part0050

Shortly before classes started, I got a letter, forwarded from Colorado, from my former girlfriend Deborah. After years of living with the surfer in Florida, she’d married him, given birth to a daughter, and moved back to California. Fool that I was, the letter gave me a flicker of hope. She clearly wasn’t very happy; maybe we could see each other again.

But I was too busy with the start of graduate school even to dwell on past love. I had been offered a research assistantship by the botany department funded through the U.S. Forest Service. This was a break; it meant I could focus on research and did not have to work as a teaching assistant. My grantors didn’t care what I worked on, they said, as long as it was Hawaiian and as long as it was a tree!

I knew nothing about Hawaiian flora at the time except that Acacia koa and some of its close relatives were important trees on the islands. I knew that some of the African and Australian Acacia species had high levels of DMT and other tryptamines, also beta-carbolines, in the bark and leaves. It was perfect! I thought I could study the tryptamine chemistry of the indigenous Hawaiian Acacia species; I’d compare the alkaloid profiles among them and see if those compounds could be used as chemotaxonomic markers. The possibility that they might also yield significant quantities of DMT would be another, if unstated, research goal.

The only problem, I soon discovered, was that the Hawaiian Acacia species are all notable for their lack of alkaloids. Like many indigenous island plants, they had long since lost the need to produce protective secondary products like alkaloids, having few predators. Instead, I focused on the non-protein amino acids and phenolics, which were abundant in the Hawaiian Acacias . I ended up comparing these profiles among different island populations, and also with some of the closely related Australian Acacia species (which did contain tryptamines).

It didn’t really matter. It was a good, challenging project that enabled me to learn hands-on plant chemistry and how to conduct myself in the lab. Eventually, I got a master’s degree out of that work, though none of my findings were published in a journal, much to the disappointment of my original supervisor, who had secured the forestry grant that funded my research assistantship.

As it happened, I ended up working more closely with another professor, Sanford Siegel, Ph.D., who eventually became my research supervisor, mentor, and friend. Siegel was one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. He was truly a Renaissance man and a brilliant and creative scientist. I had seen in the literature that arrived with my acceptance notice that among the faculty was one Sanford Siegel, whose research interests, among many things, was exobiology, the study of extraterrestrial life. What? How could anyone study that, since there was none available to study, mushrooms notwithstanding? I had to meet this guy. A couple of weeks before the semester began, I visited the department just to nose around and see who was there. That was the mid-seventies, the era of the “energy crisis,” and the corridor lights were dimmed. I approached an odd-looking, rumpled character in the gloom, and asked if he knew where I could find Dr. Siegel. He peered at me myopically through thick glasses and quietly replied that he was Dr. Siegel. He looked like a gnome, short and quite round.

He invited me into his office, and we chatted. It quickly became clear that we were on the same wavelength. For one thing, we both loved science fiction. For another, we shared this interest in extraterrestrial life, chemistry, and pharmacology. He had never had experience with psychedelics, but when I mentioned them he didn’t freak out like so many in his generation might have done. I queried him about his research, and it turned out that he was, among many things, an environmental toxicologist who studied “stress physiology” in plants (and animals) and extreme environments.

That was the exobiology angle; he had grants from NASA to study the effect of simulated extraterrestrial conditions on earth organisms, to determine the environmental parameters under which they could survive. He also studied mercury cycling in the environment, which explained what he was doing in Hawaii. The volcanoes spew forth megatons of mercury in numerous chemical forms, and many organisms—such as those that inhabit volcanic steam vents—have adapted to its presence and can tolerate extremely high levels of the metal. He was using satellite vegetation mapping technology to chart the distribution of mercury-tolerant species, and thereby locate volcanic vents, which are potential sources of geothermal energy.

In his NASA-funded work, he was extremely creative in his thinking about stress physiology and extreme environments. For example, he wondered what would happen if he tried to grow a cactus underwater. Turns out it grows fine as long as you bubble oxygen and carbon dioxide through the water. How well does a tarantula survive under a radiation flux similar to that at the Martian surface? It survives just fine, for months. Can you germinate onion seedlings in liquid ammonia as a substitute for water? Yes, ammonia can substitute for water in many biological processes. He had a genius for thinking up these incredibly creative, exciting, simple experiments. And yet they all had a rationale and a reason behind them. He was an out-of-the-box thinker.

Sandy was like a father to me, my scientific father. I loved the guy. And he loved me, too; really, he loved all of his students. Whenever an interesting professor came to town, Siegel would invite all the grad students up to his house in Manoa for pizza and beer, and we’d spend the evening having the most fascinating conversations. His wife, Bobbie, was also a scientist and a brilliant microbiologist; they had one of those science-based marriages like Pierre and Marie Curie. Those of us who were part of Sandy’s circle called ourselves “Siegel-Lab.” One of the marks of a truly great mind, in my opinion, is they tend to love teaching, and Sandy did.

Through Sandy I met a number of gifted students who became my close friends. Maggie, for instance, eventually became a well-funded, highly published professor. Her work had something to do with the regulation of the cell cycle, most of it so complicated I couldn’t understand it, and still can’t. She played in a bluegrass band that performed every weekend at a roadhouse in Ewa Beach, which for many of us became the focus of our grad-school social lives. Another new friend, Lani, was a winsome island girl with long blonde hair. She was an excellent taxonomist, knew all of the Hawaiian plants, and was clearly on track to carry on the legacy of Harold St. John, the former botany professor after whom the plant-sciences building had been named. Lani died of lymphoma in the late 1990s. I was saddened to lose a friend and respected colleague when she was still so young.

I discovered Lani’s remarkable knowledge of local plants, and my lack thereof, shortly after the semester started. I was thrilled to have a bench in Siegel’s lab, with the tools of basic phytochemistry at my fingertips: a thin-layer chromatography apparatus, extraction vessels, and rotary evaporators. What I lacked was expertise. One afternoon I took a break to walk down the hill to the bank a few blocks away. When I stepped out of the bank I was struck by a strong, almost overpowering smell of DMT! As I walked back up the hill the odor became stronger. Finally, I came to its source: a small tree in full flower on the main mall of the campus. Excitedly, I collected an armload of flowers, leaves, and twigs, indifferent to the fact that I was vandalizing one of the university’s ornamental trees. Back in the lab, I started grinding up the various plant parts, putting them into alcohol, bound for the shaker to extract. I was sure I had found the DMT mother lode until a moment later when Lani walked in, picked up a flowering branch and said something like, “Oh, I see you’ve found Sterculia foetida ! Really stinks, doesn’t it?”

Well, at least I had a name, but I still thought it might be DMT. Subsequent analysis proved otherwise. As it turns out, Sterculia foetida does have interesting chemistry, namely a group of unusual cyclopropene-containing lipids that have marked anti-inflammatory activity. These would be volatile and highly aromatic but not hallucinogenic.

A few weeks into the semester, I moved out of my tiny apartment near the campus to a bigger place in Nu’uanu Valley, where I stayed less than a year. One notable thing about that time was that it coincided with, if not the end, at least the beginning of the end of the two romantic attachments that had defined my early adulthood. The first was with Peggy, who was still living in Boulder. Having enrolled in a nursing program, she was going through her own set of personal and academic challenges. Her boyfriend from a few years back was long gone. She was lonely, and I was still in love with her, having come to accept both my feelings and their futility as a chronic condition. Without really expecting anything, I offered to send her a ticket to come visit. I was surprised—overjoyed, actually—when she accepted. Maybe after all that pain and heartache, love longed for and lost, we’d actually get together.

Peggy flew out, and we went to the Big Island for a few days. We stayed in the cabins at Mauna Kea State Park, on the flanks of the volcano that is Hawaii’s highest point, and took some mushrooms up there. Our trip together was excellent, our lovemaking less so; it just didn’t seem to have the passion that I had long imagined it would. It was not her fault, or mine, really. There was just no spark. She was beautiful and I lusted for her, but afterward I had to admit we just couldn’t be comfortable together. It was not the end of our friendship, but, more importantly, it wasn’t the beginning of the relationship I had desired for so long. Peggy went back to the mainland with a cloud of ambivalence and uncertainty hanging over us, and I slipped into a funk. I had interesting work and a circle of nice friends, but no one to love.

Terence and Kat had returned from their trip to Peru earlier that year and settled in California. I traveled there in November for their Thanksgiving weekend wedding. I had another agenda, one I could trace back partly to my disappointing visit with Peggy, but more to that forwarded letter I’d gotten months earlier from Deborah. Married and a mother though she was, I decided to visit her. It was an utterly stupid thing to do. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew what I wanted to happen; I wanted Deborah to leave the surfer and come live with me in Hawaii—an unrealistic hope, and a selfish one to boot. I knew from our correspondence that she wanted to see me, and so I went.

When I arrived, I found her husband to be remarkably cordial, considering the situation. Then again, I was supposedly visiting there as a friend. He was barely out of the driveway on his way to his night job before Deborah and I were locked in passionate embrace.

There was a big scene when he got home. Deborah told him she no longer wanted to be married and no longer loved him; she wanted to be with me. The poor guy had been blindsided. Our mushroom grower’s guide had just been published, and I’d brought a copy for Deborah. Her husband saw it and threatened to call the cops. I fled in horror and anger, leaving a wrecked if formerly unhappy marriage behind me. It was a shameful, rotten thing to do; there was no excuse for it. Deborah was foolish and selfish, but I was no less so. Many times I have regretted my role in their breakup.

Within a year, Deborah was divorced and struggling financially. We believed we were in love again and would be together soon. This long-distance relationship, rekindled by a betrayal and sustained by a delusion, went on for nearly a year. During that time, Deborah got involved with another man, a guy who, ironically, was growing mushrooms using our newly published method. Deborah wasn’t a person who had much self-reliance or who could be centered within herself. I should not have been surprised that she couldn’t remain “true” to me, whatever that meant in such circumstances. I tried to be sanguine about this new turn of affairs, still convinced that if we could be together for a while we’d rediscover the love we’d shared before.

Finally, she planned a visit in August 1977. She and her ex-husband shared custody of their young daughter; he amicably agreed to look after the child for the two weeks Deborah planned to spend with me. Reflecting on this, I’d say he was either a saint or a fool or possibly both; he certainly reacted to the situation with a lot of maturity. I was beside myself with hope and desire as I counted down the days until her arrival.

Early on the morning Deborah was supposed to arrive, she called to say that she wouldn’t be coming after all. She’d thought it over, she said, and a relationship between us just couldn’t happen. She needed to live where her daughter could be close to her father. I was devastated. We had words, and in my anger I said hurtful things. She responded in kind. It was the last conversation we ever had.

It took me a long time to get over that call. At first I became profoundly depressed. I seriously contemplated suicide. Life had no meaning for me. I dated many women, almost in rebellion for what had happened, but I was in no shape to start a meaningful relationship. Perhaps a trace of such anguish lingers, of course, but I do not blame Deborah for any of it now. She did the right thing. Her daughter needed a father as well as a mother, and though I was ready to accept her daughter as part of a family of our own, that would not have been the same.

I first came to realize that nearly two years later. I had taken a very high dose of mushrooms, by myself and for no particular reason. It was the best thing I could have done. I understood, with their help, that Deborah really had no choice but to do what she had done. She hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but I’d backed her into a corner and something had to give. Grasping that, finally, I could hardly blame her for what had happened. Not that she needed forgiveness, but I did forgive her, and I forgave myself. It was one of the most therapeutic psychedelic experiences I’ve ever had. After that, the clouds lifted on my gloomy mood and I became much more the cheerful person I was, and still am. When I think of Deborah now, it isn’t with anger, but with love.

The voice of the mushroom is not always so healing, let alone reliable, as an episode shortly after my breakup with Deborah revealed. In the worst of my grief, I thought it might be good to do exactly what I later did so usefully—spend some time alone and take some mushrooms. I put a few things in a pack and flew into Hilo on the Big Island and rented a car. I spent a night at the park at Laupahoehoe on the windward side, but it poured the entire time. I checked out the park at Mauna Kea, but it was rainy and chilly there, too, so I drove down the island’s leeward, drier side to Spencer Beach, a favorite tourist spot near Kawaihae.

That’s where I met Brad and Kris. Blackjack dealers at a big casino in Las Vegas, they were camping their way around the Big Island over an offseason break. They seemed friendly and normal enough, and after talking for a while they asked me if I knew where to get some acid. No, I said, but I did have some shrooms. Before long we were talking about finding a spot to take them. As it happened, I had the perfect place in mind. Earlier that year, Terence and Kat had briefly visited the island and acquired a parcel of land on the Kona side. There were as yet no structures on the property, which could only be reached by four-wheel drive up a dreadful road. No one lived nearby, so we wouldn’t be disturbed, and the couple’s rental vehicle could handle the track.

By dusk, we’d pitched our tents on the empty land and were ready for the mushroom soup that had been simmering on the fire. Kris called it “blue soup” because of the blue color imparted by oxidation of the psilocin in it. I’d put all the mushrooms I’d brought into the soup, and we split it three ways. It didn’t take long before the effects began to manifest, and they seemed incredibly strong. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and I figured that was the reason. We smoked a little weed to mellow things out. Kris began telling me about her misadventures in Las Vegas, the time she’d dropped acid on the strip and ended up naked and raving in the local police station. She did have a bit of the volatile raver in her, and I could see how she might have attracted attention had we been in public.

As darkness fell, the psychedelic effects deepened. We lit a lantern, and Brad and Kris invited me to come sit in their larger tent. They weren’t exactly into an orgiastic scene, but we got into some touchy-feely stuff—Kris inviting me to feel her up a little, the three of us snuggling, that kind of thing. The effects of the mushroom were coming in waves, as they often do. Periods of relative lucidity alternated with long internal reveries; we would surface and exchange a few words, fumble a toke on the last of our joint and then submerge again in our own personal hallucinatory ocean. Quite honestly, we were much too stoned to engage in any hanky-panky even if we’d wanted to. It was all we could do to hang on.

As the evening progressed, the visions faded a bit; our eyes were more often open, but we weren’t talking much. The faces of the odd couple looked grotesque in the yellow lantern light. I suddenly went cold with a sense of overwhelming dread. There was something sinister about them. I revisited their story: happy casino dealers, off to Hawaii to spend some of their easily earned dough. It didn’t ring true.

Suddenly, it hit me: They were serial murderers, sex killers, cannibals! I had fallen into their trap. All traces of their grisly feast would be buried up there in that empty place, and they’d be on a plane before the sun rose, leaving my gnawed bones to molder in a shallow grave.

My only hope, I decided, was not to fall asleep. I looked at them in the lamplight—nothing unusual, just a pair of young people like me. I wasn’t fooled. I muttered something about turning in and went back to my tent, where I grabbed my flashlight and machete. Pulling my sleeping bag partly over me, I sat upright in the darkness, ready to lash out if they made a move. The night was dark and moonless; it would be a long wait until dawn. I was completely down by then. No residual effects of the mushrooms remained except the scenario I’d concocted, which still seemed totally plausible. I’m not sure how long I stayed awake, but I surely didn’t make it to the light of day.

The next morning, everything was fine. We brewed up some coffee, packed up, and headed down the dirt road. They asked for, and I gave them, my address. They’d be passing through Honolulu in a few days and promised to look me up if they had time. They proved as good as their word. We spent a delightful evening together eating Chinese food and getting loaded on my best Hawaiian bud.

The incident says more about the ambivalent nature of the mushroom experience than it does about the Big Island odd couple. In deep mushroom states, one can be seized by outlandish conceits that are very hard to shake. The mushrooms can be tricksters at times, and they have a way of presenting delusions as self-evident truths. Many of the events and insights at La Chorrera are good examples. Like certain Irish bards I could mention, the mushrooms can, at times, be the best of bullshitters. They usually have an interesting story to tell, but it’s not necessarily the straight story. It’s important to keep one’s critical faculties tuned to the highest level of sensitivity in order to filter what you’ve learned, or think you’ve learned, from mushrooms.

By the start of the new semester in the fall of 1977, I’d accepted an offer from Siegel to move into a small apartment at his home in Manoa. This new living situation gave me a chance to befriend the two Siegel kids still living at home. His daughter, pale and soft-spoken, lived there with her boyfriend and their baby boy. The guy was a motorcyclist, a bit of a rebel, but an intelligent fellow, a physics, astronomy, and philosophy buff, and we hung out regularly and had many good discussions. Siegel’s son was interesting and quite eccentric in his own right. Enamored of all things British, he too was blonde and fair; but he had his father’s barrel chest. He put it to good use by becoming an accomplished bagpipe player, recognized all over Oahu for this talent. The Siegels were anything but a typical American family, and it could not have been otherwise, given such brilliant, driven parents and their inevitable influence on their children. Though I lived among them, I never pried into the family dynamic. I didn’t want to know the details, really. Siegel was a mentor and a role model to me, and I preferred not to have any of my bubbles burst.

Siegel’s grad students used to worry about his health. After all, we loved him as much as he loved us. He got no exercise and viewed his body as a vehicle to carry around his amazing brain, which may have been his undoing. On any given day, I’d arrive at the lab and ask Lani or Maggie or someone else, “Well, how bad is he today?” We all expected him to keel over at any moment. We judged the state of his ill health by his pallor. Some days he looked pretty good; others, he was gray and was clearly having problems.

Siegel eventually became the department chairman years after I’d left. He performed those duties well, but he really belonged in the lab, where his creativity could flower. In 1992, I was working as a research pharmacologist at Shaman Pharmaceuticals in San Carlos, California, when I got the news that Sandy had collapsed and died at his desk the day before. I think I cried more on hearing that than I did when my own father died. His death was a terrible loss, to science, and to those who loved him, and there were many. He was as fine a human being as I have ever met.

After living at Siegel’s place for just under a year, I moved to another apartment. I was tired of the cramped quarters, and I wanted a place of my own where I could bring someone after a date. The breakup with Deborah still haunted me, but I was determined to move on.

The next big phase in my life began unexpectedly at one of those beer-and-pizza gatherings that Siegel liked to throw for visiting colleagues. The guest of honor that night was Siegel’s friend Neil Towers, a professor of botany at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In the course of a lively conversation, Neil mentioned that he had a master’s student who was working on characterizing an enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway to psilocybin (which he pronounced “si-lo-cybeen”). His student, he said, had started the project but then had dropped it to work on something else. Towers mused that he thought it was an interesting problem; what a pity there was no one to pick it up where she’d left off.

I practically fell off my chair! Trying not to spew my beer, I set it down and stammered something like, “Well, Dr. Towers, that’s very interesting. I’ve had some interest in these mushroom metabolites as well, for some time.” Trying not to betray my excitement, I added, “I don’t suppose you’d have a place for a new graduate student to work on this problem?” In fact he did, as I quickly learned. We started corresponding, and he made sure my application to UBC was accepted, and with a four-year fellowship in the bargain. It was one of those shifts in the time stream that sets you off in an entirely new direction and leaves you wondering who’s writing the script.

A year after that pivotal event, I found myself in a taxi on a drive to the Honolulu airport. I’d finished my master’s in the spring of 1979 and was getting ready to start my doctoral work in Vancouver. I was leaving Hawaii behind, heading to a new country and a new phase of my life.

Though I’ve returned many times to Hawaii and have maintained my connections there, I’ve never again had the pleasure of calling it home. Most people are never confronted with a choice to leave a paradise like Hawaii, and doing so carries with it the potential for major regret. I could have gotten my Ph.D. there. Siegel would have been happy to have me, there was stipend money, and I might have ended up sticking around like those I knew who came to Hawaii to study and never left. Driven by ambition, the prospect of a career and new adventures, I gave up that bucolic life, which seemed the right thing to do at the time. Now, I’m not so sure. I do know that once you leave Hawaii it’s hard to get back.

Perhaps if current cosmological theories are true, we live in a world in which all timelines exist, every possibility is actualized; somewhere on one of those alternate tracks the doppelgänger of Dennis McKenna never left Hawaii. It’s fun to speculate about such things, and useless, destined as I am to live out the consequences of the decisions that have led me to this particular nexus of space and time.

While I was busy pursuing my graduate studies in Hawaii, Terence and Kat were making their own choices as they built their life together. Shortly after their marriage in 1976, they moved from Kensington to a more rural setting not far from Santa Rosa. Within a year they’d bought their property on the Big Island; as shareholders in a “hui,” a collective land-ownership association, they’d tied their futures to the paradise I’d later depart. Their first child, Finn, was born on April 7, 1978.

By then, Terence’s career was beginning to take shape. Our first book, The Invisible Landscape , hadn’t made the best-seller lists, but it got some attention in esoteric circles, and Terence had attracted notice as well. Shortly after his wedding, just before Christmas in 1976, I was listening to the radio when suddenly I heard my brother’s voice—unmistakable then, and now. He was going on about extraterrestrial intelligence and how it would be hard to recognize even if we did encounter it; it might present itself in some surprising form, he said, perhaps as a mushroom. It was a thirty-second snippet on an obscure station, but that was the first time I’d heard him air those peculiar notions to a wide audience. For me, that was the beginning of his public career. It was also the seed of a self-replicating meme that would propagate like a virus through the cultural body for decades, and indeed is still doing so.

Terence had left the family and Colorado at sixteen while I stayed behind. Nevertheless, our lives remained entwined, linked not so much by physical proximity as by our shared interests and obsessions. That bond culminated at La Chorrera, where events brought us about as close as two siblings could get. There at the peak of our folie à deux, the metamorphosis we attempted with light and sound and mushrooms was an operation on a single entity, or so we imagined. That’s how we understood it then, and that’s actually how it was.

Everything after that critical moment would be an expression of two lives drifting apart. Like two boats formerly lashed together, we rode the same current, at times closer and farther apart, but always within hailing distance. That ended twelve years ago, when Terence was swept into the vortex of his own personal singularity, the same one we’ll all face someday. How long before my journey ends, I cannot know. Whatever distant shore Terence has come to rest on, may it be a lovely tropical island and not a frozen reef. My feeble signals to him vanish in the night like the wan glow of a semaphore in a howling gale; so far there has not been, nor do I expect there will ever be, a responding light.