part0032

Following the drama festival, the final semester of my junior year rapidly drew to a close. Most of my close friends graduated that spring and began scattering to their various destinies. Richard went off to Aspen and found a cooking job, a move that defined his later career as a highly regarded chef. Tom, who had worked off and on as a carpenter throughout high school, headed for Denver to help out his brother’s construction company. Gary had recently met and become engaged to his first wife. Shortly after graduation, the couple resettled in Boulder where Gary began his studies at the University of Colorado. Of the original group, only Madeline, Phil, and I were still stuck in Paonia.

The prospect of returning to school after we’d been ostracized seemed quite bleak. Since Terence had been allowed to complete his final two years of high school in California, it seemed only fair that I should be allowed to go somewhere else for my last year. Determined to escape, I hatched a plan I began to implement shortly after the semester ended.

Crossing the mountain to the Crystal River Valley, I got a summer job as a dishwasher at the Redstone Inn, just up the road from my aunt and uncle’s ranch. The inn had been built by John Cleveland Osgood, a coal baron who created a mining and steelmaking empire in the area in the late nineteenth century. Osgood and his second wife, a Swedish countess, lived in a lavish, Tudor-style mansion half a mile up a private road from his inn. That forty-two room house was officially known as Cleveholm Manor, but we called it the Redstone Castle. Osgood, one of the top industrialists of his day, designed Redstone as a company town complete with a theater, library, bathhouse, clubhouse, and school. In addition to eighty-four chalet-style cottages built to house the married miners and their families, there was the inn, which originally served as lodging for single miners. The Redstone became a high-end inn in 1925 after Osgood lost the mine in a bitter stock dispute, and with minor interruptions (and through many owners) it has operated as a resort ever since.

Kids from Paonia and other nearby towns often got summer jobs in resort towns such as Aspen, Glenwood Springs, and Redstone. The winter ski season was busier, but there was enough summer tourist traffic to make it relatively easy to find work. I was soon ensconced in a dormer room in the Redstone Inn with the other summer slaves. As long as I showed up to wash dishes for the dinner shift each evening, I was free to ramble the surrounding hills. Though my stay was short and uneventful, it was a novel situation for being the first time I’d lived on my own.

I somehow obtained a tab of acid and took it alone one beautiful moonlit night. I felt it was important that I should take it alone, and at night—partly, I think, because I wanted to confront the fears triggered by my misadventure with datura. My third LSD trip went off without a hitch. It was a beautiful experience. I spent half of it wandering the nearby forests and trails, and half alone in my room. The highlight was when I looked in the mirror. This is not something you want to do on LSD unless you’re prepared! I spent a long time looking into my own eyes, studying my visage. After a few minutes of staring, I met my totem animal: a lion! I was quite surprised but it was unmistakable. Ever since that night I have known and identified with the lion as my shamanic spirit guide. One could do worse.

My three-week stint there ended when I moved on to the Aspen-Snowmass area and its developing hippie scene. It was not exactly the Haight, but it would do. There were drugs to be had, hippie chicks about, and loads of possibilities. Being just that much farther from Paonia was a definite plus, and so was having Richard there as a friend. I quickly secured another dishwashing gig, this time at Cyrano’s Restaurant in Snowmass Village, a fancy shrimp and steak house in the center of the Snowmass Mall. The job included accommodations in the half-empty Pokolodi Lodge. This turned out to be a sweet deal. I had a job, I had lodging—little more than a hotel room but it would serve—and I had most of my meals provided by the restaurant. If you’re young and itinerant and don’t care about making more than just enough to get by, I highly recommend dishwashing as a profession. There’s a need for this skill almost everywhere, and it’s a good way to secure employment as soon as you arrive in a new place. It worked for me in Redstone and Snowmass, and at various other times in the years ahead. I was set for a great summer. In fact, it was destined to be one king-hell crazy summer, to borrow a phrase from an Aspen local, Hunter Thompson.

By this time, Tom, the carpenter, had relocated in Denver and connected with some of the area’s recreational psychopharmacologists, an eclectic mix of very smart, occasionally quite dysfunctional people. But they had access to good drugs, and wheels, so my little outpost in Snowmass became a weekend party destination. Practically every weekend one or more of the Denver crowd would show up, ready for some serious bioassays. There was a lovely little lake near the lodge, a short walk away. There was rarely anyone up there, so it became our own private retreat, a place we’d go to trip on the psychedelic of the week, hunt mushrooms, and just hang out.

Into this scene came Terence, fresh from his yearlong ramble through Asia and the layover in Seychelles where he’d written his book. He had the manuscript with him, ready to pitch it to publishers in New York. As I mentioned, his idea had been to plant his cannabis seeds and write until both the book and his crop had reached a finished state. According to a story Terence would later tell, when that day came he got totally baked and realized what he’d written was terrible. He panicked, knowing he had to rewrite the entire thing, which he did, smoking day and night, extending his stay on Silhouette Island an extra month while he bulled it through. He thought the result was much better; at least he would not be embarrassed to show it around. Though I never saw the pre-cannabis version, when I did finally get a chance to read the manuscript I found it interesting but flawed, and Terence would have been the first to agree. Its interesting title suggested a McLuhanesque influence: Crypto-Rap: Meta-Electrical Speculations on Culture . It was the kind of book that an intense, angry young intellectual, fueled by psychedelics and radical politics, would write in the waning years of the 1960s. There was plenty of good material in there, but it wasn’t going to cause a stir among publishers, as he later discovered. The manuscript still exists. It might be of interest today for historical reasons more than as a work of cultural analysis. That said, it surely holds clues to the evolution of Terence’s thought process and may yet find its way into the light.

Terence’s stopover in Snowmass was brief but rich. He had arrived back from Asia on the West Coast and was on his way to New York to sell the book and perhaps to pursue a new love interest. I know nothing about her beyond that she lived out East and was one of the magnets drawing him to New York. During his travels in Asia, Terence had done a bit of hash smuggling, which in those days was relatively easy. Before the War on Drugs started, a lot of itinerants were able to finance their nomadic lifestyles by sending a few ounces, or a few kilos, of Nepali temple balls or Afghani Red to the hash-starved folks back home. Since he’d be passing through Colorado, he’d decided to direct one of his shipments to Paonia, addressing it to himself at our post office box so he could pick it up.

Needing a respite from Snowmass, we decided to spend a few days in Paonia. Dad flew over in his plane and brought us home. Terence was agitated and insisted on checking the mail every day. He said this was his biggest shipment yet. When it finally arrived, we knew it immediately, because the entire post office was redolent with the aroma of fine Nepali hash. Terence had had the bright idea to conceal the hash in the swollen stomach of one of those “happy Buddha” statuettes. The only problem was, the shippers had done a shoddy job of gluing the thing together, and it had broken open in transit, scattering large balls of hash throughout the packing material.

Terence handled this with aplomb. When he stepped to the window to pick up the package, the postmaster asked if it contained perfume or something. Without missing a beat, Terence replied, “Incense.” Our friendly local postmaster might have been a little skeptical at this explanation, but if so he didn’t let on. We accepted the package, which was elaborately sewn with a muslin covering, and hightailed it out of there. The good news was that we now had an abundance of hash, including a small personal stash that made my remaining year of high school quite tolerable.

Shortly after that, Terence took off for New York, where he hoped to sell some Tibetan thangkas he’d purchased in Kathmandu—“smelly, moth-eaten things,” our father called them—each worth several thousand dollars. Terence got a good price for them in New York among the Asian art dealers. His love interest apparently hadn’t panned out, and he only stayed there a few weeks. But his pockets were stuffed again. Everyone who could, it seemed, was hitting the hippie trail in India, Thailand, and Nepal. Terence wasted no time getting back on the road. Having discovered a taste for the nomadic lifestyle, and a way to fund it, he was prepared to travel for the rest of his life. I wouldn’t see him again for almost two years, just months before our mother’s death and our subsequent trip to Colombia. We corresponded, though at a leisurely pace that those who have grown up with email can scarcely imagine. The richness and depth of our exchanges more than made up for their infrequency. Though we didn’t really think of it in such terms at the time, we were hatching our plans to actualize the eschaton.

August was fading; already an early autumn chill could be felt in the clear mountain mornings. Terence had left for the East Coast, book and thangkas in tow, and I entered phase three in my plan to evade a return to Paonia for my senior year. Over the summer at Snowmass, I’d become pretty good friends with my boss at the restaurant, whose name was Joe. Joe wasn’t that much older than I was, but he qualified as a kind of mentor. He understood why I dreaded going back to Mordor, so he offered to sponsor me, which meant he’d become, if not my guardian, at least a responsible adult willing to look after me. With his support assured, I approached the principal at Aspen High School, who proved to be open-minded about the experiment. It helped that I’d be turning eighteen in a few months, making me a legal adult. If Joe was willing to look after me, provide menial employment and a roof to stay under, the principal agreed to let me enroll.

I sprang the surprise on my parents when they arrived to drive me home. Both were unhappy about it, especially my mother, who was probably upset at the thought of losing a second son after Terence had prematurely flown the coop for California. Given that precedent, I insisted that I ought to be allowed to finish school somewhere else, somewhere less narrow-minded. Mom was already quite concerned about her sons, given our interest in psychedelics. She couldn’t imagine our explorations in that alien world could lead to anything good. I remember one tearful conversation Terence and I had with her that summer. “You both have fine minds,” she said. “I am just so worried that you will lose them to a bunch of drugs.” We tried to reassure her that our interest was serious, and that our investigations might one day lead us to become great scientists. Ironically, her words were prophetic, though she wouldn’t live to see our departure for La Chorrera and the psychological upset that awaited us there. Nor did she live to see that we were right, as well. Indeed, Terence and I would continue to explore our youthful fascinations, if along different paths. I might not have achieved greatness as a scientist, but I have earned a modest reputation investigating the very substances she so feared. It saddens me that our passions were never more than a source of constant worry for her.

On that day in Aspen when I told them I was staying, my father could see I was determined. By arranging to be enrolled, employed, and sponsored by an adult, I had outmaneuvered him, leaving him without much to say. By then he was probably so disgusted with me he might have been happy to let me go, but Mom wasn’t ready for the nest to be so abruptly vacated. After intense discussion, we worked out a compromise. I would not complete my senior year at Aspen High, that hotbed of dope and liberal ideas, nor would I return to classes in Paonia. Instead, my mother and I would rent an apartment in Grand Junction and I’d finish my studies there. We would stay at the apartment during the week while my father was on the road and return to Paonia for the weekends.

In many ways this arrangement worked out well. For one thing, the sheer size of Grand Junction High School, with its more than 3,000 students, improved my prospects of meeting compatible friends. The school also offered many academic opportunities that weren’t available in Paonia, with its student body of 250. As the year wore on, this became the justification my parents often gave their friends when asked why I was attending a different school: I was a brilliant kid, they said, and I deserved some of the advantages that Terence had enjoyed.

I heartily agreed. Though I returned to Paonia many times that year, and many times since, I would never again be its prisoner.

I want to pause the narrative there, in 1968, and take a moment to acknowledge how my feelings about Paonia have changed over the decades. I last visited my hometown in the fall of 2011 as a pilgrim doing research for this book. I wanted to reflect on family roots, on the ties that bind a life to a place and time. I flew into Aspen and poked around there for a day, looking for the old haunts where I’d lived in summers past, but everything had changed. Like buildings in the film Dark City , those in Aspen had morphed and re-morphed over the decades, some torn down, others thrown up, others renovated, many in that pseudo-Tyrolean style that tends to plague ski towns. While Aspen remains a theme park for the über-wealthy, a plastic cocoon of tasteful but corporatized shops and restaurants and galleries, the rest of Western Colorado is a different story. Like most everywhere else, circumstances have gotten harder there: foreclosures, unemployment, no health care, crumbling infrastructure, a sense of America collapsing into a sort of stunned Third-Worldism as the country realizes its day in the sun is over.

And yet, for all that, life was good on that warm and clear October afternoon, with the aspens in full color in the high country, the hills dripping with molten yellows and oranges, aflame with the dying foliage giving up its soul in a carotenoid riot. The sky was brilliant blue with wispy clouds aloft and a lot of lenticular cloud formations—a good sign! I drove out of Aspen and headed for Snowmass Village, still more a bubble than Aspen will ever be, a planned community from the start. I knew Cyrano’s, the restaurant, had been gone for decades, but I spent an hour wandering the mall, which was eerily empty in the offseason; I felt I’d stepped into an old computer game like Myst. I stopped where I was pretty sure the restaurant had been, but the surroundings were all different. As for the little lake a short walk from the lodge where I’d stayed in 1968, perhaps that had been an artificial reservoir. I’m not sure, but a later search for it via Google Earth after my trip led me to think it might be gone as well.

Returning to the highway, Colorado 133, I passed through Carbondale with its lovely, redone main drag, lots of cobblestone, little shops, street sculpture, and even a medical cannabis dispensary—a hopeful development. Why shouldn’t this simple and good medicine be available at your local apothecary, as it once was? There’s far too much handwringing about things like this that could be so simply solved. I took the back way into Redstone, inching through town, watching out for the kids, until I reached the Redstone Inn, as imposing and quaintly out-of-date as ever with its towers and dormers, wraparound balconies and gingerbread banisters. In the plaza formed by its U-shaped driveway was a chromed metal sculpture of a falconer, complete with falcon, seated on a chair. It was a cool sculpture, but I couldn’t decide if it fit there or not. Any change from the past as I remembered it introduced a kind of cognitive dissonance. I ate in the inn that evening, but I stayed at Chair Mountain Ranch, always a bittersweet experience. It’s hard to be at a place that figured in so many family memories without feeling eight years old again. And yet there, too, much had changed. The lodge’s outward appearance was much as I recalled it, but the old cabins were gone, replaced by a row of very nice two-bedroom cabins across from the new fishing pond—“new” meaning not there when I was a boy. The current proprietors are nice folks, but of course they can’t understand how, for me, the ranch is like a family heirloom that’s been sold off to someone with no connections to its past.

The next day I drove to Delta with my cousin Judy to visit my beloved Aunt Mayme on her ninety-seventh birthday. Medicaid paid for her to live in a nursing home in return for the lien on her house, this being the brutal way we provide for the extremely old; finally, you lose everything, they take it all. But it’s a good place, clean and bright, and she was well cared for by the attentive staff. Though she could no longer see or hear well, and was out of it most of the time, behind her rheumy eyes her lively spirit and sense of humor were still there, I felt, but just not getting out. I thought she had a flash of recognition at the sight of me, but that may have been wishful thinking. Still and all, it was a somewhat depressing and sobering encounter, her grim plight a reminder of what lies in store for many of us, that is, to live for years beyond the joy of being alive. I made a mental note to remember to secure myself that tincture of hemlock so it’s there when the time comes. I’d rather exit in style, under my own volition, or so I say now. We’ll see.

We stayed an hour, sharing a little ice cream until lunch arrived and then quietly slipped out. Though I knew I might not see her again, somehow my sense of loss was not as great as it had been in the past; so much of her was already gone. She died several months later.

The rest of the day was considerably more upbeat. Judy and I stopped by the new Paonia Public Library, a beautiful facility paid for by donations from the community, including the purchase of fifty-dollar bricks, which afforded me the treat of standing in the lobby and reviewing the names etched on them, each one evoking old memories, faces, teachers, families. My civically engaged cousin is on the library board and is the curator of the North Fork Historical Society Museum, which we visited next. The place was full of artifacts left by the people who settled and built Paonia, some of them pictured in ancient, faded photos; I couldn’t imagine what was masked by the dour expressions on those long-dead faces. There was too much to process; old cameras, musical instruments, bygone baby clothes and adult fashions; an entire high school classroom, complete with antique desks; an office, a child’s bedroom, an old-fashioned kitchen. I spotted a few familiar items, including my grandfather’s old Remington typewriter, an uncle’s letter sweater, and the doll furniture and a toy kitchen set that once belonged to Judy and her twin sister. I even recognized the embroidered sentiment that hung in Aunt Mayme’s kitchen for decades: “Old friendships are like flowers in memory’s scented garden.” The flowers are faded now, their scent reminiscent of the inside of my mother’s purse when I was a boy, a vague amalgam of cheap lavender cologne and makeup.

Then Judy brought out the real treasures, stored in an old filing cabinet: nearly pristine copies of the Eyrie , the Paonia High School yearbook for 1968 and ’69. Here were the photos of my former classmates, old friends and enemies, girls I’d pined for with their crazy upswept hairdos—innocent young women, now aging like me. A few of my former schoolmates had departed the world by then, including my friend Tom, who died in 2011. The faces in those portraits had yet to be etched with the lines of character, of adversity confronted and overcome, or not. I was a junior that year, looking serious, and not too much a doofus in my horn-rimmed glasses. What a shock it was to turn the page and see my long-lost, long-lusted-for Rosalie—my God, that girl was beautiful! It was strange how just the name of someone I hadn’t thought of in years could activate long-dormant neural traces, bringing back a person’s laugh or another’s goofiness. That all of these people had grown up and lived their lives in some universe worlds apart from my own was almost impossible to get my head around.

That evening I had dinner with an old friend from those days. A few years ago, he returned to the family fruit ranch to care for his aging father, who had since passed on. His father had sold off his arable land, and the former apple orchard had been bulldozed to make way for grapes—Paonia has quite a reputation these days for its local wines. Without good cropland, my friend was stuck. The estate had yet to be settled, and his siblings hadn’t settled on a plan for making the homestead viable in the interim. He had considered building a greenhouse and growing medical cannabis, but the others vetoed the idea, and his parents slowly stopped spinning in their graves.

He looked good, as handsome as he was in high school, the lines in his face only adding to his character. He remained a committed Luddite, utterly convinced that we’ll wake up someday and find our smart machines have become our masters. He had no use for email or the Internet, which makes it hard for us to keep in touch, but we manage. I gently broke it to him that the takeover happened years ago and that he may as well get with the program, but he wasn’t buying it.