

I loved reading popular expositions of the latest cosmological ideas, like those written by George Gamow and Fred Hoyle, vocal proponents of, respectively, the Big Bang and Steady State theories. I always leaned toward Gamow, a Russian-born émigré, partly because he was a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I nurtured an ambition of one day studying under him. Another reason was that the Steady State theory seemed rather boring to me; I liked the idea that the universe began with a really,
really
big bang. I was quite serious about my studies. Besides reading the popular science literature on astronomy, space exploration, and related topics, I also delved into the technical side in the obsessive way I had of getting into things. Terence gave me a subscription to
Sky & Telescope
one year for my birthday, and I cherished it, reading every issue from cover to cover even though I understood about half of it. One summer I resolved not only to read but to copy everything in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
related to astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics. Every afternoon I’d show up at the Paonia Public Library, notebook in hand, select a volume of the
Britannica
and retire, monk-like, to a carrel in the upstairs reading room. I was quite content to spend those summer days transcribing various essays while my peers were playing outside. It didn’t seem to harm me; in fact it was good training for future scholarly endeavors that required a lot of focus. But after that one intense summer, I realized the task was hopeless and pointless, and I gave it up.

From the beginning, Terence and I were both Big Picture people. We weren’t sweating the details; we wanted the answers to the ultimate questions. This inclination partly explains our early interest in metaphysics and philosophy. We were dissatisfied with the pat and shallow answers proffered by our Catholic faith, and with the priests who, with a few exceptions, responded angrily, or disingenuously, to our insistent questions. It became clear to us early on that Catholic dogma was pretty much a fairy story concocted to satisfy the incurious masses, and we were buying none of it. That skepticism became a motivation to look beyond the boundaries of our religious faith, as eventually we did.