Once I decided I had whipped the acid god, I was able to take pleasure in this miserable, strictured mode of intoxication. The mesquite flames rising serene from their bed of incandescent coals seemed more than beautiful. They were enchanted flames, magical, holy, mystical. The writhing trees, the palpitating mountains of fresh liver and raw lung, the breathing earth, the stars struggling in the cobweb sky, all struck me now as no longer strange and fearful but simply as the way things are—amusing, charming, delightful.

But there was no sense of joy or exultation in the floating opera of my nervous system. Sometime late in the dead shank of the night, with our firewood gone and the fire down to a few smoldering rubies—but oh the intensity of those glowing coals; they watched me like radiant red eyes—we put our beer-can bones and crystal limbs in gear and shambled toward my old pickup truck. Terry drifted onto the passenger’s side of the seat. Out of habit I slammed his door shut behind him—that door was always hard to latch—then turned back to the remains of the fire to get something I’d forgotten: a shoe, a sausage, I forget what, maybe a shovel.

“Ed!” he screamed, “don’t go!”

I stopped, returned, hugged him to me, did my best to comfort him for several minutes. Several hours? He was in a bad state, trembling, sweating, terrified. The slamming door, my turning away, had shattered his bliss.

We rattled home to Furnace Creek. Although I had driven the acid clean out of my head and felt—up there—clear and triumphant as a winning warrior, my bones and flesh remained hypersensitive for hours. On the dirt road each pebble, each grain of sand beneath the wheels, set my teeth on edge. All the same it was good to know I was free from the glassy paralysis and coming home, coming back to earth. Nothing had ever seemed better. I had escaped, or so I thought, that dreadful web in which the stars are trapped, that galactic spider out yonder in the dark attic of space.

Later though, for weeks following my abortive flight, I suffered from a shade of disappointment and loss. Some ancient way remembered but not found. The trail not taken. For me at least, it now seemed clear—there was not going to be any magic shortcut into wisdom, understanding, peace. There would be no easy way.

Meeting the Bear

IN THE EVENING I descend from my tower and go for a walk in the woods.

What tower? What woods? Hard, brutal questions, which I decline to answer. The specificity demanded I regard as an invasion of privacy. But I shall offer a few clues (out of homage to Nabokov) for the entertainment of any readers who may still be with me. Think of Montaigne. Yeats. Rapunzel. Childe Roland. Of Stephen Dedalus and “stately, plump Buck Mulligan.” Of a warm, secret place for the gestation of ideas—not so much an ivory as an ovary tower. It matters little if the ideas fail to emerge.