Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (20 page)

22

white rabbits

Yep, I’d married a stranger, quit my job, moved three thousand miles from home, dropped out of graduate school, and stumbled into a career as an art critic; but those changes, which most of us would consider fairly significant, weren’t a poot in a plastic poke compared to the permutation, the alchemical alteration, the reorientation I would undergo while sitting quietly in an armchair one July afternoon in 1964. I’m not exaggerating. In fact, the hyperbole does not exist that would do it justice.

It wasn’t one but a succession of white rabbits popping up first here, then there, that would eventually lead me down the hole into Wonderland. The first of these oracular bunnies had caught my eye when one Saturday some artists invited me to accompany them up in the mountains on a chanterelle hunt. Chanterelle? Sounded like the stage name of a chanteuse in a Parisian nightclub. I was pretty sure no sexy French singer was lost in the Cascades, but what, then, was a chanterelle? A mushroom. It turned out to be a damn mushroom.

Down South where I hailed from, folks did not waste a perfectly fine autumn afternoon tramping over hill and dale looking for wild mushrooms.
Au contraire
. Whenever one of my people chanced upon a mushroom, they’d mutter “Toadstool” under their breath and kick the thing through the goalposts of oblivion as if it were one of Satan’s fumbled footballs.

The mushroom is an object of mystery, blooming in thick fogs of superstition, its roots reaching into the deepest cellars of the human unconscious. On one level, it has a reputation as an aphrodisiac, both its image and its many names in many languages soaked with erotic meaning. Throughout the world, the mushroom has been employed as a symbol for phallus, vagina, and the sex act itself. Conversely (or maybe not), it has been chosen since primitive times to represent evil and death. Standard equipment for poisoners, a necessary accessory for the well-appointed witch, dark is the hue of fungoid repute.

Culturally, racially, we tend to be either mycophobic or mycophilic: we adore mushrooms or detest them, there’s scant middle ground. The most avid lovers of fungi are the Indo-Europeans, that vast body of peoples that stretches from China across the states of the former Soviet Union to the fringes of Central Europe. The French and Italians are myco-bigoted, limiting their fondness to a few familiar varieties, falsely regarding all others as toxic or unfit; while Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons have traditionally placed mushrooms in the category they reserve for spiders, bats, bohemians, and things that creep in the night.

I, being genetically Anglo-Saxon and bohemian by temperament, found the prospect of hunting, picking, and eating wild mushrooms sketchy if not repulsive, yet also marginally fascinating in that it flickered with the allure of forbidden fruit. So, mildly hesitant, I agreed to join the search for Mademoiselle Chanterelle, never dreaming that I would, in the process, be glimpsing the first of those white rabbits destined to lead me through a gash in the fabric of consensual reality.

There are white and off-white mushrooms, but the chanterelle itself is not one of them; this baby is the color of egg yolks, ruffled like an Elizabethan collar, and shaped like a miniature trumpet. In the Douglas-fir forests of the lower Cascades they sprout in profuse patches, or they did before so much of our woodlands were leveled by timber barons. In the fall of 1962, the woods were less ravaged than today, however, and spread out, we moved among the towering firs as if through the chambers of an ancient temple, involuntarily respectful to the point of reverence; uncharacteristically hushed until one of us would come upon a bristling horn section of chanterelles, silent as if waiting for some elfin conductor to raise his baton; whereupon the spotter would let go a half whoop and our party would set upon the saffron trumpets, baskets at the ready.

The sheer novelty, the mystique if you will, of picking wild mushrooms with culinary intent proved captivating to this Southern boy who, growing up, had been warned to never so much as touch a feral fungus. The genes in my old hunter-gatherer DNA were reignited. Even when our baskets were loaded, I didn’t want to leave the woods. Driving downriver to La Conner whence we’d come, I felt like an aborigine being forced off his ancestral lands.

Ah, but the good times weren’t over yet. In the old La Conner farmhouse where my friends lived, we washed the duff and fir needles off the chanterelles, dipped a quantity of them in a thin batter and fried them in butter. Another batch, once cleaned, were chopped, sautéed in butter seasoned with paprika, then simmered for a few minutes in sour cream and served over toast. Chanterelle meat proved thick and firm, and although a wee bit peppery, tasted rather like . . . you guessed it: chicken. I imagined a hen fattened on nettles and apricots.

These days, when chanterelles, morels, portobellos, and other undomesticated mushrooms may be found on the menus of a great many upscale restaurants; and in season, piled in the bins of better supermarkets, it may be hard to understand what a thrill, what an outlandish oddity was my personal introduction to mushrooming in a society still fraught with fungophobia. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spoke for most of the Anglo-Saxon population when he labeled mushrooms as “foul pustules” and a “filthy crop,” a prejudice hardly weakened by the general who described the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in 1945 as having formed a “mushroom-shaped” cloud. Mom! Dad! Bud! Sis! Duck and cover! The mushroom is coming!) Ah, but I was hooked, becoming henceforth an avid mycophile.

La Conner, the picturesque fishing village and longtime artist community where, eight years later, I would settle down (if that’s not too wimpy a phrase), made an excellent home base for mushroom expeditions. From there, friends and I motored into the Cascades all that autumn in search of oyster mushrooms, king boletus, matsutake, and more chanterelles; invaded foothill pastures (sometimes just ahead of an irate farmer or an irate bull) to gather any one of several tasty agaricus species. Winter shut us down, but come late March we turned our attention to the morel, one of the most prized and savory of all wild mushrooms despite its uncanny resemblance to the withered gray penis of a thousand-year-old mummy. We searched, we picked, we cooked, we ate.

Spring mushrooms fancy summer no more than the fall varieties like winter, so by mid-May of 1964 I’d put away my basket temporarily and shifted my gastronomic focus to tamer fruit, knowing that in a couple of months my father would be shipping me tomatoes from his Virginia garden. It was about that time, however, that someone happened to mention an article in a recent
Life
magazine that went into some detail about a different sort of mushroom, a variety that illuminated not the palate but the mind.

Curious, I tracked down that issue of
Life,
opened it to the article in question, and
whoosh!
Up jumped another charismatic cottontail, this one smaller, quicker, more furtive yet somehow more portentous than its predecessors; and I sensed that were I to run after it (speaking metaphorically, of course), it would lead me to a hole, a burrow, a shaft, an underground portal that opened upon some secret cockeyed world that though hidden, lay not far -- not far at all -- from where I sat reading a popular mainstream magazine.

Life
was mainstream all right: mainstream, popular, corporate, and slick. Yet there’s reason to believe that
Life
has probably “turned on,” if I may use that phrase in its street slang context, more individual Americans than
High Times,
the
Berkeley Barb,
and all other counterculture periodicals combined. Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than
Life
to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.” The pages I read in
Life
that day definitely catapulted me onto psychedelica’s helical trajectory and I’ve met a number of other (often influential) people for whom that same article was the starting point of a personal magical mystery tour, a bunny trail Frost scarcely could have imagined when he spoke of “the road less traveled.”

The article detailed the experiences of one R. Gordon Wasson, a successful Wall Street financier whose passionate interest in mycology led him to the mountains above Oaxaca, where in the hut of a
bruja
he ate a sacramental serving of teonanácatl, the so-called sacred mushroom of indigenous Mexicans. Wasson described a cascading ecstasy that lasted for hours, as well as “wakeful dreaming,” which is to say, though he was at all times fully conscious and intellectually astute, he entertained incredibly vivid visions of, among other things, radiant beings, luminous extradimensional landscapes, and melting castles encrusted with precious jewels. The
bruja
told Wasson that while white men talked
to
God, the Oaxacan Indians talked
with
God, back and forth, and that the mushroom was the conduit that made such a two-way conversation possible.

My reaction to Wasson’s account was immediate and pronounced: I wanted to experience teonanácatl for myself and, by God, I wanted it sooner rather than later! But why?

That’s a fair question. Why? It couldn’t be categorized simply as thrill seeking. As a boy, I’d fantasized about a life of romantic adventure but that was unrealistic kid stuff; influenced by movies and books and, moreover, of a wholly external nature, vastly different from Wasson’s internal expedition. I suppose there could have been an element of the romantic in my desire for the Mexican mushroom, an adult equivalent of stowing away on a smuggler’s sloop or running away with the circus, although in retrospect I think it was something more universally felt if less commonly expressed: a vague yet poignant desire to experience, up close and personal, the fundamental essence of reality, the “which of which there is no whicher,” the ghost in the machine. I guess I wanted to break into that melting gemstone castle and see if there was somebody -- or some
thing
-- in there who actually knew which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Off and on, for several years, I’d been reading Zen, I’d flirted with Tantric Hinduism, I’d surfed the smaller swells of Sufism, and tried to get down with the Tao. It was all very eye-opening and inspirational, and while Asian mysticism is an easy target for the sneers of secular cynics and sectarian dogmatists alike, it’s far more compatible with modern science than the misinterpreted Levantine myths, ecclesiastical fairy tales, pious platitudes, and near-desperate wishful thinking I’d been fed in Southern Baptist Sunday School. The wisdom in those spiritual texts was obvious, yet I’d integrated it into my daily life with but minimal success. From a practical point of view, it was like trying to teach a monkey to play chess.

I wasn’t unhappy exactly. I had an interesting job, sufficient material comfort, and a congenitally comic sensibility: a lens of levity that not even a neurotic alcoholic wife could fog. Still, something was lacking. Mysticism was too abstract, too remote to warmly embrace; art too concrete, too accessible to resonate for very long in those areas of the brain beyond the optic nerve. In that nondescript period between the end of the beige fifties and the beginning of the Day-Glo sixties, I found myself drifting unfulfilled in an ocean of circumstance. Perhaps I was simply itching to move farther outside the realm of normal expectations, thereby insulating myself from the temptations of bourgeois compromise. Maybe I wanted bliss, wanted freedom, wanted deeper meaning, wanted to experience what Surrealist poets meant when they rhapsodized about the Absolute. Maybe I, too, wanted a tête-à-tête with a supreme being. Or maybe I was just terminally curious. Whatever it was I wanted or imagined I wanted, I intuited, thanks to
Life
magazine, that there was some fungus down in ol’ Mexico that could very well hold the key to the only treasure -- aside from love, of course -- that really mattered.

What did I do then but pick up the phone and call the botany department at the University of Washington. I asked to speak with Dr. D. E. Stuntz, the resident mycology expert (I’d seen his name in a field guide), and when I had him on the line I, after identifying myself, came right out and asked if he could help me obtain some hallucinogenic mushrooms. Talk about naïveté! Even in 1963 this was naive. Not particularly amused, Dr. Stuntz curtly suggested I talk to Dr. Varro Tyler in the UW pharmacology department. So I rang him up, too.

With a chuckle, Tyler informed me that while he knew of Wasson’s exploits and was aware of mushrooms with similar psychotropic properties that grew here in the Pacific Northwest (Wow! No kidding?), this was not his area of interest. Before hanging up, however, Dr. Tyler gave me the name and number of an academic colleague, I’ll call him Jim, who had conducted a bit of research in the psychotropic field.

So I rang up this fellow Jim, who proved to be not only a medical doctor with a PhD in pharmacology, he, as luck would have it, was also a Sunday painter and an avid follower of my art column in the
Times
. Jim suggested we meet for lunch. Later that week, over platters of pasta, we discussed art and philosophy for a couple of hours before getting down to the business of teonanácatl and its gringo cousins. When I inquired if he knew how I might acquire some, Jim smiled and said, “You don’t want mushrooms.”

“Oh, but I do. I really do.”

“No,” he said. “Mushrooms aren’t trustworthy. The amount of psychoactive properties varies from season to season, locale to locale, even mushroom to mushroom. Two mushrooms growing side by side will often contain different amounts of the mind-affecting agent. It’s impossible to gauge a proper dosage.” He paused, registering my disappointment. “There’s something much cleaner, safer, more reliable, and equally effective. Actually, it’s even more effective, if that’s where you want to go.” He paused again. My forkful of tiramisu froze in midair. “It’s called,” he said, “lysergic acid diethylamide-25.”