The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (52 page)

My only hope, I decided, was not to fall asleep. I looked at them in the lamplight—nothing unusual, just a pair of young people like me. I wasn’t fooled. I muttered something about turning in and went back to my tent, where I grabbed my flashlight and machete. Pulling my sleeping bag partly over me, I sat upright in the darkness, ready to lash out if they made a move. The night was dark and moonless; it would be a long wait until dawn. I was completely down by then. No residual effects of the mushrooms remained except the scenario I’d concocted, which still seemed totally plausible. I’m not sure how long I stayed awake, but I surely didn’t make it to the light of day.

The next morning, everything was fine. We brewed up some coffee, packed up, and headed down the dirt road. They asked for, and I gave them, my address. They’d be passing through Honolulu in a few days and promised to look me up if they had time. They proved as good as their word. We spent a delightful evening together eating Chinese food and getting loaded on my best Hawaiian bud.

The incident says more about the ambivalent nature of the mushroom experience than it does about the Big Island odd couple. In deep mushroom states, one can be seized by outlandish conceits that are very hard to shake. The mushrooms can be tricksters at times, and they have a way of presenting delusions as self-evident truths. Many of the events and insights at La Chorrera are good examples. Like certain Irish bards I could mention, the mushrooms can, at times, be the best of bullshitters. They usually have an interesting story to tell, but it’s not necessarily the straight story. It’s important to keep one’s critical faculties tuned to the highest level of sensitivity in order to filter what you’ve learned, or think you’ve learned, from mushrooms.

By the start of the new semester in the fall of 1977, I’d accepted an offer from Siegel to move into a small apartment at his home in Manoa. This new living situation gave me a chance to befriend the two Siegel kids still living at home. His daughter, pale and soft-spoken, lived there with her boyfriend and their baby boy. The guy was a motorcyclist, a bit of a rebel, but an intelligent fellow, a physics, astronomy, and philosophy buff, and we hung out regularly and had many good discussions. Siegel’s son was interesting and quite eccentric in his own right. Enamored of all things British, he too was blonde and fair; but he had his father’s barrel chest. He put it to good use by becoming an accomplished bagpipe player, recognized all over Oahu for this talent. The Siegels were anything but a typical American family, and it could not have been otherwise, given such brilliant, driven parents and their inevitable influence on their children. Though I lived among them, I never pried into the family dynamic. I didn’t want to know the details, really. Siegel was a mentor and a role model to me, and I preferred not to have any of my bubbles burst.

Siegel’s grad students used to worry about his health. After all, we loved him as much as he loved us. He got no exercise and viewed his body as a vehicle to carry around his amazing brain, which may have been his undoing. On any given day, I’d arrive at the lab and ask Lani or Maggie or someone else, “Well, how bad is he today?” We all expected him to keel over at any moment. We judged the state of his ill health by his pallor. Some days he looked pretty good; others, he was gray and was clearly having problems.

Siegel eventually became the department chairman years after I’d left. He performed those duties well, but he really belonged in the lab, where his creativity could flower. In 1992, I was working as a research pharmacologist at Shaman Pharmaceuticals in San Carlos, California, when I got the news that Sandy had collapsed and died at his desk the day before. I think I cried more on hearing that than I did when my own father died. His death was a terrible loss, to science, and to those who loved him, and there were many. He was as fine a human being as I have ever met.

After living at Siegel’s place for just under a year, I moved to another apartment. I was tired of the cramped quarters, and I wanted a place of my own where I could bring someone after a date. The breakup with Deborah still haunted me, but I was determined to move on.

The next big phase in my life began unexpectedly at one of those beer-and-pizza gatherings that Siegel liked to throw for visiting colleagues. The guest of honor that night was Siegel’s friend Neil Towers, a professor of botany at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In the course of a lively conversation, Neil mentioned that he had a master’s student who was working on characterizing an enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway to psilocybin (which he pronounced “si-lo-cybeen”). His student, he said, had started the project but then had dropped it to work on something else. Towers mused that he thought it was an interesting problem; what a pity there was no one to pick it up where she’d left off.

I practically fell off my chair! Trying not to spew my beer, I set it down and stammered something like, “Well, Dr. Towers, that’s very interesting. I’ve had some interest in these mushroom metabolites as well, for some time.” Trying not to betray my excitement, I added, “I don’t suppose you’d have a place for a new graduate student to work on this problem?” In fact he did, as I quickly learned. We started corresponding, and he made sure my application to UBC was accepted, and with a four-year fellowship in the bargain. It was one of those shifts in the time stream that sets you off in an entirely new direction and leaves you wondering who’s writing the script.

A year after that pivotal event, I found myself in a taxi on a drive to the Honolulu airport. I’d finished my master’s in the spring of 1979 and was getting ready to start my doctoral work in Vancouver. I was leaving Hawaii behind, heading to a new country and a new phase of my life.

Though I’ve returned many times to Hawaii and have maintained my connections there, I’ve never again had the pleasure of calling it home. Most people are never confronted with a choice to leave a paradise like Hawaii, and doing so carries with it the potential for major regret. I could have gotten my Ph.D. there. Siegel would have been happy to have me, there was stipend money, and I might have ended up sticking around like those I knew who came to Hawaii to study and never left. Driven by ambition, the prospect of a career and new adventures, I gave up that bucolic life, which seemed the right thing to do at the time. Now, I’m not so sure. I do know that once you leave Hawaii it’s hard to get back.

Perhaps if current cosmological theories are true, we live in a world in which all timelines exist, every possibility is actualized; somewhere on one of those alternate tracks the doppelgänger of Dennis McKenna never left Hawaii. It’s fun to speculate about such things, and useless, destined as I am to live out the consequences of the decisions that have led me to this particular nexus of space and time.

While I was busy pursuing my graduate studies in Hawaii, Terence and Kat were making their own choices as they built their life together. Shortly after their marriage in 1976, they moved from Kensington to a more rural setting not far from Santa Rosa. Within a year they’d bought their property on the Big Island; as shareholders in a “hui,” a collective land-ownership association, they’d tied their futures to the paradise I’d later depart. Their first child, Finn, was born on April 7, 1978.

By then, Terence’s career was beginning to take shape. Our first book,
The Invisible Landscape
, hadn’t made the best-seller lists, but it got some attention in esoteric circles, and Terence had attracted notice as well. Shortly after his wedding, just before Christmas in 1976, I was listening to the radio when suddenly I heard my brother’s voice—unmistakable then, and now. He was going on about extraterrestrial intelligence and how it would be hard to recognize even if we did encounter it; it might present itself in some surprising form, he said, perhaps as a mushroom. It was a thirty-second snippet on an obscure station, but that was the first time I’d heard him air those peculiar notions to a wide audience. For me, that was the beginning of his public career. It was also the seed of a self-replicating meme that would propagate like a virus through the cultural body for decades, and indeed is still doing so.

Terence had left the family and Colorado at sixteen while I stayed behind. Nevertheless, our lives remained entwined, linked not so much by physical proximity as by our shared interests and obsessions. That bond culminated at La Chorrera, where events brought us about as close as two siblings could get. There at the peak of our folie à deux, the metamorphosis we attempted with light and sound and mushrooms was an operation on a single entity, or so we imagined. That’s how we understood it then, and that’s actually how it was.

Everything after that critical moment would be an expression of two lives drifting apart. Like two boats formerly lashed together, we rode the same current, at times closer and farther apart, but always within hailing distance. That ended twelve years ago, when Terence was swept into the vortex of his own personal singularity, the same one we’ll all face someday. How long before my journey ends, I cannot know. Whatever distant shore Terence has come to rest on, may it be a lovely tropical island and not a frozen reef. My feeble signals to him vanish in the night like the wan glow of a semaphore in a howling gale; so far there has not been, nor do I expect there will ever be, a responding light.

Chapter 40 - In the Trenches

Before leaving Hawaii, I shipped my books and a few other things worth keeping to a friend in Seattle. Upon arriving there in the summer of 1979, I borrowed her car and drove to Vancouver, found a scuzzy apartment, unloaded my stuff, and headed back to the States for a month with friends and family in Colorado. In Paonia, I paid $400 at a local garage for a 1973 Mercury Monterey, a huge thing that had literally been driven to the post office and back by a little old lady. With the cruise control set and the AM/FM radio cranked up, I floated to Vancouver in what turned out to be great wheels, a perfect road machine I’d drive for the next five years.

By late summer, I was eager to start the new semester and begin my research. Like most foreign graduate students at the University of British Columbia, I had a two-year fellowship that would be renewed for another two years if I kept up my grades. I’d already completed a lot of my work in Hawaii—in plant physiology, biometrics, calculus, and plant biochemistry. My first two courses at UBC were in fungal genetics and advanced organic chemistry. Both were a challenge, and I was under a lot of pressure to excel. Among the many good incentives to keep my fellowship was that it relieved me of any teaching duties, giving me more time to focus on my research.

My research supervisor, Neil Towers, ran his lab as an incubator for a succession of eccentric but brilliant students. For Neil, our work was as much a social activity as a scientific one, but his standards were high. By then, we had agreed that my project was to characterize the enzymes involved in psilocybin and psilocin biosynthesis. For this, of course, I was well prepared. I knew all about growing mushrooms as a result of my extracurricular hobbies. Health Canada, the country’s public health department, had helpfully provided the synthetic psilocybin and psilocin I needed for my analytical work. My first task was to develop methods for detecting and quantifying these two metabolites in fungal cultures and fruiting bodies. I requisitioned a growth chamber in the basement of the biology building, and for most of that fall and spring I had it stuffed with prolifically fruiting jars.

My first-year goals were to devise techniques for extracting psilocybin and psilocin from the mushrooms, and then develop ways of using “high-performance liquid chromatography” and “thin-layer chromatography” to analyze and quantify those extracts. Once these methods had been perfected, the reasoning went, we’d extract the biosynthetic enzymes from the fruiting bodies or the mycelium and incubate radioactively tagged precursors with them, and then quantify the resulting products: psilocybin, psilocin, and their intermediates. In a later phase, we planned to look at the genetic regulation of biosynthesis in the mushrooms. To do so, we’d first use mutagenic agents to make mutant strains, select these, and then examine the variations in the biosynthetic products associated with them. I never got to that point, as I’ll explain; but I did manage to develop some reliable analytical methods.

I didn’t know any of the other graduate students when I first arrived at UBC. I was an outsider, an American, and a loner, but as in Hawaii, I soon met other kindred spirits. One was Terry, a “moss man” from Ontario working on bryophytes under a prominent taxonomist in the field, the late Wilf Scofield. Terry was never into mushrooms or psychedelics, but he was peculiar enough in the best of ways without them. Another wonderfully odd new friend was Paul, who wasn’t actually a student, but a renowned amateur mycologist whose interest in the “neurotropic” species led him to discover and name several British Columbian
Psilocybe
species over the years. When I started hanging out with these folks, we’d retire every Friday to the graduate student center on campus and drink beer—strong, Canadian beer—and I’d get smashed. It wasn’t really my thing, but the camaraderie was a pleasure.

During my first semester, in the fall of 1979, I had moved into another dreary basement suite in West Point Grey. I then bought a used bike so I could commute to school along the bike trail that wound through the Endowment Lands, a kind of green belt between my neighborhood and the campus. A construction crew had been working along a road that ran parallel to the trail. One day the construction crew dug a trench eight feet deep and twenty feet long right in the middle of the bike path, as I unluckily discovered that night. I left the lab late; it was rainy, dark, and dreary, and I thought I was coming down with a cold. I climbed on the bike to start home, and my bike light was pathetically weak on the wet pavement. The crew had placed a small sawhorse mounted with a flashing light at the lip of the trench—not six or eight feet in front of it, but right at the edge. By the time I got there, the warning light had either died or was barely working. In the darkness and the rain, I plowed through it and went head over heels into the trench with the bike landing on top of me.