One of the best things about living at the Rusty Bucket Ranch was that there were so many places to go hiking. Marty wanted his leg to get better quickly, so he went on a lot of hikes. That was his physical and mental therapy all rolled into one. When he said he was going “outside,” he really meant it! The rickety old front door of their cabin was like a magic portal to an enchanted forest that spread down the creek bed for miles, and up the steep slopes of branching emerald canyons filled with ferns. In ten minutes he could be in places where few human feet had ever trod. Marty sometimes enjoyed being the first person a tree had ever experienced. This made him eager to go backpacking in the Trinity Alps, where he remembered wide open spaces and incredible views, which were missing from the dense forest where he lived. He recruited Mike and Boobers one day to go on a hike up to Kent Lake. Annie was supposed to come, then called and said she was grounded for lying to her parents, but Mike didn’t believe her. They were having some kind of spat again – and after they were so cute together in Yosemite! Mike was in a surly mood that day, and found an old tire he that he dragged all the way up to the top of the dam. From there, he sent it on a terrific spin down the spillway, hurtling madly in a cross between ski jumping and Evel Knievel as it gained speed, shot up the sloped side of the concrete chute, and smashed through bushes into the pond below. Then he celebrated wildly, as if he’d set a new world record.
When the three friends finally made plans to head for Big Bear Lake before the busy July 4th weekend, Annie wasn’t part of them. Marty sensed that Mike needed some time away, and he knew just the spot. When he asked Julie to check his truck for a long distance drive, she announced that she was going with them (and her dogs, too… of course). Their mission now involved two spacecraft: Apollo and Barracuda. Julie loved the band Heart, and played their music on her stereo real loud, so her vessel already had a perfect name. She had been working on its massive 454 engine for some time, and was ready to take it on a long trip, but brought some tools just in case. The trip up Highway 5 was hot, boring, monotonous, and uneventful – all at the same time. They partied a little too much at a campground the night before their big expedition, and were attacked by giant moths that crashed into the Coleman lantern like kamikazes. Where was Godzilla when you needed him? The dark trees understood.
The porters paid dearly for their cavalier attitude the next day on a hot, brutal hike up the trail, which gained more than half a mile of altitude in just over three miles of distance. Binoculars, sneakers, tarps, and other gear that had seemed clever and essential on the list back home were unceremoniously dumped in favor of the beer (of course they brought beer… haven’t you been paying attention?). Julie was expending great amounts of energy trying to control her dogs, Che and Shirelle, who darted this way and that; excited to explore such a large expanse of potential varmints. At one point, she took out their food bags, and lashed them to their backs like miniature pack mules. “You guys can carry your own food if you’re gonna be like that,” she said in a scolding tone as Shirelle whined impatiently and Che looked guilty. The “doggie pack” experiment lasted about twenty yards, until they had to stop while Julie picked all the kibble out of the gravel. They stumbled up – always up – the trail, constantly adjusting their packs and shifting their steps, as the hot sun glared at them accusingly through the dry branches. It took a long time for their band of wasted gypsies to ascend such a short trail! The effects of partying the night before demanded a massive toll. Fortunately, their sheer will to find another party spot for the night overcame the torpor of their abused bodies, and they reluctantly wedged their packs into the sweaty depressions in their t-shirts for the final push to Big Bear Lake.
Even though they had smoked a peace pipe during their break, to Marty the mountains seemed more hostile the closer they approached. The day became oppressively hot, and their sour shirts were soaked and stuck to their skin like mustard poultices. Tender parts below the waist were chafing and prickling unbearably in the heat, and the backpacks dug deep grooves into tired muscles. Marty’s legs hurt from walking, his diaphragm was sore from gasping for breath, and even his brain was overexerted. He and his companions were most definitely not happy campers! Smoking pot and drinking beer while carrying nearly half their body weight up the side of a mountain in broiling temperatures was a grand joke of the gods… and they were the ridiculous butts!
They eventually ran out of uphill trails to climb, and found themselves at the edge of the marvelous pools, where sheets of water slid softly over granite shelves. The dogs jumped in the deepest part immediately, but the humans were oblivious to its charms, and staggered the last few hundred yards to Bear Lake. The water sparkled invitingly, the wind softly explored their campsite, but the last thing anyone remembered was collapsing in a heap.
The next day, the conquistadors compounded the abuse of their bodies by ravaging their brains with hallucinogenics. Their muscles were sore, but those fresh young minds wanted to have a good time! Party! Party! Party! Sadly, they were too young and inexperienced to realize that the “good time” was inherent in their magnificent surroundings. But the three teenage boys decided to drop acid early, in order to maximize the duration of its effects. The weather was awesome, and they felt confident that the drugs would be an exciting enhancement to an already enjoyable day, in an amusement park of beautiful wilderness. Perhaps it was the altitude, or the debilitating effects of the hike the day before, or the strength of the chemicals, but they were totally unprepared for what was to come.
They passed the pipe around with Julie again, about an hour after swallowing the little paper tabs, because it seemed as if they weren’t having much of an effect. The lake became still and silent, as the three guinea pigs waited for something to happen. At some point they didn’t realize, there developed a peculiar psychedelic caste to everything. Burbling giggles alighted on the branches of their minds, and unbridled thoughts percolated in the depths of their brain stems. The combination of pot and LSD was exhilarating at first; then it became burdensome to speech and movement, and swiftly progressed to complete incoherence of their central nervous systems. They all slipped a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder, and understood only what the rocks were saying; not what lower life forms like humans were trying to communicate.
“Glorg,” blurted the primordial ooze that used to be Mike, seemingly profound in its absurdity.
“Glink! Bloog, freem killigum,” Marty exclaimed in agreement, as something that sounded like Boobers vibrated in his peripheral hearing like a broken bassoon. His afro was the only recognizable feature on the stump that used to be his head, but Marty couldn’t make out what the stump was trying to say. He laughed and ducked from the fireworks in his eyes, not realizing he had fallen sideways into the dust like a sack of potatoes. He remembered very little after that.
Actually, they were lucky the mountain gods let them live. They weren’t in their familiar party spots at home – they were in a designated wilderness area miles from help of any kind. If anything happened, they’d be in serious trouble. As the day wore on, and the giddy effects of the drugs started to wear off, random paranoia began to pry at the veneer of their chemically-induced happiness, peeling it off like their flaking, sunburned skin. The wind, which had been soft and gentle all day, began to blow with a peculiar low, ominous howling. The sparkling surface of the lake faded to a dull, flat gray. High clouds enveloped the sky, here and there turning wispy like mountain ghosts floating in the atmosphere. The rugged purple rocks all around them abruptly stopped their conversation, and seemed to be staring at the intruders as if they had noticed the unwanted party crashers for the first time.
Julie had left camp to sunbathe with her dogs down by the shallow pools, and the three chemistry subjects lounged in desultory fashion around the campsite, poking at the dirt with sticks and wishing they had some music. Suddenly, Mike got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Large drops of blood plopped in the dust, and trickled on his t-shirt. Marty and Boobers freaked out, and mostly bumped into each other. Julie suddenly appeared with another hiker like guardian angels, and helped them stop the bleeding. By sheer chance, the other camper was an EMT.
The wasted adventurers rested after the ordeal, somehow surviving the stress of psychotropic natural selection. As soon as Marty could put two coherent thoughts together, he vowed never again to ingest something that would alter his sense of reality that much… even if he was “safe” at home. He rather liked the world the way it was – especially up at Big Bear Lake! Hours had passed, of which the three of them barely had any recollection. Except the blood. They all remembered the blood. Marty felt guilty, as if they were defiling a church somehow. That must be why the mountains were frowning down on them disapprovingly. The trio of would-be day trippers feebly tried to celebrate around the campfire that night, but soon crawled into their tents and slept like dead things.
There was a profound difference between LSD and psilocybin highs, Marty mused the next day, during the return hike to the metal contraptions that would take them home. While mushrooms enhanced the natural world, acid distorted it. It was as if mushrooms were a stairway to an omnipotent benevolence that evolved the mind, and acid was a trap door to the depths of lower vibrations, where the limbic system hijacked the coherence of reason.
The drive home seemed as if it would last forever. Mike and Boobers slumped in the cab of the Apollo with their eyes nearly closed, and their brains dried up like last year’s walnuts in the shell. The ravaged crew rattled and vibrated all the way down Highway 5, in a straight shot to the Bay Area, through the waves of heat that rose from the blacktop like plasma. Marty’s vise-grip hands clenched the wobbling steering wheel because he wanted to get home safely. The vibrating got more intense, like the howl of a siren, when suddenly the Apollo blew out its rear end! There was a screaming noise underneath, and then – bam! The back of the truck jumped off the ground and lost all power. The snarling gears gnashed their teeth in hot agony, as Marty concentrated on coasting to a safe stop off the freeway. Mike and Boobers were wide awake now, gripping the dashboard in terror. Julie was following in the Barracuda, and in Marty’s rear view mirror he could see her mouth shaped as a big O behind her windshield.
They got out and found they were in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Podunk and Hicksville, with slim chance of finding a mechanic on Sunday. The few tools Julie brought weren’t going to handle that job. “I saw something come off back there,” she cautioned, peering under the frame as best she could with a flashlight. “This truck ain’t going nowhere except up on a rack.” Flat, featureless pastures stretched out for miles in every direction, and faded into the hazy horizon. Faceless semi-truck trailers roared by impassively, as if they had no human drivers inside. Julie had noticed a repair shop a few miles back, and headed that way in the Barracuda. Miraculously, she was able to find a tow truck (her good fortune may have had something to do with the effect of her halter top on the handsome driver). The crew abandoned the noble Apollo to the mercy of Elroy’s Auto Repair, and crowded most of their gear into the one remaining vessel, with dogs laid across their laps all the way home.
It turned out Elroy knew his stuff, and phoned the next day. He reported there was no fluid in the differential of the Apollo. Marty hadn’t heeded Dale’s advice, and merely thought it was oil leaking from the back end, when he saw the stain in his parking spot at the pet store. “The engine was burning oil, so I kept topping her off,” he explained to Julie with a straight face, and naively asked, “Doesn’t oil flow through the truck’s body like blood?” Actually, he didn’t want to learn about differentials at all, because it sounded too much like math.
By the time they got home, the crew was all pretty wiped out, and the mystical malevolence of the lake had faded from their memories. Safely back at the Rusty Bucket Ranch, Marty renewed his vow never to take LSD again. But he was already thinking about returning to that beautiful wilderness, on a different kind of “recreational” trip. They bought a case of beer and hung out with Otter, regaling him with tales of their conquest (leaving out the scary parts). As the campfire flickered, and the friendly smoke drifted lazily up through redwood branches, the old Inuit fixed one precarious eye on Marty, and called him “Chipmunk.” Or maybe it was “Chunk.” (One syllable was about all he could manage at the time.) He finally had a nickname!
Marty was worried about Otter, and when he was relatively sober, he asked if he’d seen a doctor for his persistent cough. “Doctors make you worse,” he said emphatically, and took another swig of the beer he was having for breakfast. He didn’t complain, but had the face and posture of a man with a very sore stomach. His skin was slightly yellow, and he sweated a lot. He was the toughest man Marty knew, but everyone has their limit. Marty continued staring at him, waiting to get past his shields. “Old Injuns just go off to die somewhere anyhow,” Otter finally shrugged. When Marty exclaimed his dismay, and gave him Dr. Z.’s number, Otter promised he would call, “To make you happy.” Marty didn’t know his age, but he wasn’t that old! He realized that he loved Otter very much, and wanted him to be strong, wise, and happy forever.