part0034

My mother and I returned to Paonia, but my stay was brief. My father had a ’59 Chevy Impala with enormous fins, a beater he’d been keeping at the airport in Montrose so he could fly in and cover his territory without having to rent a car. He generously gave it to me for the summer and flew me over to Montrose to pick it up. The wheels were a kind of graduation present, and just what I needed. I packed up the Chevy with a few basic necessities and headed to Aspen to start my job.

I found a tiny apartment in a condo-like building on a side street in a residential part of town. Every day, my fellow workers and I would catch a bus that took us a few miles up Castle Creek to the campus. There we’d do whatever chores we were assigned—mowing, trimming shrubs, sweeping out the practice rooms and generally tidying up. It was easy enough to slip into one of those rooms on a break and blast a joint. Supervision was minimal and the work was good exercise. There were a lot of pretty music students around, though as a lowly maintenance grunt I was too timid to try to befriend them.

Into this scene came Lisa. I’ve already mentioned how I first met Lisa, or at least saw her, on my visit to Berkeley in 1967. Two years later, there she was in Aspen, seeking a place to study Pure Land Buddhism, inspired by Secrets of Chinese Meditation, a book by Charles Luk. Lisa had a friend in town I’ll call Erin, a willowy blonde who had fallen in with my friend Richard. Encouraged by Erin, Lisa and I got together and soon were sharing my apartment. According to Lisa (I remember none of this), the landlord was spying on us and we were promptly evicted. We moved to a studio apartment in the back of a house, a distinct step up as it had a private entrance and a primitive kitchen. We lived there for much of that summer until events brought our short idyll to an end.

Our intimacy was a breakthrough for me, a chance to continue my sexual education, and Lisa proved a gentle and wise instructor. I had not had any sexual encounters (or no successful ones, and not for lack of trying) since my furtive episode with Fay two years earlier. Lisa was an angel of mercy who came into my life just when I needed to be rescued. She was very delicate; she had many allergies and was prone to getting sick, but she had a good soul. Wise in the ways of herbs and astrology, she was a good guitar player and singer, a good cook, a good lover. She taught me many things, but I was too inexperienced to give back in kind. I’ve since apologized for being so inept; I had thought she must have taken pity on me to put up with such awkwardness. I was pleased to hear she’d never felt that way, and that the mutual passion we felt made up for my lack of experience.

Nevertheless, I didn’t return her affection in the way she might have wanted. The crucial reason was that I was still hung up on Peggy, and still clinging to hopes we’d get together in Boulder that fall. During those years, it was a pattern of my erotic life that I spent much of it longing for someone out of reach, someone I couldn’t have for one reason or another, to the neglect of the person I was actually with. It wasn’t fair to that person, or to myself, because it kept me from fully committing to the relationship. And so it was with Lisa. Ultimately, however, that wouldn’t be what pulled us apart.

During that summer, Terence, then rambling through India, had been sending back hashish shipments from Mumbai, still known then as Bombay. Aspen, he thought, was the perfect out-of-the-way spot for these shipments to arrive, and a friend of his, Brett, was there to receive them. For Terence, this was a ramped-up version of what he’d been doing the previous summer when we picked up the smashed Buddha statue at the post office. At least then he’d made an effort to conceal the goods, however inadequately. At some point, however, he seemed to have thrown caution to the wind and started sending his shipments barely concealed in locked tin boxes. That seemed rather reckless to me, and my misgivings proved correct.

Several packages arrived without incident, picked up at any number of rented P.O. boxes up and down the valley. Most of the product was then taken to Denver and turned over to Tom, who had plenty of hash-starved customers ready to purchase whatever he had for sale. Brett, impatient and a little greedy, was quite happy to sell ounces locally, and in fact out the door of his cottage. I knew because he was living in the same cluster of cottages as Lisa and I. I thought he should show some restraint, but he didn’t listen; soon, half the hippies in town were beating a path to his door. His place quickly became widely known as the go-to source for the best hash to hit Aspen in months, maybe ever. As it turned out, his actions didn’t make much difference. When the end arrived, it came from a completely unexpected direction.

Most people with counterculture ties back then remember where they were on Woodstock weekend, August 16-17, 1969. I certainly do, but the famous music festival was not the reason why. I spent that weekend in the county jail in Glenwood Springs, awaiting transfer to a federal detention facility in Denver, where my companions and I were to be arraigned on hashish smuggling charges the following Monday. It went down like this:

I worked at the Aspen Music School until the end of July and then began getting ready to move to Boulder for the start of classes. Brett had temporarily moved in with Lisa and me, a cramped but tolerable situation, given that we’d only be sharing the space for a couple of weeks. But Lisa wanted nothing to do with a smuggling conspiracy. Deciding to bail early, we arrived in Boulder in the first week of August and found an apartment. Luckily, she stayed there when I headed back to Aspen to finish packing up.

In the course of moving out, we’d stored some dishes and linens at a house in Glenwood Springs, about forty-five miles north of Aspen. On the day I left Aspen, I wanted to pick up those boxes before continuing over McClure Pass for a brief visit in Paonia. It was a sunny Thursday, August 14, when I pulled out in the old Chevy. As best I can recall, Erin and Richard had plans to spend the weekend at the house in Glenwood, and Brett decided to drive his own car over to see them. He also wanted to check the post offices in Snowmass and Basalt, because one of Terence’s shipments had been delayed. Two packages had already come through, but not the third, so he was concerned there might be a glitch. We drove separately to the post office in Basalt, and I waited in my car while he went inside to check. When he emerged carrying a large muslin-wrapped package and a big smile I realized the Good Shit had arrived. We continued on to the house in Glenwood in our separate cars.

In the parking area in front of the house, Brett locked his car but didn’t bring anything in. I remember Erin being there, but not Richard. I went down to the basement to get my boxes, and when I came up Brett was looking worriedly out through the drawn curtains of the living-room window. There were two or three cars visible from the house with two men sitting in each. Not a welcome sight: it looked like the place was staked out. Brett decided to leave and take the package back to Aspen or try to ditch it somewhere, but by then it was too late. Both cars converged on his, blocking his exit, while four men emerged from the car, guns ready, and forced Brett out of the car. He stood there, helpless, arms outstretched, while two of the men came up to the house and called us out. I’m sure we all looked shocked and confused, and more than a little scruffy, as we emerged. Before long we were in handcuffs being booked at the county jail.

We were sequestered in separate cells, and left to chill for a couple of hours, pondering our grim fates. I was despairing and traumatized. I wasn’t a “bad kid,” let alone a criminal, despite that little session back in Paonia two years earlier. I was just a hippie who liked to smoke a little hash and groove on psychedelics. Now here I was in the slammer. But this was worse. This was serious shit. This was a federal bust of an international smuggling ring.

By the time I was collected from my cell and ushered into an interrogation room, I’d had plenty of time to reflect on the error of my ways and to conjure up some dreary scenarios of where I was headed as a result. Agent Grissom, as I’ll call him, a narcotics enforcement officer with U.S. Customs, was tall, elegant, and soft-spoken; his colleague was short and squat, had a fat face, and looked like he was a bit too fond of those jelly donuts that cops are supposed to like. In this case, it was the fat jolly one who played the good cop. He was friendly enough as he explained to me that this was not about whether I liked to smoke grass or not; this was a felony conspiracy to import a dangerous drug, and they expected me to tell them everything I knew. Meanwhile, Grissom, playing the bad cop, kept his silence and just looked at me with pity and loathing, as if to say, “You poor sap, you are so fucked.” Well, I was fucked. I don’t recall any recitation of my rights, or anyone advising me that I didn’t have to talk to these guys. But I resisted. I insisted that I wasn’t part of the conspiracy, that I was just a friend of the others, and that I had no part in the smuggling operation. I had not received shipments nor had I sold any hash or facilitated any sales.

In fact, this was true; but circumstantially it didn’t look good. After all, I had been hanging out with the others all summer. Brett was even staying in our apartment, and Lord knows I was quite happy to smoke the abundant hash. But was there direct evidence linking me to the conspiracy? Not really, and association with criminals does not necessarily make one a criminal. But I didn’t know that at the time.

In fact it became clear that they had no background information on the case. Richard got picked up later, but the authorities didn’t know Brett had been living in my apartment; they didn’t know about Lisa, who had already moved to Boulder. For them, the case began with the package they’d tracked to the Basalt post office. They produced my wallet, which they’d taken earlier, and started going through the paper scraps in it, scribbled grocery lists and phone numbers and so forth. One of those was the smoking gun: Terence’s address in Bombay! They jumped on that, and pressed me: had Terence originated the shipment? He was the one, wasn’t he? If you confirm this for us, they said, if you rat on your brother and your buddies, we’ll make sure you get released when you’re arraigned in federal court on Monday. It was obvious that Terence was on the other end of the Bombay to Aspen pipeline; who else could it be? I broke down completely, and in tears I confessed: “Yes, it’s all true!”

Looking back on this, I am still ashamed. What kind of a worm rats out his own brother? I did it then, I didn’t see any alternative, and I’m not proud of it. What can I say? I was eighteen. I was scared out of my wits. And the cops were playing me like a fiddle. I got no Miranda warning, so I when I was interrogated I was under the impression I really had no rights. The cops did their best to reinforce that belief, to make me think they were ready to lock me up for good right then and there. Had I known of my rights, I’d like to think I would have resisted and, as in the movies, thrown it back in their faces: “You’ll never make me talk, you dirty coppers.” It’s a little different when you’re a terrified kid.

Terence’s address in my wallet was the damning evidence, and I think it would have been even if I’d said nothing. Under the circumstances, I may well have confessed even if I had been read my rights. Then again, had I been able to talk to an attorney, I would have learned that the case against me was weak. The fact that I had driven to Glenwood in my own car and happened to be at the house when the bust went down was not sufficient evidence to charge me. And a good attorney would have told me that. The cops were able to assure me that I’d be released after my arraignment because they knew very well they lacked the evidence to hold me, and they would not have held me even if I’d said nothing. But they didn’t divulge that; they played on my fear and ignorance of the law to make me spill.

I spent the next two nights in the holding cell at the county jail. My parents knew I was supposed to come to Paonia that weekend, but I hadn’t been allowed to contact them, and actually I didn’t want them to know. Foolishly, I thought I could somehow conceal this from them. Knowing I’d be released on Monday, I wrote them a letter, sent from jail, assuring them all was well and that I’d be there in a couple of days. It was a total lie of course, but I thought it would buy time, which it did, a little. On Saturday, we were transported in shackles to the holding pen at the Federal Building in Denver to await our arraignment. Or I should say I was transported. I didn’t see the others until the hearing. Those twenty-four hours in the holding pen were a real education for me. People were being held on all sorts of charges, ranging from drugs to armed robbery. Some were old hands, career criminals who had been in and out of jail for much of their lives. They were a much more cynical bunch. Others were scared kids like me, in there on pot charges.

The next morning, Monday, I was led to the hearing room. My associates were already there. As we sat waiting, I could not look them in the eyes. I was consumed with guilt and shame at my supposed betrayal, about which they knew nothing. But I also saw a path to redeem myself, at least partially. The hearing opened, and I was called up first. Agent Grissom and his buddy were as good as their word, or so I thought. The judge said, “As to the case of Dennis McKenna, no charges will be filed as there is insufficient evidence to charge him.” I was enormously relieved, unaware that I would have heard those words even if I’d said nothing. Afterward, I was allowed to leave, but not until I’d watched my friends being shepherded back to their cells.

In retrospect, I have to marvel at how limited the police work was. The tools for investigation and surveillance were relatively primitive back then, before GPS and the Internet. They had no idea where we lived in Aspen, or even who we were when they made the bust. They apparently knew that a shipment was coming in, addressed to unknown persons, and they had staked out the post office, waiting for someone to claim the package. That’s where they picked up the trail. As a result, they were unaware that another one had been picked up without incident at a different post office a few days earlier. That package was still sitting in the closet at the apartment back in Aspen, waiting for Tom to collect it and sell it in Denver, as earlier arranged.

My task was clear: I somehow had to get the package in Aspen and hide it in a safe place, then show Tom its location so he could retrieve it later. I’d just been sprung; I was loose on the streets of Denver with no car and very little money. Then I had an idea. I called up a guy named Brandon I’d met a few months earlier. Brandon had a sleek sports car and a sleek girlfriend, both of which I admired. I phoned him up and explained the situation. I offered to give him some of the Good Shit if he’d drive me back to Aspen to get the stuff and then take me somewhere to hide it. He agreed; in fact, he said it would be fun.

Brandon and his girlfriend picked me up a few blocks from the Federal Building, and we headed west over the mountains. When we arrived in Aspen, I told them to park a few blocks from my former cottage and wait while I checked out the place, wary of a trap. It was late and the place was quiet. I’d sequestered a key near the entrance, so I didn’t have to break in, but I still feared I’d be arrested in some crazy scene as cops burst out of the bathroom. But I had to do it; this was my chance to help my friends, an obligation I felt most acutely since I had betrayed them, or so I thought.

No one was there; the hash, in its metal box, was still in the closet. I returned to the car, and we drove back and collected the package and took it up to the secluded lake outside of Snowmass where I’d hung out the summer before. We found a spot that looked like it would be easy to locate again, dug a hole, and buried the package—that is, after I’d cut my driver his chunk. With the deed complete, we started back over the mountains.

It was a clear, moonlit night. There was no Eisenhower Tunnel back then; to get to Denver from the Western Slope you had to cross the Continental Divide via Loveland Pass, about 12,000 feet at the summit—a spectacular place, but terribly cold at night, even in August. We had almost made it to the summit when we saw lights flashing behind us. My heart jumped. It was three in the morning, and we were the only ones on the road. This had to be it! I was sure the cops had followed us all the way to Aspen and back, ever since they’d turned me loose after the hearing. We sat petrified, hunkered down in the car, as the cop approached the driver’s side, the typical picture of a state trooper: helmet, wraparound shades (yes, shades) glinting in the moonlight, revolver in his holster, the whole bit.

“Some problem, officer?” Brandon said.

“Did you know you have a taillight out on the left side? Better have that looked at when you get back to Denver.”

“Yes, officer, why thanks, officer, no, I didn’t know,” Brandon said, “I’ll take care of it right away.”

He bid us a good night, and without even a warning ticket we drove on. I had practically fainted and was literally shaking. I was grateful that Brandon did not affect a hippie style. No long hair or wild clothes, he looked quite respectable, like a clean-cut preppie college student. I don’t know if that made a difference, but whether it was that or sheer dumb luck, we had ducked a potentially disastrous outcome.

Brandon let me off in Boulder at about six in the morning. I was completely exhausted. I went to our new apartment and woke Lisa. She already knew from Tom what had happened but was still frantic for the details. I related the whole sorry tale, from the bust in Glenwood to our mad run to Aspen and back. But I was not done. I still had to return to Snowmass with Tom so I could show him where the stuff was stashed.

For Lisa, who had wanted no part of these dealings from the start, this was the last straw. She decided to leave Boulder and return that same day to Berkeley. I agreed, though I knew it meant the end of our relationship. Indeed, I would not see her again for years.

After getting in touch with Tom, he and I decided to catch a plane back to Aspen. Our friends were still in jail waiting to be released on bail. To get the process rolling presumably meant retrieving and selling some of the hash. As we took off from Stapleton Airport sitting in the back of a chartered six-seater, Tom pulled out a tiny cellophane bag with a few crumbs of hash in it and waved it before me. I was appalled at his recklessness, but he just laughed.

Flying to Aspen took about an hour. We rented a car and headed for the lake above Snowmass where I’d buried the stash some hours earlier. We walked in on foot; there was no sign of any disturbance or ambush. I pointed out the location to Tom, and we got back to the car and drove to Glenwood. The idea was that he’d return for the package later and take it to Denver, and I assume that’s what he did.

I found my car in the parking lot, keys still in it, outside the house where we’d been caught. My parents had gotten the letter I’d sent from jail at about the same time they were reading an article in the Daily Sentinel about the bust. Needless to say, the conflicting accounts had created some confusion and distress. They had heard that we’d been taken to the courthouse in Denver, but not that I’d been released. Based on that, Mom and Dad had immediately driven to Denver to bail me out. By then I had already made my clandestine trip to Aspen and back, returned to Aspen with Tom on the plane, and found my way to the scene of the bust a few days earlier to get my car.

When we finally did connect, my mother was sick with worry and my father was both worried and furious. I couldn’t blame him. I told them I’d be driving back to Paonia that evening, which I did. I was completely thrashed and almost fell asleep at the wheel several times, but finally I made it to the empty house. My parents, meanwhile, were driving back from Denver.

When they arrived the next morning I’d had at least a few hours sleep. The scene was tense. My father was out of his mind with anger, and appropriately so. There was nothing I could say in my defense, so I said as little as possible. I explained what had gone down, including Terence’s connection to the mess. He was off in India somewhere; a Bombay address at least a couple of months old was the last one we had, and we weren’t sure he knew yet what had happened. It speaks amazingly well of our father that, despite his fury at the two of us, his hatred of drugs and anything to do with them, he still saw it as his duty to protect his son.

In doing so, he probably committed a felony himself. He sent two cables to Terence’s last known address: “Interpol is looking for you, get out now!” A pretty unambiguous message. Meanwhile, the others had been released and had sent Terence a more cryptic message: “Colorado Fuel and Iron gone down.” That was their code name for the operation, Colorado Fuel and Iron, named after the company founded by John C. Osgood, the builder of the Redstone Inn. In either case, the message was clear. Something had gone seriously wrong, and Terence needed to hightail it out of wherever he was.

He got both messages and immediately dropped off the radar. No one heard from him for several weeks; we had no idea where he was. It wasn’t until the end of September that a postcard finally arrived, dated three weeks previously, postmarked Benares, and signed by one HCE, a reference to a character in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake . This would become his nom de guerre over the next year, as he moved clandestinely from country to country, hiding out. Postcards from HCE showed up irregularly, tracking his travels, in southern India, then Thailand, then ever more remote locations in the Indonesian archipelago as he made his way to the outer islands in search of butterflies and anonymity, tracking back to Taipei, several months in Tokyo teaching English, finally ending up in Vancouver in the fall of 1970 where I was able to visit him. It was a life on the run. It might have even seemed romantic at the time, but the uncertainty of ever being able to return was worrisome.

The legal consequences from this episode have long since been settled, and Terence’s involvement in it has been public knowledge for decades. He discussed the bust in True Hallucinations and elsewhere; it is even mentioned in his obituary in The New York Times . I haven’t told the story here to depict Terence and myself as romantic outlaw renegades but rather as a cautionary tale. Like many eighteen-year-olds, I made some foolish choices, especially under pressure. Whatever my beliefs about one’s right to experience certain altered states, the bust was a searing reminder that the law is the law. And to break the law is to invite anguish not only into one’s own life but into other lives as well.

Following the bust and its aftermath, the waning days of August were fraught with tension. I had no cred left with my father, and for good reason. Both Terence and I had disappointed our parents. Our father was either a fool or far more enlightened than I could understand at the time, and I now believe it was the latter. He didn’t approve of us or of what we’d done. But according to his moral compass, you stood by your kids no matter what they did. He never disowned us, and he never cut off financial support for me, though it was perhaps really our mother he was trying to protect. We had hurt her deeply. She had been in delicate health for years, and now with all these new stresses I think Dad was concerned that she was at risk for some serious illness. As it turned out, we had no idea how serious.

As the time neared for me to start classes, my father determined that my mother would take me to Boulder and help me get settled. To provide moral support, Mom’s good friend Marge, the English teacher from whose class I’d been summoned by the sheriff two years before, accompanied us. Marge was wise in ways I hadn’t realized. She was there for Mom, but she also realized I wasn’t a bad kid, just a little misguided, or perhaps a lot misguided; but nonetheless her presence helped me as well.

I had to find a place to live. Mom wanted me to live in the dorm at least for the first semester, but I was adamantly opposed. I didn’t want to face the restrictions that would entail, especially the restrictions on being able to smoke dope whenever I wanted. Plus, I was an introvert and repelled by the kind of social interaction that dorm life entailed. So I pushed back. I found another place, a tiny apartment in a three-story hippie house filled with a motley assortment of freaks, and with a landlord who didn’t much care what you did as long as you paid the rent on time. It was just what I was looking for! It was Mom’s worst nightmare, for the same reasons. But I insisted, and tried to convince her it would be OK, and actually Marge came to my defense. So it was that I found myself in Number 7, 1507 Pine.

Shortly after my mother returned to Paonia she fell and broke her ankle. Here was yet another challenge, as if the worry we’d caused her wasn’t enough. She had always been fragile, and probably at her age, fifty-six, she may have been developing some osteoporosis. This injury further exacerbated the arthritis that she was suffering. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, the arthritis and the ankle injury were harbingers of a much more serious illness she’d face some months later.

I settled into my studies in the warm autumn of 1969, happy to have the bust behind me, happy to be in Boulder living on my own. I wasn’t sure what courses to take; like many freshmen I had no idea what I wanted to specialize in. I knew I wanted to pursue something related to psychedelics, but I was uncertain whether it would be neuroscience, chemistry, anthropology, or botany. I had a vague idea that I wanted to be an ethnobotanist, but there was nothing in the curriculum that matched that; so I started taking classes in basic botany—plant taxonomy, mostly—and anthropology.

One of my classes was an introductory ethnography course taught by Omer Stewart, an authority on the Native American Church, and later the author of Peyote Religion: A History (1987). As I’ve noted, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, had come out the previous year and had an enormous impact on me. Since then, much if not all of Castaneda’s work has been discredited as confabulation, but that first book may have had some basis in truth. At the time I had no reason to doubt it, nor did I want to doubt it. In fact, I credit it, along with Eliade’s work, in fostering my interest in psychedelic shamanism. It provided a context for the use of psychedelics that I couldn’t find anywhere else at the time, certainly not from Timothy Leary or the other mass-market gurus. The revelation for me was that psychedelics were nothing new; rather, they were part of a shamanic tradition stretching way back, possibly to the Paleolithic or even earlier. If one wanted to understand psychedelics and how to use them, consult the peoples who had been using them for thousands of years. This made sense to me, and still does.

Part of the reason that psychedelics were so disruptive to society (or were perceived to be) when they burst on the scene in the sixties was that we had no context for them. They were not part of the Western religious tradition (although they may once have been, that connection has long since been suppressed) and their role in witchcraft and alchemy was esoteric knowledge—that is, largely forbidden knowledge. So psychedelics were fascinating to many of my generation, but there was no map, no guidance on their usage that could be adapted to the contemporary societal context; this partly explains why many people got into unfortunate situations with them. It was not widely understood at the time that proper “set” and “setting” were essential to using psychedelics safely, and for purposes of spiritual discovery and the exploration of consciousness. In fact, this is largely what shamanism is: a set of procedures, practices, and beliefs that provide a structure or a context for understanding and controlling the experiences, within limits. Without that context, one is left to random experimentation without any framework for interpreting the results. In that respect, I think Castaneda’s first book did a service for a generation of psychedelic novices. It made us aware that at least there was a context and a tradition, even if the one he described, through the character of don Juan Matus, a supposed Yaqui sorcerer, was largely the product of the author’s fertile imagination.

While taking Stewart’s class I visited his office to discuss The Teachings , which he had read carefully. He assured me the book almost had to be a fabrication; there was nothing in Yaqui traditions that even hinted at the practices it described. Either Don Juan was an idiosyncratic figure whose belief system bore no relationship to Yaqui culture, or he and his practices had been constructed out of whole cloth. Stewart’s critique was a wakeup call. I had learned early on a valuable lesson about accepting, without corroborating evidence, the assertions of self-styled gurus, shamans, and other supposedly wise teachers. It’s good to keep an open mind; there is much we don’t know, as one should never forget. But it’s just as crucial never to sacrifice the capacity for critical thinking and skepticism. Stewart’s lesson is one that many who fall prey to cults of one sort or another (and I include most of the major world religions here) would do well to heed.

The value of skepticism was reinforced in a second course I took that fall, on the comparative anthropology of religion. To discover the variety of what passed for religious or spiritual practice was eye-opening. One person’s abomination or blasphemy could easily be another’s sincere belief. I remember reading When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, first published in 1956. It’s the study of a Midwestern UFO cult that claimed to be channeling messages from aliens. Newly recruited members were told they’d be picked up on a specific date and saved from the imminent end of the world. The members quit their jobs, gave up their possessions, and gathered together, waiting to be saved. When the appointed date came and went, they grew even more convinced that the revelations were valid. It wasn’t until two later predictions also failed that members became disillusioned and the cult fell apart. The case is an interesting commentary on the folly of human belief systems, including most millenarian cults. The dynamic of the true believer is much too prevalent in today’s mass consciousness, and in political and religious discourse: My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts!

All this amounts to a cautionary tale for those anticipating the end of history as predicted by Terence and others for the winter solstice in 2012—or on any other such date. No prophecy of major global catastrophe or the end of history has ever come true. Terrible events can and do happen in both human and natural history, but prophets cannot predict them. And yet it is virtually certain that some believers will find a way to rationalize the fact of a prophecy proven wrong. From a sociological perspective, it will be interesting to observe what happens in the days before and after the latest in a long line of such predictions. I don’t expect the world to end, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were major social disruptions resulting from mass hysteria.

Much of my education during that first semester in Boulder did not occur in the classroom. It happened when my friend and mentor John Parker came out from California and spent several weeks with me in my apartment. John and I had been carrying on regular correspondence for a couple of years. His eclectic interests—in drugs, magic, shamanism, biology, chemistry, alchemy—likewise fascinated me. Our hashish-fueled conversations lasting well into the wee hours were a supreme pleasure. During those weeks together, we explored many of the ideas that Terence and I would later call upon to force open the portal to hyperspace at La Chorrera.