USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 4

Ian and I had returned on a Friday from four uneventful days in the backcountry. I defined uneventful minimally: We hadn’t been impaled by any trees or limbs during a day of high winds, Glorified G still seemed to like me enough not to bite or spit on me when I approached his enclosure, the cabin hadn’t caught fire, I hadn’t murdered Ian out of frustration or vice versa, and Ian hadn’t come onto me again.

Once we returned to the government area, I opted out of what promised to be a debaucherous start to the weekend: a trip north to the casino in Sequim with my coworkers. If their aim was to binge drink and gamble, they could do worse. I gave them credit for supporting an enterprise of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. They didn’t totally twist my arm when I objected to joining, but I did have to say that indulgent consumerism in public wasn’t my thing before they were ultimately persuaded to go without me. That ended up being one of the few quiet weekends in the Rain Shadow that summer. Although I would’ve been happy for desolate weekends to myself in the house, what happened in the subsequent weeks probably ended up being better. Ultimately, my coworkers would end up favoring the bizarre, accelerated bonds formed in the isolated confines of our self-proclaimed Neighborhood of Hood Canal over venturing into the outside world. But in that transition from my first to second weeks on the Peninsula, I was still bent on approaching the summer as a monkish retreat to detox from people and organized society’s bullshit. Little did I know, the forced intimacy of the Rain Shadow would have a way of shifting that agenda by forcing me into the last thing I expected to be remedial: living in community with ragtags.

I ended up reaching back out to Tully on that Friday to schedule a meeting late during the upcoming week, the end of which fell on summer solstice. I still wasn’t sure whether my times with her were considered sessions or appointments, but I didn’t really give a damn either way. Her counsel about my preoccupation with the question of why I existed had left an impression—enough of an impression that I had thought about it again seriously when the circumstances of my mother’s death had come up with Ian. I was inclined to believe that there was more to learn from Tully, and I didn’t really care if it was based in hard science. I had spent enough years of my life trying to understand the proven and material aspects of my existence, and for what? To support my predisposition for despair? That seemed to be the only advantage to the brand of seeking I had limited myself to, and it was starting to seem a little fucked up that I had always thought grim knowledge advantageous. I was starting to suspect that I had taken my practical sensibility too far by effectively confusing indulgent nihilism with being realistic.

Though Tully wasn’t the sole force working on me that summer, her ideas about moving from why to how thinking would prove consequential. For reasons still mysterious to me, I think I already sensed that moving into the latter part of June. I knew certain places had a reputation for stirring elevated states of consciousness, and coastal forestland had as much lore chronicling experiences to that effect as any setting. However, I did wonder if there was a lurking variable when applied to the Peninsula that had less to do with alchemical enchantment than human history coinciding with wide availability of psychedelic mushrooms. It was a datapoint that was hard to overlook with someone like Pete in my life.

He and my dad had been vocal proponents of tripping as a way of gaining perspective since before Elliot and I were born. And in his years living with Ayla on the Peninsula, Pete’s specific interest in psilocybin had, in its own way, mushroomed into something of an idle-time obsession with mycology. I was surprised to run into Pete in the government area not long after contacting Tully. But I was not at all surprised that he invited me to Moclips to help him identify mushrooms he planned to harvest over the weekend. Ordinarily the type to nest in my early days in a new place, I surprised both myself and Pete by agreeing to head out his way the following day.

The trip to Moclips and back proved a taxing one for Gertie. Though her last stand would come to pass the following week and I’d ultimately take Elliott’s advice to use the life insurance money to replace her, she’d started showing signs of deterioration around Aberdeen, with about another hour to Moclips after two already on the road. It seemed ironic that the onset of Gertie’s senility occurred near Aberdeen of all places.

I had lived in Upstate New York for the two years before Dad’s death while I was in grad school and it had struck me that people in Washington seemed to talk about Aberdeen the way people in New York talked about Utica. The Erie Canal town had earned the nickname “the city that god forgot” when jobs and industry started leaving in droves at the tail-end of the previous century. I had no idea whether Aberdeen had any such nickname or history, but I knew it was the hometown of Kurt Cobain—somebody I found myself reflecting on more since Dad’s death. It had less to do with their correlating causes of death, though, and more to do with the runup.

I had once heard a biographer describe what was likely the last time anybody had seen the guy alive. In the reconstruction of events, Cobain and Courtney Love’s live-in nanny and his own partner went to the Lake Washington Boulevard house in Seattle after Cobain had already been MIA for several days. They expected to find a body inside the house, but found nothing. While driving away, the nanny’s partner had seen light and a shadow in the greenhouse above a garage on the property. She said nothing and Cobain’s body was found in the greenhouse a few days later.

Although that exact impression and sequencing of what happened was often contested, it didn’t detract from what had struck me about the account. I knew it was difficult to reach out once you’d resolved to disappear, particularly when there was material evidence that somebody else was nearby. It was easier to believe that you’d been willfully left for dead.

But Dad’s death had made me think more about being on the other side of the experience. I had a hard time chalking it up to coincidence that I had thought about Dad in the hours before I’d gotten the call from Pete. Part of me thought it was a devastating oversight that I hadn’t managed to reach out—that somehow my intervention might’ve saved him. It was tempting to use that against myself, to apply the thinking that had haunted me in Challis that I’d had ample warning but hadn’t listened. But I also wondered if there was something more elevated in having, in a sense, witnessed the last moments of Aldo Callahan’s existence, if only by thinking of him from 330 miles away (or 276 as the shit flies) in what were his last hours.

I knew I’d probably recognize the final stretch of gravel road that would take me to Pete and Ayla’s door. The trick was figuring out which left turn off the main highway would take me there. I knew Google Maps couldn’t help me after a certain point, and even if it could, trees and fog always made this stuff more complicated. It struck me how far removed most people were from this way of being. To me, it was less of a divide between urban and rural than suburban and truly remote. In my time on the east coast, I noticed most of my peers couldn’t get their heads around the idea that there were still places in the U.S. that were: a.) out of cell service or internet coverage, and b.) not zoned with physical addresses that you could look up. Some people were convinced I was homeless whenever they saw that my permanent address prior to undergrad had been a post office box in Idaho.

I eventually took a chance on one road and only knew I had chosen correctly when I spotted a familiar assemblage of dogs who immediately bolted for my car. They weren’t Pete and Ayla’s and I had never met whoever claimed them, but there had always been three, with new members of the lineup emerging as others presumably died or moved on. At some point in my teens, Pete and Ayla had a cattle guard installed before the last 20 yards or so of their drive, at which point the dogs routinely bailed.

I expected the air more exposed to the Pacific proper to be crisper than that along Hood Canal or the inlets. But when I parked Gertie and got out to let myself into Pete’s house, it felt warmer than I expected—even balmy. Pete was at a table when I walked in, two large serving bowls full of little brown mushrooms in front of him.

He said hey as he put a handful of mushrooms into a compost container. I walked to the table, put my keys and water bottle down and asked if it was unusually warm for the mild climes of the Peninsula. Pete said that June was on-pace to be the hottest on record.

When he asked how the drive was, I said it was fine but mentioned that Elliott had been right and that Gertie was indeed on her way out. On that cheery note, he asked if I was ready to start identifying mushrooms with him. I said I was and asked what we were spotting for even though I was pretty sure I already knew.

“They’re all little browns,” Pete said. “So, we will have to see how they bruise to figure out if they’re anything more.” I knew the implication was that little browns, or LBMs, were generally one of two kinds of mushrooms, neither of which were the kind you fried up on a weeknight with dinner.

“So these puppies can either kill us or get us high?” I asked.

“More or less,” Pete said.

I wouldn’t say that Pete and I had had numerous discussions about fungi, but enough that I knew we were on the same page that the range of things that particular kingdom of eukaryotic organisms could do seemed like an apt metaphor for life. Different manifestations of both were equally likely to kill, intoxicate, heal, or feed. The idea had inspired me enough to read a bit about psychedelics in human history. And even though it had been a while since I’d spent some time with the subject, it wasn’t lost on me that Dad’s experience in the academy with his own cryptozoological interests mirrored that of neuroscientists and psychologists who were researching the clinical use of psychedelics before they got subsumed by the counterculture movement in the 60s. Neither Pete nor I called attention to that connection even though I suspect it had been on both of our minds.

I sat down across from Pete and reached for the blunted knife he’d left out for me. I asked him what to look for and he said to discard any into compost that didn’t show blue bruising in the stem. Once I got started, he commented that he was surprised I hadn’t gotten more into mushrooms on my own.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“You’ve never been afraid of the dark. Elliott’s the same way.”

“Do you think Dad had a lot to do with that?”

“Probably,” Pete said. “Do you?”

“Yeah. At least, a little,” I said, cutting a stem and scrutinizing an ambiguous bruising color. In a cycle that held up with every two or three mushrooms, I’d give up trying to decide for myself if grayish or purplish coloration counted as blue and hold them up for Pete to examine. I’d throw another into compost when he’d shake his head and we carried on like that for about an hour, talking the entire time.

I explained why I credited Dad for instilling in Elliott and me an early sense that life and death were two sides of the same coin. Dad got particularly excited at the opportunity to inspect fresh carcasses. He wasn’t above pulling the car over to lead my brother and me in an anatomy lesson over some roadkill he’d spotted, but he had an extra special place in his heart reserved for organisms that had died a natural death.

Sometimes, before the local bear population holed up for the winter, we’d greet the dawn with a fresh gut pile they hadn’t finished off outside our front door. I would spot it often at inconvenient times when I was trying to get on the road, then come back in if Dad was home to tell him. He’d charge out the door like a bat out of hell, often neglecting to put on a coat despite sub-freezing morning temps characteristic of late October in Challis. Predictably, he’d start waxing about the singular beauty of what we were seeing. I’d stand by and humor him because I knew that was about as sentimental as he got. I didn’t see it the way he did at the time, and never thought to tell him when I finally got it. There was a profound intimacy in seeing something so fresh in death as to be steaming, still acting upon its surroundings like it had will, volition, and gravity. Death and life were intertwined, both worthy of our attention. It’s a principle Elliott and I had seen modeled from earliest memory.

The entire LBM haul had yielded just five that were psychedelics. Pete promptly offered them to me, and I promptly declined. This had been a common occurrence in my adult life. I would’ve been surprised if he hadn’t tried to pass the psychedelics off to me even though I was too paranoid about the bad-trip potential of my shoddy brain to ever accept. I knew different psychedelic chemicals had done wonders for different patient populations in clinical trials. Even so, Pete respected that I was leery of some of the side effects of trips gone wrong, two of which I thought I might be susceptible to. Though rare and not exclusive to psilocybin, it wasn’t unheard of for psychedelic molecules to induce psychosis and recollection of traumatic birth experiences. If I was due for a psychotic break, I figured that was something I could at least take reasonable precautions to delay. Touching on that gave way to an entire tangent in our conversation about the known effects of psychedelics, which made me wonder something for the first time.

“Do you think Elliott would benefit from treatment with psychedelics?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Pete said, rising with the compost container of the rejects. I followed him outside and we continued talking while he emptied the smaller can into the compost bin next to their garden. “Theoretically, your dad dying would be as likely to change his behavior, yours, and mine as any medically administered psychedelic therapy.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Life-altering experiences like death and birth have permanent neurological effects. Your brother might have been a little bit estranged in his adult life, but he and your dad liked each other. Even if he wasn’t lucid when he got the news, I’m sure he took it hard.” 

It was a good way to put it. Though estranged, Elliott and Dad had stayed fond of one another. “What do you think the odds of Elliott staying sober and in Challis are?”

“Why? Do you want to place a parlay on it?”

“Hell no,” I laughed. “Do you?”

“Not really. But honestly, I think there’s a good chance he at least stays clean.”

“Why’s that?”

Pete shrugged. “He doesn’t want to disappoint you. I know it’s unfathomable to you that people want to see what you do with your life, but some of us—me and your brother included—have a vested interest in it. We think you’re cool.”

In the past I wouldn’t have thought twice before saying that my brother and Pete were likely to be disappointed if they were holding out on that expectation. But I had finally started to sense the violence in that response. I often interpreted people’s hope for me as expectations that I was bound to disappoint. There was a kind of generosity in letting people hope for you, and not resenting them for it. Yet that went against everything in my nature, which was entirely dictated by self-hatred. I denied myself the potentiality I hoped for on behalf of other living organisms.

And so, it was a trip to Moclips to help Pete identify mushrooms of all things, that brought on what at the time felt to me like a radical proposition. Namely, everything I knew about life and death in the living world also applied to me. What good was it to take note of these things if it didn’t influence my own restoration?

I had an instructor in undergrad who once clapped back on a student’s comment that a film lacked plot by saying that he was personally determined to break our generation’s addiction to plots on the grounds that all plots led predictably deathward. About a year later, I learned that was a DeLillo reference. Not until that first visit to Moclips in 2019 did I start thinking I had an obligation to my fellow deathward travelers to stop acting like I was already dead. Or a stillborn.