[pct-l] Libations to war story...

[jjolson at uwyo.edu (Jeff Olson)]

Perhaps my most social and outrageous experience in the high country took
place over Easter weekend, 1971, when I was a freshman in college.  I was
attending Raymond College at the University of the Pacific, a very small,
cluster college in Stockton, California, with 25 faculty and about 210
students.

UOP had the reputation of being "safe" during the very turbulent times of
the late sixties.  High SES families sent their children there with the
false hope that panty raids and beer drinking would constitute "pushing the
envelope."  Raymond had an experimental program - intensely academic
courses,  no grades, and a three year program. My friends came from all over
the world.

That easter weekend about 12 of us headed up from Happy Isles on Saturday.
I think it took about three or four hours to get to Little Yosemite Valley.
We smoked Michoacan at the trailhead.  We smoked pot and lucky strikes at
breaks.  We trudged our frame packs and cotton sleeping bags, our wool and
cotton clothes higher and higher, until finally,  we hit snow.  Not wanting
any adversity, already high on Michoacan, we found a spot to set up camp
about 100 yards from the trail, and an eighth mile from the snow.  It was
probably 2PM.  Memory fails...

One of the guys had brought back 1000 hits of synthetic mescaline from some
hard core dealer in Philadelphia during Christmas break, and he had brought
a bunch with him.  He  handed out caps  to everyone.  All of us, except
Mike, nickname, "Subhuman" ate at least one hit.

I remember the night that Chris packaged the mescaline into capsules in the
dorms.  If you walked into his dorm room that evening, and stayed for just a
couple minutes, you got high from breathing the air.  Needless to say, the
whole dorm floor, what we called "Third Floor Ritter" was in and out of his
room until the wee hours.  The college had made the mistake of asking for
pictures of us before placing us in our dorm rooms, and had placed all the
longhairs on one floor.  This was the era where you put a towel under the
crack of your dorm room door to keep the smell of pot from leaking into the
hall.

We camped right next to a big boulder, about 12 feet high.  While we set up
camp and got really high, Subhuman demonstrated his rock climbing skills,
choosing multiple routes up the boulder to the top, where he would proclaim
his 19 year old dominance and intense involvement in his own life.  Subhuman
didn't really like hallucinogens.  He liked to drink.  If you've seen
pictures of Neal Cassidy, you know what Subhuman looks like, and the kind of
intensity he can bring to a situation.

So Subhuman drank the bourbon he brought and got higher and higher, feeding
off our altered realities and establishing his own as the center of our
attention, for hour after hour.  He was fueled by bourbon while we were
fueled by hallucinogens.

Because it was Easter weekend, there were lots of hikers coming up into
Little Yosemite Valley and they all hit the snow only an eighth mile or so
from where we were staying.  Subhuman stood on top of the boulder auctioning
off different kinds of sleeping spaces.  There was rocky sleeping spots for
a buck.  Wet, meadowy spots went for two bucks.  Deep duff spots went for
five bucks.  He screamed in rhyme and he screamed in disbelief that the
passing, ignoring  hikers didn't listen to him.  He said that they would all
be back.

Subhuman exhorted all hikers, going both ways, to purchase sleeping spots
from him.  The 11 of us not drunk, but really, really high and hullucinating
on good, synthetic mescaline, rolled around in rib-hurting, uncontrollable
laughter.  He was beyond any pale, beyond any semblance of nornalcy.  He was
violating every wilderness ethic anyone has conceived of.  There must have
been 30 parties that passed us, and came back that afternoon.  Subhuman
recognized the returnees, and redoubled his sales efforts, screaming out his
absurdities and checking in with us to make sure none of us were standing.

It got dark around 6PM, and an hour or so before the dark twilight Subhuman
lost steam.  He'd downed nearly a quart of bourbon, and crawled into his
tent that some kind soul had set up for him.  He would reappear periodically
to vomit and tell us all what a great life he was living.  So intensely
personal and angst ridden.  The rest of us coped with dropping temperatures
and lessening light by trying to organize dinner.  What a laugh.

We got a fire going, perhaps one of the last fires I've built in the high
country, and mellowed coming down with our own liquor stashes.  Subhuman
drank Jim Beam - 86 proof.  Most of the rest of us had heard of Everclear,
and 151 Rum.  Freshmen in college - longhairs, hallucinogens and powerful
liquor.  We were men...

One guy made lemonade with everclear.  I remember the hallucinogenic feeling
of staring off to the east as the sun set on the cliffs above our camp, and
watching the whole world ripple, undulate, non-solid.  I brought out my own
Wild Turkey and Sierra Cup, and drank to buffer the crash, the jagged edges
that make the moment full of weird people doing strange things that they
would normally do, or would they?

I remember sitting on a log, staring at the Alpenglow, marvelling and lost
in the rippling spiral of a world in constant motion.  Randy, an east coast
rich kid, stopped, looked at me, hugging myself in the down coat my mom had
made me, one of those Frostline kits that had lots of down.  He actually
curled his lip into a sneer, and said, "Yeah, I bet you're cold."  With that
incredibly disdainful remark he walked away.  That was 33 years ago, and I
remember it as if it happened yesterday.  His vitriol sticks with me to this
day.

The night wound down, and we slowly dropped off to our tents, tarps or open
sleeping bags.  Blue tarps didn't yet exist.  I slept out, but had a plastic
tube tent.  Makes me wonder now why I think of a tarptent, or some other 22
oz wonder.  The tube tent worked.  I spent a number of nights in the late
sixties, early and mid-seventies sleeping in tube tents in the rain.  They
work...

This was the era of five pound boots, five pound packs, cotton underwear,
bluet stoves, and four pound down bags - the down was really, really
greasy...  I'm so glad my pack is 11 pounds with everything sans food and
water.  So much easier to walk and enjoy walking...

We woke up the next morning, and all the other backpackers we saw we were
shamefaced around.  We'd been screaming, singing, and exhoring into the wee
hours.  People were sleeping within a couple hundred yards of us.  Their
looks condemned us to backpacker hell, and we deserved it.  We knew this.

WE ate our oatmeal, bemoaning our aching heads and fast-beating hearts.  A
couple of us took nips to lessen the pain.

Subhuman woke up and ate two hits of mescaline.  Luckily he'd packed up his
gear so that when he entered the high country we didn't have to do much to
get him to move.  The whole way down, the trail by Nevada FAlls, Mist Falls,
the rocks, the switchbacks, Subhuman was a different person.  Gone was the
exhorting devil of adolescent angst.  Now was the kindly, curiously awed
young man.  A couple of us stayed with him as we descended the trail,
marvelling at what he was seeing.  I remember being so hung over and
ecstacied out.  There was only the immediacy of the trail and my off
centered balance, swinging me one way, then another. Subhuman was my center,
my guide, my mentor and guru.

While I haven't done hallucinogens since 1976, I remember that day walking
down the trail, the wasted, leftover feeling with little trailers rippling
through the moment.  Subhuman simply centered the residue/hangover and I
slowed down to appreciate where he was.  He really wasn't much different
from the day before.  Rather than focusing on the world 10 yards and
outward, he was focusing on his immediate environment.  The flowers, the
water flowing, cascading, the rocks and the silicate, the bright sun and how
shade/sun/water/spray interacted.  Rather than exhorting innocent hikers, he
exhorted the immensity of being in the moment, unencumbered by any reality
other than what was just there.

I was a spectator once again to the power and immensity of his world.  The
Grateful Dead have a song eulogizing Neal Cassiday's death, running down the
railroad tracks in Mexico.  It's a consuming image.  Subhuman had that kind
of intensity.  I experienced my own limits, my own boundaries, with Subhuman
on that walk down the Muir Trail.  I knew I'd never achieve the kind of
intense focus, straight or high, that Subhuman was doing moment by moment as
we hiked down the trail.  In an important way I was grateful to realize
this.

Living life on the edge intrigues me, but when it comes to "REALLY" being
there, I'm one step back.  The mountaineers  (Touching the Void) who
blithely enter the death zone, which means to me that at any given moment a
misstep means you die, doesn't intrigue me. I don't push the edge.  I try to
understand the patterns that encourage each of us to explore our own edges.
I'm an intellectual.

Subhuman had an involvement in his own life that pushed the envelope so that
if he did misstep, he'd die.  I wasn't, and am not interested in pushing my
personal envelope to find my own limits, at least in that way.  But dammit,
those souls who find a personal mission to exclusion of all else have to be
respected.  Subhuman probably lives, 33 years later.  He's probably married
with kids and a job.  He wasn't "smart" in the sense of being able to create
a reality that would make him a lot of money or establish a position within
academia.  His intensity was different.  He shaved his head every spring.
He wore pants cut off below the knees and short sleeve, cotton shirts of
generic pattern.

Women weren't attracted to Subhuman.  I think, looking back, that this is
what pains me the most.  He was the most vibrant, alive guy I'd ever met,
and the very lack of filters and sophistication and savoir faire relegated
him to the social fringes as far as women were concerned in a rich kids
school.  He left after the first year, and I don't know what happened to
him.  His intensity was a barrier he used to keep us from getting close.  No
one knows what happened to Subhuman.

I envision him living in a world that he changed himself to belong to.  This
makes me sad, because the very intensity that defined who he was, was so out
there, there was no place for him.  Today he'd fit in.  There would be a
place for him.  Then, he was a character that society had no place for.
Now, he'd be flying through the air on his motorsicle, riding his skate
board yards above safety, or, doing 540s on the half-pipe.

I started this talking about my most outrageous experience with substances
in the high country.  It ended with a tribute to Subhuman.  How this relates
to the PCT is really peripheral.  This years thru-hikers have left, and
those of us who wait for next year, or the year after that, to hike our
hikes, have to make due with stories like this.  I hope you enjoyed....

Jeffrey Olson
Laramie, WY