A Fugitive From Myself
I dropped acid with Timothy Leary in Algeria, and I didn’t like it
I have tried to hide in libraries, in teaching, in sex, and through drugs
At 82, I don’t want to be a fugitive anymore
You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Drugs ‘R’ Us.” I have. By 1960s standards, I was a modest druggie. I never went over the edge. But I knew that I was drugs and drugs were me. Case in point: I met Dr. Timothy Leary a handful of times during the last few decades of the twentieth century and dropped acid with him in LA and then in Algeria, where he was a fugitive from the law. Still, I was never by any stretch of the imagination an acidhead; I had friends who went on hundreds of acid trips, while I rejected the gospel of acid and disliked Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He was a salesman and LSD was his product. I was an academic and didn’t want to damage my precious brain. But after a long dry spell, I did catch up with “the drug culture” — or perhaps, more accurately, it caught up with me.
In the late 1960s, I got stoned with a Columbia Law School student and an SDS member named Gustin “Gus” …
The Front Porch
July 4th is a traditional time to celebrate America’s republican democracy, eat hamburgers and pie, set off fireworks, and take stock of where we are at as a nation. By some measures, we are doing fantastically well — a military hyperpower with global reach powered by the world’s most advanced economic engine. Investors anywhere on earth would be foolish to sell Silicon Valley short. They would also be wrong not to take advantage of America’s thriving biotech industry, or to ignore the contributions of American farmers and fishermen and miners, or to neglect the many other fields in which American craftsmen, entrepreneurs, inventors, and engineers bring their bounty to market, often in miraculously short spans of time.
Let’s take Elon Musk for example. Musk is a modern-day Thomas Edison crossed with P.T. Barnum and Tony Stark; he’s invented electric cars and now trucks that millions of people actually pay …
The High Wood
I was shocked to discover that the forest wasn’t mine
COVID sends me back home to Vermont, where my daughter can walk in the woods with her grandparents
A man named Phil keeps his promise
At the end of a dirt road on a hillside in Vermont is an old hollow tree. In my youth, it marked the boundary between my parents’ land and the dense maple and pine forest that spans thousands of acres along the rolling hills. The tree is very old and very dead. When I would enter the forest, I would always throw a stone into its large hollow before tearing up the old logging road with stick in hand to fight dragons and explore the woods. I happily wandered through every good green place — the sunny forest clearing where all the logging roads meet, the deep gully that collects tangles of deadfall trees perfect for climbing, the old overlook high up on the hill with the old camper trailers — receiving stings from nettle and bites from briar, building forts and cultivating an overwhelming love for all things that grow. As this wandering, daydreaming, and adventuring continued through my adolescence, the dark …
