The Professor climbed into the passenger side of the Pappy Wagon, my 90’s era Toyota Sienna van covered in magnetic Day-Glo flowers and Big Lebowski bumper stickers, one warning concerned tailgaters, “Careful, man, there’s a beverage here.”
The Prof taught philosophy and religion at a local college, but he moonlighted as an amateur botanist, arming us with alarmingly powerful basement fungus, which we munched like popcorn once we drew close to our destination – Southern California’s Holy Mountain of bohemian and 60’s counterculture, the legendary Zorthian Ranch.
Every country has its sacred spaces, high enough above civilization for its mystics and musicians to find transcendence. The Ranch is where the West Coast wild ones burned and set fire to the world, the real greats – jazz icon Charlie Parker, physicist Richard Feynman, artist Andy Warhol, occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons. It was here at the Ranch’s grand 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Summer of Love that we chose to investigate, worship, and sip up the surviving spirit of the 60’s, especially now under the shadow of the Trump regime.
Ever since America’s volcanic election day, the one that carmelized our fair country in Vesuvian sludge, the Prof and I had searched desperately for answers, for something beyond media sound-bites about the cultural Cold War. We wanted a dose of the Beyond, a dip into multi-dimensional waters, radical inner gnosis. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of drugs, but if there were ever a time to use ‘em it was now. As my fellow Kentuckian, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, put it, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
So we went pro… We brain-goggled ourselves on magic mushrooms in Anglican liturgies. We soared through acid-induced visions of ancient Alexandria at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral. We lurched about slurring in tongues with bewildered Pentecostals after hotboxing the apple hash-pipe. On each of these “Psilocybin Sundays,” we sought out epiphany by whatever religion and chemical catalyst necessary.
We called our irreverent spiritual study, Gonzo Theology. After all, it was Hunter, the doctor of gonzo journalism himself, who went headfirst into the American heart of darkness with nothing but a headlamp, a flimsy rope, and blind trust that some future readers might grab the slack. I can see him now, wild eyes and wobbly legs, shooting a flare gun into the air at the very point in time when the glorious window of the ‘60’s slammed shut. Hunter decided that the Bush regime wasn’t worth living through. What would Hunter say with our current “pussy-grabbing” Atlantic City mob-boss of a president? We’d have to sort that out for ourselves.
We parked at the bottom of a one-lane dirt road corkscrewing up to the vast Zorthian compound above. I grabbed my walking stick and brown broad-brimmed felt hat. With that and my long, unruly beard, people often accused me of looking like Walt Whitman – a postmodern Whitman with a two-gallon Camelbak of water, two boxes of PowerBars, a pack of Tarot cards, and enough cold brew coffee and weed to share with strangers along the way. As a father of two, and psychologist to many, I eschewed the self-indulgent nihilism of my Gonzo forbear for a more therapeutic, hospitable approach to psychonautic exploration.
Gonzo Dad Guideline #1: Make it home to family intact, “clothed and in his right mind.”
The Professor adjusted his Clark Kent style glasses, staring up at the strange ruins perched on the side of the mountain. We marveled at the spikey space-pods of wild cucumber hanging in the chaparral of the high desert hillside. We climbed the trail with an eye for rattlesnakes, the Professor and I trading stories of the legendary late Jirayr Zorthian, the eccentric Armenian artist who hosted lavish spring Bacchanals in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. He famously paraded about in togas and garland, laughing melodiously through a wine soaked beard as the naked nymphs of Tinsel Town danced around him in pagan revelry. He was boisterously generous, serving whole roast pig and barrels of wine to the dancing crowds. For three hot, proud, and weird decades, the Ranch rose to the status of Mt. Zion for SoCal’s Bohemian literati.
We caught our breath near the top, sharing sips of water from the Camel Back and assessing the lay of the land. Paths dipped down into hallows with strange Dr. Seuss cottages hanging precariously along the sides of ravines. Curvy walls wound along the paths, the concrete embedded with random junk – colored glass, buttons, motorcycle parts, old synthesizers, strange components of obsolete machines.
Hurrying through herds of llamas and goats, I told the Professor why the Ranch meant so much to me. See, my last time on this mountain was 5 years ago with my wife Anna for the LA Folk Festival. Pregnant with our second son, Bodhi, she felt intense abdominal pain on the hike and feared she’d lost our unborn child. The next day, the doctor delivered the news. “According to ultrasound, we don’t see a baby.” Devastated, we barely spoke for the next few weeks, until suddenly, Anna noticed a wiggle and kick in her womb. We went for an ultrasound redo. The verdict – Bodhi, our little Houdini, had returned.
We finally reached the ancient stone buildings at the edge of the compound, which seemed more ancient Pythagorean Greece than Los Angeles. And the place was dead empty. Was this a ghost ranch? A half-ruin lost along the Pacific coast line? Had the Summer of Love been forgotten in time or was today’s scheduled Happening part of some Merry Prankster stunt.
“Did you get the day right?” asked the Professor.
“Shhhh. You hear that?”
The shrooms had clearly kicked in. I knew because the notes of a distant squealing guitar twisted and turned in the sky like living musical vines. Right then, the Prof underwent a strange physical mutation, one I’d puzzled at during every one of our previous gonzo escapades. Clark Kent’s academic brow suddenly grew beastly thick, his skin darkened as if from the inside, and I swear black curls of wild hair poked up from the sides of his head like the horns of a faun.
A young lady in retro 50’s starlet lingerie rushed by us and we followed her through some sort of graveyard of antique cars with elaborately costumed mannequins placed in their rotting seats. The Professor plucked a yellow flower from overgrown wild mustard and began to eat it. He pointed to another similar-looking weed and warned gravely, “Hemlock.” Both glowed a fluorescent shoulder-height yellow. Oh God, such luminescent beauty by which nature nourishes and then poisons you. The thought alone cast a paranoid shadow over the sun and we started to feel queasy and unsteady in ourselves.
We followed the footsteps of our starlet up to a glass podium flanked by two giant, junk-metal Mercury wings, 10 foot or so in wingspan. When flapped by the speaker at the pulpit, the wings sang like wind chimes. The Professor and I rattled the large, clanking wings with all our might, howling out barbaric yops and psilocybin pleas, “Where is everybody?”
People suddenly began appearing out of nowhere, and from all directions. Dozens, hundreds of ‘em, all at once. They didn’t look like new arrivals, but products of the landscape who’d gone through millions of years of evolution overnight and crawled out from the bushes, their bodies striped with mud or black paint, perhaps from some occult ritual, the origin of which either none could remember or they weren’t at liberty to convey. Young men, shirtless, slender, with toned bodies and long hair. Young women uniformly voluptuous, braless, wearing loose blouses that served to accentuate rather than cover up. We had finally stumbled across the creatures of our Holy Mountain. We had arrived.
While the Professor set off on a ridge trail with “the ghost of a lost love,” I scrambled into the crowd and flopped down on a giant red-velvet bed. It fit a dozen or so people, and I presented tribal offerings of protein bars and water to the ones cuddle-puddling among the sheets. A woman in a low-cut bodysuit cat-crawled over a young Indian man who lay in a silent swoon, his face frozen in the expression of someone who’d died in orgasm. I offered them a toke and a Tarot reading and soon we were fast friends. As we lay there, lolling on velvet and sunshine, listening to the birds reveal the secrets of Creation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the three of us had done this before.
A clean cut man in khaki pants, button-white shirt, and brown loafers came over and asked for a Power Bar. Henry, a working artist from San Francisco had a natural confidence that made him belong anywhere, even if his style might be a touch conservative for the surroundings. The weird thing was, he was the spitting of my mischievous 5-year old son Bodhi, or what I imagined Bodhi would look like 25 years from now.
“I want to show you something,” he said, eagerly pulling a tattered sketchbook out of his backpack, “my ayahuasca trip to Peru.” He turned pages of brightly colored jungle vines mutating into DNA strands connecting the past, present, and future. These weren’t visions as much as encounters, angelic alien beings walking him to the World Tree by a river of light, of death and rebirth through DMT release.
He tore out a blank black page, and began to scribble sacred geometry and a note, which he asked me to give to his future self. My eyes teared up, watching this future version of my son. We sat close and continued to talk as if we’d missed each other for decades. Overwhelmed with deep paternal affection it only seemed natural for me to touch his hair, even give an unapologetically awkward dad-kiss on the cheek, “ love you son, and I’m very proud of you.” Surprised, his eyes began to well, and without hesitation, he smiled “I love you, too, dad.”
Just then the Professor emerged from his mountainside explorations surrounded by new friends, a loud and surly lot, covered in esoteric tattoos and unruly beards to rival my own. “Just like Timothy Leary said,” he bellowed, “Find the others!” One of them had a BB gun and the shacks across the ravine became an impromptu shooting gallery, as we all took turns firing at the various spittoons, metal pans, and pails sitting on wood planks and hanging off nails. Tripping balls, tipping beers, shooting guns, and laughing our asses off. Hunter would be proud.
We lingered a bit longer in the dappled sunlight that oozed like glowing taffy through the canopy of oaks. One of the young men produced a guitar and sang along with the birds who’d gathered in the branches overhead. It was the sound of Transfiguration, and we were there to bear witness.
We had come to see what was left of the Aquarian dream. Just as the ‘60’s flashed so brightly during the Summer of Love, and then vanished into the ‘70’s, leaving a bewildered Hunter S. with a suitcase full of drugs and no hope for the future; the hopes of Occupy and of the Bernie Sanders movement had flared up only to disintegrate before our eyes. But up here, on Zorthian Mountain, we could see the future. The kids were alright. My sons were going to be okay. And that’s all I needed to know.
The child is father of the man.
Image by Derik Hefner
