The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [38]
I never saw him recover. He left a few days after the operation. All he knew was that he was heading south. Some months later we got a letter from South America.
Although I only dimly realized it at the time, Luke’s leaving broke my heart.
Maybe if I hadn’t hunted grouse, or maybe if I had thrown the chain saw into the lake, maybe…
My love for Luke was important to me then. It was very important to me when I went nuts and it’s still important to me. If at the last judgment I’m confronted with a list of all my sins, my defense will be that I loved Luke. Proof that I was capable of higher emotion, proof that no matter how many ugly things I might have done I knew beauty when I saw it, proof that I didn’t have to fuck to have fun.
JANUARY 1971. A new spirit settled on the farm. We had arrived. Thanksgiving and Christmas had been confirmation rituals and we had passed both with flying colors. There had been a slightly disturbing tentativeness to the place before.
There had been pressure to work work work to get the house ready for winter. All of a sudden we noticed that winter was half over. The house still wasn’t ready and no one was dying or even sick. It was too cold to work very comfortably. Fingers didn’t behave; they dropped things all the time. We stopped trying to get the house ready for winter. It was cold at times, but we had our down bags and the kitchen could be made plenty toasty by revving up the stoves.
We had a big laugh about the whole thing. What had we been worried about? Local people were saying this was the roughest winter in years. If this was the worst winter could do to us, our survival was a piece of cake.
The die-hard regulars, Simon, Jack, Kathy, Virge, and I, settled in. We had time to look around and try to figure out exactly what it was we had. By and large, we concluded it was pretty good and would get even better. The hardest time had been a snap and was behind us. We had enough wood and enough food, so we just sat back, carved wooden spoons, knit scarves, wrote letters, read books, made music, and waited for our goats to have their kids.
2
ARRIVING
If God is one, How can I be Evil?
—C. Manson
The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in.
—D. H. Lawrence
DRUGS. Most of the people at the farm were well-seasoned trippers. It hadn’t rotted their brains or taken over their lives. It was just something they had done several times a year for the past three or four, something they enjoyed and felt helped them grow and understand more. From the way I looked and talked and the friends I hung around with, people who didn’t know me well assumed that I had done my share of tripping. They were always a little surprised to find out that I had never dropped acid and that my sum-total experience with psychedelics was one mescaline trip, and that not until I was an old man of twenty-two and out of college.
I rarely admitted even to myself that I might be afraid of drugs. I just kept saying that feelings of love, beauty, peace, and cosmic insights could be achieved more lastingly and meaningfully in other ways. But the drugs were always there and more and more tempting, if only to find out what the hell everyone was so excited about. So one fine and sunny day, two weeks after graduating from Swarthmore, Vincent, his girl friend of the moment, and Virge and I headed down from Boston to the incomparable dunes of Sandy Neck to do something about Mark’s virginity. Vincent had four caps of super organic mescaline.
Oh, well, thought I, I’m going to trip. Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. I had a slight feeling of anxiety in the pit of my stomach but I laughed at it. No one ever has a bad trip on mescaline. It’s not like it’s acid or something.