The Eden Express (14 page)

It took forever for the others to get their sleepy selves moving. And when they finally trundled down they hardly seemed to notice what a wonderful day it was. Just to make sure they didn’t miss it altogether, I suggested that it was a fine day to drop a little mescaline. Everyone was game. Down went the little pills. I was fully confident that this trip would be as glorious as my first mescaline trip was horrendous. I was right.

After a big mug of coffee made in our new super-see-through Pyrex glass percolator and seasoned with goat’s milk and honey, I went up to the roof, took my clothes off, and lay in the sun. It was the first time in many wet, cold months that that had been remotely possible. Jack came up and joined me.

We were lying there in a timeless state of peace and contentment when the sound of uncontrollable laughter came from below. I crawled to the edge of the roof. The scene I looked down on was a vision of heaven and peace on earth, harmony-between-all-things. Simon had baked up a batch of crackers and brought them out just as Kathy finished milking the goats. Simon and Kathy were laughing so
hard they were crying as they fed crackers to the two nanny goats and the kids. The goats couldn’t get enough; they were prancing around kicking their heels in the air. Zeke was watching the scene, wagging his tail in approval and getting an occasional cracker himself. They were all falling in a big heap of joyous people, goats, and dogs. Spring was definitely coming.

I climbed down, put on my tennis shoes and wrapped a blanket around myself, and went out to join them. Simon and Kathy saw me in my blanket and tennis shoes and started laughing even harder.

“Tennis shoes and a blanket, it’s all I need. I can go anywhere,” I said by way of explanation. Jack came down and we all lazed around on the ground talking about the sun and weather and laughing harder and harder all the time. We looked around at the fields, the mountains, the trees, the house. “This is Eden,” I said. Nobody disagreed.

I turned to Kathy and asked, “Is there a struggle going on?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“It’s just that I was wondering why people work at shitty jobs, live in ugly places, hate each other, have wars, etc. It really doesn’t make much sense.”

“It does seem a little silly,” she said.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Kathy said after a while.

“There’s no reason why it has to be just today,” I said. “If we want it to, life can be like this even if it rains or snows. It’s all up to us. This is our God-given birthright. I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let go of it.”

“I was wondering when this would really go somewhere,” Simon.

No doubt about it, looking around at the farm, at the people, at everything. It had really finally gone somewhere.

Kathy and Simon and I were crying and laughing for joy. It had really happened. Everything confirmed it. We were dumbfounded with joy. Jack was holding back some. I felt sorry for him, but he’d catch on.

“Did you ever think it would ever really happen?”

“I damn near chucked it many times.”

“Did you ever really doubt that it had to happen sooner or later?”

“What I wonder is why it took so long. Why now? What was stopping us before?”

“You know there’s no going back now.”

“About time. Life finally makes some sense.”

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.” “Thank God we didn’t give up.” “Thank God we persevered.” Everything that had happened before was like some bad dream, something that we could finally look at clearly now that we were out of it. “How the hell did we put up with it as long and as well as we did?”

It was truly a magic day and a magic trip, but the next day brought cooler air, with the usual total overcast and sprinkles of rain. The next day it snowed. Simon, Jack, and Kathy had come down some, but I was still a touch or so higher than I had been before the mescaline. I didn’t see what was to be gained by going back to my pre-Eden days. I was having a swell time and feeling a little sorry for the others, having their Eden depend on some silly pill.

If only Virginia could be here now, so I could share this incredible sense of well-being and saying by-by to all the shit in my life.

I had somehow conquered the evil little troll inside me that had given me so much shit and kept me from happiness. I had finally beat all the little shithead fears about myself. Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.

Everything that had ever happened to me made perfect sense. I was sore at absolutely no one and nothing. Everything that had happened had happened just right. But where to go from here? As much as it was
better to travel hopefully than to arrive, as much as I believed that and had lived by it, once you’ve arrived, you’ve arrived, and there’s not much to be done about it.

I had thought about becoming a minister because there would be no way my job would ever be finished. As long as there was one unkind thought in my congregation, one unjust deed in my community, one unhappy person, the Indelibly Reverend Vonnegut would have his hands full. I loved Virginia because there was clearly so much wrong with our relationship, so much to improve that the prospect of arrival was an incredibly long shot.

Instead of learning, I was looking for enlightenment. Instead of security, I was after infinite inner peace. Instead of a job, I was out to save the world, I thought I had taken adequate precautions against the prospect of arrival but something had gone terribly awry. I had arrived.

Things were still unbearably beautiful. I got this giddiness in my stomach and walked around completely overwhelmed by the incredible loveliness of the trees and the sky and the moss, infinitely delicate worlds within worlds, and people’s faces and the way they moved and my own body and what a perfect machine it was and the stove and the floors and our funky house. And everything fit together so perfectly. It wasn’t just in the way things looked. It was in the sounds of the wind and the stream and the way things felt, the ground gushing ever so slightly under my feet, the way everything smelled. It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. And it keeps getting better and better. And I think to myself, Look Ma, no drugs.

People are all charming and silly. The idea of purpose cracks me up. The only thing that puzzles me is why it took me so long to catch on. How did I manage to keep a straight face for as long as I did? I vaguely remember pain and struggle but it seems so remote, so unnecessary, so absurd.

THE FACE. And then one night, after several days of pure Eden, as I was trying to get to sleep, marveling at the fullness of each moment, feeling that I was living whole lifetimes within each moment, I started listening to and feeling my heart beat. Suddenly I became terribly frightened that it would stop.

And from out of nowhere came an incredibly wrinkled, iridescent face. Starting as a small point infinitely distant, it rushed forward, becoming infinitely huge. I could see nothing else. My heart had stopped. The moment stretched forever. I tried to make the face go away but it mocked me. I had somehow gained control over my heartbeat but I didn’t know how to use it. I was holding my life in my hands and was powerless to stop it from dripping through my fingers. I tried to look the face in the eyes and realized I had left all familiar ground.

When I first saw the face coming toward me I had thought, “Oh, goody.” What I had in mind was a nice reasonable conversation. I had lots of things I wanted to talk about, lots of questions it must have answers to. God, Jesus, the Bible, the Ching, mescaline, art, music, history, evolution, physics, mathematics. How they all fit together. just a nice bull session, but a bull session with a difference. A bull session with someone who
knew
.

My enthusiasm was short-lived. He, she, or whatever didn’t seem much interested in the sort of conversation I had in mind. It also seemed not to like me much. But the worst of it was it didn’t stop coming. It had no respect for my personal space, no inclination to maintain a conversational distance. When I could easily make out all its features; when it and I were more or less on the same scale, when I thought there was maybe a foot or two between us, it had actually been hundreds of miles away, and it kept coming and coming till I was lost somewhere in some pore in its nose and it still kept coming. I was enveloped, dwarfed. No way to get any perspective on the thing at all, and for all I really knew it was still light-years away and coming and coming and coming.

My own insignificance again? Shit, I sort of wanted to learn something
new
.

“So you really want to go on a trip, do you? OK, punk, now you’re really going to fly.” Or words to that effect. Not words exactly, more like thunder.

The few times I tried to fight back I was left exhausted. It took everything out of me and didn’t seem to improve matters at all. If anything they got worse. So I retreated and retreated and retreated.

I lay rigid all night listening to the sound of the stream, figuring that somehow by being aware of sounds and rhythms outside myself I could keep my own bodily rhythms going. Losing consciousness of something outside myself meant that I would die. Only by falling into step with rhythms of the outside world could I maintain my existence. I realized that this meant I could never sleep again.

A few days before, I had asked the I Ching who mescaline was. I guess maybe that was some sort of no-no. It seemed like a logical thing at the time. It seemed that the two should know each other and might have some interesting things to say about each other. I got pretty excited at the idea. I wanted to cast a horoscope of the I Ching, throw the Ching on numerology, meditate on mescaline, throw the Ching on astrology, ask mescaline about the Ching, and so on and so one, matrix and cross-reference the whole show and see what I came up with. But when this face showed up, I figured maybe I had been messing around with something I shouldn’t.

I tried to think that the face was essentially benign and that the fear I felt was due to fuck-ups in myself rather than any malignancy on the part of the vision. But it was so hideously ugly. But beauty on a physical plane is meaningless superficiality. Isn’t it? But green is such a bad color for a face. Red is a bad color for eyes, and purple glowing wartlike growths tend to detract from one’s looks. Could this be overcome? Could I learn to love the face? Tune in next week
for the saga of expanded consciousness and broadened concepts of beauty.

There was nothing at all unreal about that face. Its concreteness made the Rock of Gibraltar look like so much cotton candy. I hoped I could get enough rest simply by lying motionless. In any event, the prospect of not sleeping frightened me far less than the possibility of losing contact with the world.

 

The sun came up as I was lying quietly, listening to the stream. Everything seemed fine. I felt a little strung out but figured I had passed a crisis point and come through all right. I got up and started the morning chores, building the fire, getting water, starting breakfast. As I got water from the stream I paused and listened to it, smiled to myself, said, “Thanks for last night,” and carried the water back to the house.

Everything seemed just as beautiful as before but somehow the beauty was more solid, less trippy. I felt warm and good. Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory.

Jack had told me that according to the Zen Buddhists, after enlightenment you go back to doing whatever it was you did before—selling shoes, farming, whatever. It seemed like pretty good advice, so I tried to keep doing all the usual things I had always done around the place, cutting firewood, pruning the fruit trees, feeding the goats. But things started happening that made it increasingly difficult and finally impossible to keep functioning.

Small tasks became incredibly intricate and complex. It started with pruning the fruit trees. One saw cut would take forever. I was completely absorbed in the sawdust floating gently to the ground, the feel of the saw in my hand, the incredible patterns in the bark, the muscles in my arm pulling back and then pushing forward. Everything stretched infinitely in all directions. Suddenly it seemed as if everything was slowly down and I would never finish sawing the limb. Then by some miracle that branch would be done and I’d have to rest, completely blown out. The same thing kept happening over and over. Then I found myself being unable to stick with any one tree. I’d take a branch here, a couple there. It seemed I had been working for hours and hours but the sun hadn’t moved at all.