Fucking Mushroom Trip

How was I going to tell my friends that there’s a God? That I found him? Her? Them? 

How am I supposed to tell you?

Well… I’d been up all night stirring around in my sheets, watching old interviews with Terence McKenna talking about meeting aliens and crazy shit like that. Because I was nervous. It was Martin Luther King Day, 2021. I was on Nantucket Island, thirty miles out at sea. Today I was taking the shrooms Gabe had given me back up in Maine.

I’ve had some pretty crazy trips in the past, like, taking acid and going nuts on the beach and stuff. I also, now that I think about it, I did DMT this past summer out of a vape pen. But you always get butterflies. You never know if this is the trip that’s going to scare you out of your skin.

And I was also nervous because the weight of all the death around me has been crushing lately. Corona, obviously. But also I just happen to know like, half a dozen people with cancer right now? A few people I knew in high school have died in the past few weeks. One was Dominic, who died at twenty-three after a long battle with leukemia. The other was Cassandra, who passed away at twenty-five from an undetected blood disease. Makes me feel like I’m a moment from being gone.  

I was anxious to get all sorted out with the feeling that I’m just rotting away. Have you ever felt that way? 

I finished work around 12:30, and then I whipped up a tea with all of the shrooms I had in my Ziploc baggie. (I thought that it was a fairly mild dose of three grams, but I later learned that it was much closer to five and a half). I strained it all into my travel mug, and took about a mile walk to this bamboo grove right on the side of Madaket Road. Shrooms tend to get me pretty nauseous, so I smoked a joint in the grove, where I was perfectly shielded from the unforgiving January wind. Crouched down among the bamboo shoots and sitting on my calves, I peeked through the forest of pencil-straight stocks. I was alone. I tasted the cardboard of the filter. Well, I guess this is as high as I’m getting. 

To be expected. I haven’t gotten a real trip ever since I started taking Prozac anyways. I think it prevents your brain from accepting the excessive serotonin or something.

Just then, as I was cursing my blasted drugs, a chilling breeze swept through the grove. I shuddered, pulled my balaclava back up for warmth. The sound of the bamboo shoots bracing against the wind sounded like a million toothpicks being cracked in half all at once. 

Ooooohhh-hoooo. Maybe I spoke too soon. 

I closed my eyes to focus on the crackling around me. If I thought about it hard, it sounded like the crackling of a fire from the inside of my brain. I opened my eyes and noticed that I was hidden in the shadows. The sunshine beckoned me to come out, I could see its golden voice, whispering to me through little slits in the vegetation of the grove. So I picked up my backpack, and set on my way to Tupancy Links. 

I kept coming up harder and harder as I dragged my feet dreamily down the dirt road connecting the grove to Tupancy. By the time I got halfway there (so, only a few hundred yards) I needed to stop by the side of the road for a break. I crouched to the ground, a little way into the woods down a narrow deer path, and began humming. 

My skull vibrated loudly. The earth around me began to tremble. As the trees and thickets around me shook and wavered, I felt as though a screen was beginning to dissolve before my eyes. My reality was translucent against the backdrop of a greater, more concrete and realistic cosmic reality. 

But I suppose if anybody had stopped by, they just would’ve only seen me humming to myself in the woods. And despite my enlightenment, I wasn’t comfortable with that yet. It’s not NYC, you don’t get to act like a crazy person (like sane people should). So I got going again. No more pit stops.

Tupancy Links is an old golf course restored into a meadow habitat. You walk through vast fields of dry, yellow, low-growing shadbush, a species endemic to Nantucket. The ground is dry and acrid, and only gets sandier as you walk further and further towards the ocean. And then after maybe a mile of walking through fields, you’re up on the side of probably a fifty-foot high cliff, and there’s the big wide ocean. I sat down on a bench overlooking the vast “blue, blue, blue.” The biggest ducks I’d ever seen were chasing gulls around on the shore. 

What does it all mean? The view was beautiful, the sun was probably thirty minutes from golden hour. Sure, beautiful, alright, yaya, but I need answers. What does it all mean?  

A low voice that sounded like a warm bowl of soup called out maybe ten feet behind me. “Excuse me, are you from around here?” I could barely hear… it? Him? The wind was cold and sharp, and the warm voice was being thrown in every direction.

I turned to a man wearing a fleece from EMS, a ballcap, and wire glasses. He was probably around sixty.

I said, “Sort of”, and he asked me “Could you point out the shadbush?” I crouched down on the ground and touched a blade of it to show him. For half a second I stroked the blade of shadbush like a trippy person, but then I got back up before my new friend could notice.

He looked at me as though he was a little grumpy, a little troubled. At first I was scared he could tell I was high as a kite, but I recognized finally that he was deep in thought. 

“Now, what’s that rhyme that they have about grass? ‘Sedges have edges, brushes are hollow’… now what’s the thing about grass?”

“No idea”, I replied. I couldn’t tell if he could hear my voice over the crashing waves down under the cliff. I also couldn’t tell if I was just flat-out yelling at him.

“Sedges have edges, brushes are hollow, grasses are… sedges have edges, sedges have….” He sort of sauntered off a few feet, looking out over the waves with an empty expression, muttering to himself about grass. 

Is this happening? I was pretty sure it was happening. He flipped his head back to me, and my eyes gravitated to the crisp white Boston College hat atop his head. “What about the birds? Do you know what birds those are?” 

I peeked down to the crashing waves. In my shaky voice I answered,“Uh, buffleheads I think.”

“No, I know the black-and-white ones are buffleheads, I mean the orange ones.” He wasn’t trying to be a know-it-all. He said it as though he knew I knew, even though I didn’t. 

“I’ve got no idea about the birds, I’m sorry.” 

“Oh, don’t be sorry!” Then he took a breath and readjusted his eyes back up from the birds to the horizon. The sea was devoid of the usual white sails. I felt that me and this man were two strangers standing on the end of a world. Our little world, this Nantucket cliff in mid-January.

“So did you grow up on Nantucket?” he asked me. 

I could see now almost see the summit of my drugged-out journey. The sky and sea were both shimmering blue fields, a rich canvas. The opposite of a Rothko painting, which is red, dark, oppressive. The ocean and sky were full of light and liberation. 

“I moved here a few months ago”, I remembered to reply.

“Do you have a job?” 

“Yeah, I work at this place called the Maria Mitchell Museum, it’s a natural science museum.” He nodded. I continued, “And I also take care of a bunch of animals. Turtles, a frog, snakes. A bunch of other stuff.”

“That sounds great.” He smiled. His smile heated my face, and the sun shone down from behind me, and I was supported and held and loved by him and the sun simultaneously. 

So I said, “Well, what about you, I can tell you’re from Massachusetts.”

“Oh I’m from Chestnut Hill.”

“You grew up there?”

“Yes sir!”

“I should’ve known from the BC hat.” 

I realized immediately, even while I was completely loaded, that that last thing I said didn’t make any sense. 

He goes, “Well, actually I work there. I’m a Catholic minister.”

“No way. That’s amazing.” 

“I like it.” 

I said the only thing I knew to say.

“Man, this is really, really beautiful.” 

“It is. I wonder if they’ll be putting those windmills up anytime soon.”

I nodded. Sure. 

“I can’t wait for Wednesday.”, he said.

How high am I? I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about, but I just turned my face down at the shore again, and I twiddled a particularly tall piece of shadbush between my fingers. 

It dawned on me soon enough that he was talking about Biden’s inauguration. 

I replied probably a moment (or two) too late, “I know, I can’t wait for Wednesday either. I’m glad that we’ll finally have somebody who takes science seriously.” I thought that was passable. 

“Oh I know. It makes me so upset, sick really. Trump did everything he could to destroy the planet. Pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, and he reversed or nearly reversed every last good regulation or law that the EPA has ever put in place.”

“Yeah.”

“But we’re lucky that young people like you stood up and demanded change. I really think Biden appointing his go-to science guy to his cabinet is in response to your generation saying we need somebody to do something about this mess.”

       “Hmm. Do you feel like you often get to have conversations about earthly preservation with people in your church?” 

        I felt like a dick for reading into his identity so blatantly. 

         “Well, not all the time. But I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Pope’s Three T’s?” 

          “I’ve never.”

           “It’s terra, trabajo, techo. Land, work, and housing. He means like, we need to preserve and protect the land. So environmentalism in the church has changed in the past few years. I’m actually studying now to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Studies from UMass Boston.”

           ‘You’re kidding. Well, congratulations, that’s really amazing.” 

            “Thank you!” 

            And then I could tell, I could really tell that I was there, I was fully there. I felt as though I was walking a tight rope between my realm and that of another (maybe heaven)?  Whoooosssshhhh.

            I better get out of here. 

            “I better get outta-”

            And before I could finish, he said in his warm soup voice, “I better get out of here. But you have a great day. What’s your name?”

            “Dan.” My name sounded wild and hilarious. “And yours?”

            “John.” 

            “it was great to meet you, John.”

            “And same to you.”

            With that, John turned and walked back toward the rolling meadows, his head slowly ducking down below the final shred of shadbush. 

            I cried. I don’t know exactly how to explain how one can feel this, but when I cried, God decided I had seen what I needed to see, and he put me back safely into this world. I was planted. I mean, don’t get me wrong, still very high. But the sun shone down on me, and I could tell that somebody out there was looking out for me, making sure I was safe, and that I was loved by God. Or somebody. Whoever it is, they are awesome, and they love me. And you. Us. 

            They also have a sense of humor, and even though the world they made is full of very real, very scary things, that’s all okay, because they’ll bail you out in the end. They are your mother letting you fall off of your bike, teasing you lovingly, patting the dirt off your butt, and encouraging you to get back on your bike. And you do. Maybe her name is John.

            But this God or whatever, when you die and they momentarily lift the veil of reality before setting you back on your way, this God will be welcoming and gentle. They will take you out of this world and back into this world in the palm of their hand. 

            I said to myself, and this time I couldn’t hear my own voice with the wind and the waves whipping around me, I said, “Man, everything is okay.”