Remembering Terence McKenna (1)

Sometime in the late 1970s, I came across a series of audiotapes that told an amazing and hard to believe story of ethnobotanical and psychedelic adventuring. It was called True Hallucinations, now a book and a video. The voice of the storyteller, Terence McKenna, was mesmerizing. Psychedelics had been a formative influence on my life -- I was 16 when I first ate peyote, on November 22, 1963 (and that's another story indeed). In large part because of my experiences, I've been open-minded and agnostic -- I don't know much about what is happening in the universe, but I know it is mysterious and much larger, stranger, and conscious than words can convey. I'm not a true believer in any God, UFO, or extrasensory experience, but neither am I convinced that none of these things exist. I continued to follow McKenna's adventures.

In the late 1980s, I went to a lecture by Terence in San Francisco. I approached him afterward, queuing up with the other acolytes. I told him that I wanted to interview him, a request he greeted with a kind of world-weary forebearance -- until I told him that I could get an assignment from Whole Earth Review. He replied that if WER would send me to his ethnobotanical preserve on the Big Island of Hawaii, he'd grant me the interview. So I found myself on a plane. I fantasized that he would tank me up on exotic botanical mind expanders, then at the peak of the trip would rip off his face to reveal that he was, as some suspected, an extraterrestrial.

He picked me up in a sturdy Jeep that had seen a lot of action. We drove away from the airport and up a bleak, black, volcanic cinder landscape. When we bounced along on the volcanic rock, he told me that the Jeep was named "Sugaree," which makes immediate sense to Deadheads ("Shake it, Shake It, Sugaree..."). Then we left the volcanic rock and entered the jungle. The moment we were surrounded by vegetation, Terence pulled out, lit, and passed to me an enormous spliff. I've seen some prodigious dedication to cannabis in my time, but anyone who knew Terence would back me up: he was the king of wake and bake potheads. As he exhaled, he recited some words in Italian. I don't know much Italian but I did know what they meant, for they were the first sentence of Dante's Divine Comedy: "Midway in life's journey, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path." Then Terence laughed maniacally. I can smile now, but I felt like I was headed into some kind of interdimensional trial by fire -- that I had signed up for. So many adventures seem attractive when you are only planning them.

...continued in Part 2