YOSEMITE: JULY 5, 2001
On the night of the full moon—the fifth of July, I think it was—I had been back in the park for an entire week, and I still hadn’t looked for work. I hadn’t done anything except sit by the river, really. I had been high ever since Bronco Bill had lit that first joint, and I needed something to shake me out of my general feeling of malaise. I was thinking about that when Chloe found me by the river and told me to come with her—a bunch of people were going up to the high country to summit Mount Dana.1
There were ten of us on the hike. John joined Chloe and I, along with a really loud and hilarious little curly-haired Italian-looking guy named Michael who had just arrived in the park from Los Angeles, and six of Chloe’s friends who had made the journey out to Yosemite with her from her hometown. Adam was a wild drunk who looked like a mini Jesus. The American version of Jesus, you know: long brown hair, scruffy beard, thin, handsome face, brilliant eyes, long, skinny fingers that he was always pointing at things in a meaningful way. I had seen occasional sparks of brilliance from Adam over the course of the past month, mostly due to the fact that he always wanted to cut the bullshit small talk and really have conversations with people. He had a tendency to go a little overboard with the booze, and he’d get sloppy and break shit and black out a lot of the time, but I really liked him, anyway. The other guys all seemed pretty alright, as well, but I really hadn’t had a chance to get to know ‘em yet at that point. Two very tall and somewhat similar-looking brown-haired guys with unshaven chins were both always taking photographs. They were really into music and records—a lot of good hip hop and old school R&B—and they seemed to love skateboarding, and both were obviously in love with all their friends—there was a deep hometown bond there. Their names were Matt and Kevin. Kevin had a girlfriend named Morgan who was a tall blonde, quiet and shy with a soft smile. She dressed straight out of the ‘60s—flowing blouses and patchwork pants, and she always wore these thick hemp necklaces with little beads of glass woven into them. She was along for the hike, too. Then there was this short, skinny young man named Tim, always smiling. He was training to become a park ranger and had a bottle of red wine in his hand nearly every time I saw him. He was Adam’s cousin. And the ninth person was actually Chloe’s brother Travis. Travis was another smart one. Handsome and contemplative. Whenever he drank, everything he said became a cryptic message of some sort. He would look out through his glasses, off into nothingness, and make comments about life that didn’t really fit with anything going on at the time. But behind all those mysterious little mutterings he seemed to have a really deep sort of understanding of the way things are.
We all rambled up the side of the mountain, up above the tree line, at one point hiking over a big snow field where I saw a couple of marmots chasing each other around and digging little tunnels in the snow. Chloe and John were way up ahead of the pack—just a couple of dots on the massive dome of granite above. Behind them were Matt and Kevin. Michael was just ahead of me, and was talking the whole time—yelling, really—just saying complete nonsense to whoever would listen. No one could hear him, but he just kept talking, anyway. And back behind me were Tim and Morgan. Travis was behind them—still so far back that it looked like he hadn’t even started the damned climb yet. We all eventually hung out just below the summit for a while, right after we had cleared the snow field, and we waited for everyone to come together so we could hike the last bit of the trail up to the summit together. Then we got to the top of the mountain just as the sun was setting in the west and the moon was rising in the east. After a good fifteen minutes of silence—all of us staring in awe at the red globe sinking and the white globe rising, with all of Yosemite and Mono Lake and the Great Basin spread out before us—Michael produced a plump bag of psilocybin mushrooms, and the night took on the feel of a pilgrimage to Mecca.
I sat and looked out over the rocks, out to Mono Lake, while Chloe and all of her old friends reminisced about the last time they had all tripped together. I felt a little strange hanging out with such a large group of people who had all known each other since they were babies—I almost wished I had stayed behind—but John didn’t seem to care, and Michael was completely oblivious to everything. So I just sat there and went along with all of it and secretly hoped the reminiscences and the inside jokes would stop after we all started losing our minds.
John sat next to me. He was wearing this long skirt-like thing that I guess you could call a sarong—a sarong is a length of fabric with a pattern on it, worn by men and women all over the world (Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, the Pacific islands), but not usually in the United States. It looked pretty ridiculous when matched up with John’s Led Zeppelin t-shirt and his thick white socks and hiking boots. But who gave a shit, really? He was his own man. He took off his boots and pulled a pair of jeans on under his skirt, saying something about his testicles being frozen. I patted him on the leg.
“I haven’t tripped in a year,” I said. “Last summer, in San Francisco. It started out fun, but ended in a nightmare.”
He clapped me on the back, “Well, we aren’t in the city right now, are we?” He spread his arms out to the sides. “We’re on top of the world, man. This’ll be fun.”
We all ate the mushrooms with gloved hands, amongst excited chatter and the constructing of a sleeping bag shelter alongside the wind shelter, where we could curl up together and stay warm all night despite the wind. After thirty or forty minutes, most members of the party had abandoned our shelter, and were wandering off to the edges of our sloping, moon-lit plateau as the last bit on sunlight disappeared from the furthest reaches of the sky. Kevin stood and stretched his hands to the sky and said “Fuck me,” over and over again, breathlessly—in genuine awe. Michael got into a wrestling match with his sleeping bag that ended up lasting the rest of the night, while Chloe and I both crawled into one sleeping bag, zipped it up around the both of us, and leaned against the wind shelter, our limbs entwined for a few minutes or so before we unzipped the bag and our limbs exploded out of it in all directions. We both mumbled under our breath, rapidly and incoherently, about claustrophobia and such, then we smiled open-mouthed smiles at one another and melted back into ourselves outside the confines of the bag, free to move our limbs through mountain air, which felt like an icy syrup on my skin.
Once the mushrooms took full hold, everyone but Michael settled in and quieted for a short while, watching the moon rise as our bodies soaked in a warm bath of psilocybin. Michael continued his wrestling match with his sleeping bag—laughing and squealing like a hyena, zipping and unzipping the bag, wrapping it around him then taking it off, lying down in it, then standing, then lying down again. He seemed to think that he was putting on quite the comedy show for all of us, but I can’t recall a single person paying him any mind. We were all lost in our own heads, our own visions. At one point, it seemed like we were losing any possibility for socialization for the entire night, so I decided to speak up. I was always thinking of myself as some kind of spiritual leader when it came to getting stoned back then. I could probably be pretty annoying at times. But I really wanted to attempt to ease everyone towards a sort of reverence for the drug, hoping to calm Michael and put us all in the right state of mind. So I started talking:
“You all know that feeling you get when your thoughts just stop, and you aren’t thinking of anything, but you also aren’t thinking about not thinking? You’re just there? An empty shell of a body, and your mind exists outside that body?” No one said anything to this, but they all turned to look at me, their dilated pupils glittering in the moonlight. “Have any of you ever felt that way? I’ve only been there once, when I was back at my parents’ house in Morrison for a week, and I was lying in my childhood bed and trying to get to sleep by counting my breaths. I fell into this intense meditative state, and had this out-of-body experience—I suppose that’s the only way to put it, but it wasn’t really out-of-body at all. I looked at my hands, and they weren’t even my hands. My body was literally just this empty vessel, and my mind was occupying it, sure—my mind was looking through my eyes like they were the windshield of a car, but my mind could have just as easily been outside the car. It could have been anyone else’s mind at that point.”
No one had a reply to this but Morgan. Her voice sounded strange. Alien. You could tell she was really out there. “There were people out there in the Saharan Desert ten thousand years ago who lived that way all the time,” she said. “There are these engravings in southeast Algeria of hammer-headed people in robes, running with mushrooms in their hands, and there are parallel lines connecting the mushrooms to the tops of their heads. I saw pictures of ‘em in an art history class. We all thought our professor was lame, but then she showed us pictures of these engravings, and she got all weird, and she told us how her husband and her got a divorce after they ate mushrooms together, because they realized while tripping that they were only staying together to satisfy a cultural construction—not out of any sort of genuine love. She said that the trip opened her to her love of all living things, and that the possessiveness of her husband was stifling that love.”
There was another moment of silence—everyone seemingly reaching a state of contemplation—but right when I thought that Morgan finally had them all, Michael lit a flashlight, yelled, “This fucking thing! Gahhh!” and continued wrestling with his sleeping bag. John looked over at me and shrugged his shoulders, then started rolling a joint. Chloe and the others all laughed at Michael, and the group fell back into restlessness.
“We need a fire!”
“We do need a fire.”
“A couple of us should hike down and find some sticks.”
“Fuck me.”
“We’re on a goddamned mountain, man.”
“There aren’t any sticks up here.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“What?”
“Is that a bear?”
“Where?”
“There aren’t any bears up here, either.”
“Right there! Over by those boulders.”
“We should start drinking pretty soon.”
“Motherfucker, you think a bear is going to come up here?”
“I’m hungry.”
“That is a bear.”
“You couldn’t eat right now if you tried.”
“That’s a shadow.”
“Who brought beer?”
“No one needs to eat ever, man.”
“I still can’t figure out how to open this sleeping bag.”
“A bear might come up here if he knew about the smoked salmon in my pack.”
“I’ve got a bottle of red wine.”
“You brought salmon up a fuckin’ mountain?”
“That is definitely something down there.”
“We need to start a fire.”
“Something living. There! It just moved again.”
“If we started a fire up here it would blow all over the goddamned high country.”
“That isn’t smoked salmon, it’s beef jerky.”
“Yeah, we aren’t starting a fire.”
“Can someone help me?”
“Maybe it’s a person.”
“Look at it! It’s huge.”
“God damn it, somebody help me.”
“Let’s burn Dominic’s sleeping bag.”
“I paid nine dollars for beef jerky?”
“That is definitely a bear.”
“You guys are idiots.”
“Salmon is bear food.”
“I can’t feel my feet.”
I leaned back and looked up into the sky. My muscles had all relaxed to the point of feeling like I had gelatin flowing under my skin, and I was able to focus on that feeling, shut out the activity around me, and become absorbed by my breaths—each one becoming more all-encompassing than the last until I could literally feel each inhalation bringing oxygen into my blood stream. I eventually stood—slowly, deliberately—and left our pile of bodies and sleeping bags. I went to sit in the wind shelter alone, where I had a hallucination—not really a full-on twisting and disorienting psychedelic experience, but more of a widening of the lens—in which I saw all of the land around us as that heaving mountain of ice from my dream. Everything was ice—one big glacier that spread east and north, away from the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, out over the Great Basin, east over the deserts of Nevada and the salt flats of northern Utah, over the Great Plains and the vast fields of corn and wheat and all the way out over Morrison, Illinois, and Chicago, over all of Wisconsin and Michigan and up over the Allegheny Plateau and Pennsylvania and New York, up to the forests of Vermont and Maine and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and out into the Atlantic. It also stretched north through the mountains of eastern California and over Lake Tahoe, up over the string of National Forests that stretches from the Sierra Nevada up through central Oregon and up into Washington and through the North Cascades and into Canada. All of it was ice. There were no trees, no cities, no people. Everything had been obliterated—or possibly nothing had ever existed at all—all was a heaving mountain of ice, moving, sculpting the land. And the ice stretched from our spot up there on that mountain in that cold alpine evening with the moon so bright up above just like it stretched from the porch of the cabin in my dream, where I had watched it countless times—I had watched it heave in the rain just beyond the swaying pines while Don dressed himself in a steamy bathroom and a naked woman slept soundly in a bed next to a framed picture of me as a little boy.
After what seemed like hours, I slowly became aware of the others again.2
Michael’s drugged giggles began to make me feel almost sick to my stomach as I continued to attempt to focus on my vision—to focus on the ice that had connected everything, here with there, the past with the present—but my disgust was more with myself than with him. He was just enjoying himself, goofing around, enjoying the high. But I had closed myself off; I had shut myself out, retreated within my own obsessions. I couldn’t stand the fact that we were on this mountain, experiencing this one and only life, and all I could think about was the passage of time. Death. Then I had the absurd and egotistical idea that none of the others seemed to know or care that we were dying, and that made me really, really sad. I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I didn’t want to be scared. And I certainly didn’t want to be depressed. So I joined the others, laughed at Michael and his goddamned sleeping bag, hugged Chloe, and all of it felt fake.
I wanted to jump off the side of the mountain.
Despite being the second tallest mountain in Yosemite, with an elevation of 13,061 feet, Mount Dana is a relatively easy mountain to summit. The trailhead is at the Tioga Pass Yosemite Park Entrance, and it is a three mile hike to the summit, with a rise in elevation of only about three thousand feet. From the summit, there are views of much of Yosemite National Park, as well as the strange and beautiful volcanic Mono Lake and the Mono Lake Basin, and there are the remnants of a very old granite wind shelter which houses a small aluminum box with notes in it from hikers through the years. One of the notes is from Gary Snyder. ↩︎
Psilocybin is believed to affect prefrontal cortex activity in the brain, as the prefrontal cortex plays a large role in time perception. Studies on people tripping on mushrooms have demonstrated that the drug impairs a subject’s ability to gauge time intervals longer than a couple of seconds, thereby causing him or her to believe that time is standing still, or that hours have gone by when only a few minutes have passed. ↩︎