Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  We were close friends, in our early twenties and halfway through college. This was precisely why we’d come: debauchery and comic misadventure. But also, the more time I spent outdoors, the more I realized that nature was more than scenic beauty and the physical challenges of rugged topography. As strange as it sounded even to me, being in wilderness awoke me to something woven into the fabric of the universe. The air in natural areas like Redwood National Park felt threaded by an enigmatic buzzing, not a measurable force like wind or gravity, but the nagging, low-frequency suggestion of scenery within the scenery, a secondary landscape. I told no one about this sensation other than Dean, and even then I struggled to describe it.

  “It’s the sense that there is more to reality than what we see,” I kept saying during the trip. “That some meaning lurks behind the obvious phenomenological level.” Dean nodded and asked questions, but my explanations failed to clarify. “It’s like peripheral vision in the mind’s eye,” I explained, “out there on the cusp of perception. Like shadows. Rustling leaves.”

  Hearing myself say this aloud, I feared it sounded nuts. Back in Phoenix, I’d sometimes wondered if thoughts like these signaled the onset of a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. But when I stepped back into a moist old-growth forest, the sensation returned and dispelled my concern. This perception of a nonphysical component of the physical world was real. Was it God? Heaven? Parallel dimensions? Had I been gifted with the powers of a seer?

  As a friend, Dean tolerated my incessant yammering. As a fellow outdoorsman, he was attuned enough to nature to entertain challenging cosmological possibilities. “I don’t believe in God per se,” he said. “I do believe that things have a spirit, a life force, if that makes sense.” His mom attended church every Sunday but didn’t raise him Catholic. Yet, he was adamant: “There is definitely a larger force in the universe. I just don’t know if it’s a Christian-type god.”

  Whatever it was, I wanted a direct encounter with it. So when the people we were staying with in Vancouver came home with PCP on our last night in British Columbia, Dean and I bought some.

  Twenty Canadian dollars got us two gelatin capsules of white powder. My friend Christie’s roommates sold it to us. They’d let us sleep for three nights in their white weathered bungalow. It had tilted front columns and a warped, creaky porch. They listened exclusively to techno music by day, hit after-hours clubs at night. Dean and I could do without the techno, but Vancouver was beautiful, our hosts friendly, and we didn’t want to leave. But with seven days to drive back to Phoenix and funds evaporating, we had no choice. We devised a plan. That night we would travel as far south of Bellingham, Washington as our weary bodies would allow and then sleep in the van in a hotel parking lot. We’d been doing this the whole trip to save money: sleep in the van, “shower” in gas station bathroom sinks, cook food on our camp stove. After three weeks on the road, we’d paid for only two motel rooms.

  We bought the PCP after midnight and started the long drive south. The van’s wheel wells, spare tire, and carpeting seemed the most obvious hiding places. Dean figured the last place border agents would look was inside his insulin syringes. At a gas station along the highway, he removed the needles from two of them, placed the inch-long capsules at their tips, then slid the orange caps over the capsules. Positioned in the center of a bag among a hundred other syringes, chances of discovery seemed slim. It was genius. I reciprocated by scooping a space in the center of our peanut butter jar, stuffing the bag of weed inside and smoothing a lid of leguminous brown over top.

  A type one diabetic, Dean tested his blood sugars every few hours and gave himself shots throughout the day. On hikes, he refrigerated the glass vials in a specially fitted ice pack which he carried in his blue daypack with the bag of syringes. We were walking down the vacant shore of Washington’s Olympic Coast one day, dark water lapping to our right, when he spotted a huge raven hunched over his daypack, picking through the spilled contents by our tent. At our approach, the bird leapt into flight with Dean’s only bag of syringes in its beak. Waving his arms and screaming profanities, Dean ran after him. Some twenty vertical feet up, the raven dropped the bag on the gravel, cawing as he went. We retrieved them unharmed.

  Dean wasn’t scared of death. He’d accepted mortality while I was still playing with Star Wars figures. He had no choice. If his diabetes didn’t kill him in his youth, it would likely get him before he got old. The injection of insulin caused spikes in blood sugar levels that often led, more than the diabetes, to debilitating complications: blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, impotence, stroke, reduced circulation, numbness in extremities, infection, gangrene, amputation. Maybe that was why he wasn’t afraid of catching rattlesnakes. On weekends he scooped them up with hooked poles in the desert outside Phoenix and slipped them into gossamer nets to get a closer look. He once caught a Gila monster, North America’s only venomous lizard, with his bare hands; he pinned its head with four fingers so it couldn’t turn and bite him. Bad dates, boring weekends, living his whole life in Phoenix—those things worried Dean, not death.

  The previous week on Mt. Rainier, I’d asked him if he thought death was the end or if something followed after. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m suspicious of heaven, but reincarnation seems possible. It’s an ancient tradition.” I nodded my head, staring into the forest.

  I didn’t know what I believed. Some days I was a deist, others an atheist, most days an animist. My mom’s side of the family was Jewish. When I was a kid, Mom wanted me to appreciate the basic aspects of our heritage. So I attended a Jewish elementary school, and Mom and I lit the annual Chanukah candles, but she and I never went to synagogue, and I abandoned my bar mitzvah study halfway through. Age thirteen seemed too arbitrary a number to signify anything, and tradition didn’t require I know the English translation of the Hebrew I was supposed to recite. How could mindless repetition of a cryptic language make me “a man,” especially when the only hair on my body was a blonde peach fuzz? Clearly I had become spiritual by age eighteen, but what sort of spirituality wasn’t clear. I had no plans to practice yoga, or study Kabbalah, or read Buddhist texts. I knew only one thing: I needed a sign.

  “God is a mystery,” my Grandma Silvia always said. “That was Einstein’s view. Maybe God is a man, and maybe a being, but to us down here, he’s first and foremost a mystery.” I didn’t want to be worrying about God on a decadent roadtrip, but I couldn’t help it. Wilderness made me think about design, which made me think about cosmology, which made me wonder if we were alone in the universe and if human existence had any purpose or not. Life and death were everywhere in the lush coastal forests. Young hemlocks grew from the soft innards of rotting tree trunks. Green shoots poked from the furry remains of decomposing animals. Death and its fertility were as in your face as trail-markers, and it all led back to questions concerning creation and meaning: why were we here? What would become of us when we were gone?

  When I looked around, I found distressing potential answers: a soaring hawk carrying a wriggling snake in its claws; spawning salmon with tattered gray skin dying in streams after laying their eggs, and the way ravens and raccoons tugged at their flesh when the fish washed ashore. Was this the heartless universe that God fashioned for us? Part of me loathed any divinity who built us this way, able to question our own existence but access no answers, just carbon machines blind to our purpose, built to lay eggs, eat each other and die. It seemed cruel.

  When the Peace Arch at the Canadian border came into view, Dean said, “Here goes nothing.” Darkness spilled like Alaskan crude around the brightly lit station, a darkness so thick it gummed the edges of my peripheral vision.

  I checked my eyes in the mirror for redness, and wiped my palms on my shorts. Canadian and US flags flew side-by-side atop the arch’s crown, with the words “Children of a Common Mother” etched in the gray cement. A rattling in the van’s tired engine mixed with the drone of crickets, and I’d wondered about the condition o
f prisons that drug smugglers were sent to, and whether we’d pay bail in American or Canadian currency. Dean cleared his throat.

  The agent rattled off questions with a surprising indifference:

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “What was the purpose of your trip?”

  “What is your destination?”

  They seemed the sort of questions a spiritual leader would pose, which made me want to ask him the same things. I also wanted to blurt: that’s it? All that preparation, the digging and stashing and answers Dean and I had rehearsed, for that? The agent didn’t request ID. He didn’t look in the van, the interior of which was stacked floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins full of clothes, canned food, river rocks, and camping gear. He simply stared puffy-eyed and dangled his arms out the station window, then he said, “Safe trip guys.” We were the only car in line.

  Sometime in my late teens, I’d started my wondering. All our struggles, accomplishments, heartbreak—for what? What was the point? I didn’t understand where we as human beings came from, where we were going or why we were here. Where was here anyway? If the universe sat within another universe, where did that sit? Nothing made sense. When I started taking weekly hikes by myself at age eighteen, it was because the wilderness seemed to offer a more direct, unbiased source of existential information.

  The outdoors had always been a presence in my life. My parents didn’t hunt or fish, but as a kid they sent me to sleep-away camp in northern Arizona and Colorado, and back home, we hiked. Phoenix contains numerous desert mountain parks, and we visited many of them. We picnicked at South Mountain Park, climbed Squaw Peak, saw petroglyphs on A-mountain. Mountains piled upon jagged mountains along the brown horizon. My dad, who was raised in a small town in southern Arizona, taught me the names of rivers, mountain ranges, and plants, and about regional history. “See that?” he’d say on family outings. “That’s a palo verde tree. It means ‘green wood’ in Spanish.” And: “That there’s Picacho Peak. It’s the sight of the only Civil War battle fought on Arizona soil.” My dad was a diehard Arizonan, enchanted by the desert, proud of his state, and he imparted this passion to me. But it was an entry-level college geology class that got me fixated.

  Geo 101 was mind-blowing. Caldera-complexes, plate-tectonics, fossilization—the field’s fundamentals forced me to look at landscapes as not just scenic backdrops, but as the result of the earth’s dynamic physical processes. Concepts like volcanism, hydrology, ecology, and decay also brought to life the great sweep of time preceding my brief existence. Our planet was 4.5-billion-years-old, the universe 13.7. Six thousand years of recorded human history didn’t register as a blip on that grand a scale. And if the mundane components of my daily life—term papers, unreciprocated crushes, which scent of detergent to buy—meant nothing measured against epochs and millennia, what was I?

  When the geology professor described the Superstition Mountains east of town as “a collapsed volcano,” I drove out to see them. I’d lived in Phoenix my whole life yet had never thought of those mountains as anything but the home of the storied Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I parked in a lot and took a National Forest trail. The fall air was warm, the sun bright but comfortable. Native creosote bushes scented the air with a clean, medicinal fragrance, and tall saguaro cacti towered around me as I navigated the rocky slopes.

  I started hiking a new local mountain range almost every week: the Goldfields, Sacatons, White Tanks, Usery Mountain. Yellow brittlebush flowers bloomed, sweetening the air with pollen. Coyotes darted between bushes and hummingbirds buzzed my head. Obsessing in a way drug counselors might describe as typical of the addictive personality, I started reading natural history, biogeography, and field guides to learn the names of local plants and animals. In turn, this led me to nature writers such as John Muir, Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, and Edward Abbey, which led me to introductory texts on Native American culture, and to Western existential and moral philosophers such as Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Hume, and later, to mysticism.

  As a budding mystic, I had long been attracted to certain oddball terms: “astral glow,” “dark arts,” “the seventh son,” “spirited away.” Certain movies, too: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Planet of the Apes, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Here kids turned into blueberries. Giant lizards filled the frame. Colors flared to artificial shades of near solar-intensity then smeared across the screen, leaving tracers. Watching them as an adult, I could almost feel the tab of lysergic acid on my tongue.

  After I’d started smoking pot at seventeen, I noticed a warping of my sonic predilections. The long, hypnotically repetitive instrumental end of the Butthole Surfers’ song “Pepper” mesmerized me. So did the trailing echo-effect on Perry Farrell’s voice in early Jane’s Addiction. And Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Many Meat Puppets lyrics expressed an acute awareness of nature, like the chorus on “Leaves” where the lead singer, Curt Kirkwood, sings: “Something that’s been around for so long . . . Every minute on the calendar is wrong.” And lines like in the song “Things”: “Ancient things’ design.” Whatever that did or didn’t mean to the band, I knew what it meant to me: nature was big, human life small, the scope of time too great to comprehend.

  As my THC-intake increased, so did my reading of anything that sounded remotely “mind-expanding”: Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the Tao Te Ching, Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan, William Burroughs. When I stumbled on the term mysticism somewhere around 1995, it confirmed what I’d secretly hoped: that potheads weren’t the only ones who sensed the supernatural. People around the world from all cultures had apparently been seeking insight into their surroundings for centuries. Loosely defined, mysticism was the awareness of, and attempted union with, an ultimate reality or spiritual truth through heightened awareness and direct experience. Mystic sub-traditions existed within many popular religions: Vedanta within Hinduism, Kabbalah within Judaism, Sufism within Islam. Even Christianity had Christian mystics. While I wasn’t concerned with the complex historical details, I was interested in the tradition’s accessibility: regardless of your religious affiliation, the experiences of enlightenment, divine consciousness and union with God were available to anyone willing to practice a specific mystical discipline. This was a huge relief. I already practiced my own system of psycho-pharmacology. Rather than doing yoga or meditating, I continued on the lazy route of self-medication.

  In one of my many surveys of Native American culture, I’d read that Native peoples had used certain psychoactives, particularly hallucinogens, for religious purposes since prehistoric times. Peyote use dated as far back as 5700 years. Yokut and Chumash Indians shamans in California had administered parts of a flowering plant called sacred datura to induce visions. The Mazatec of Oaxaca used morning glory seeds and psilocybin mushrooms for divination. The Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia used the drug Ayahuasca for ceremonial rites, same way prehistoric Europeans used the amanita mushroom. It worked for them. Couldn’t it work for me?

  I started small. After college classes ended for the day, I frequently climbed atop one of Phoenix’s desert mountains, like Camelback or Papago, smoked a bowl of weed and stared into space. High above the city, my mind was flooded with abstract thoughts. Bright geometric patterns appeared and shifted into glorious abstractions at speeds so fast they were difficult to track. I filled spiral notebooks with environmental diatribes, seasonal observations, ideas for books I should write, digressions on ecological principles I’d just read about in Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and hummed the melodies of music I didn’t know I could compose. Seated in the sunlight on pink granite outcroppings, these moments were monumental. When I reviewed my notes later in my bedroom, I mostly found cryptic ramblings: “Values, morals, ethics, belief system,” and “Life exists → evolves to fill niches & utilize available life sustaining properties.” What the hell did that mean? Trying not to despair, I would flip the journal page, light a joint and start a new entry. I did this for nearly two
years. By the time Dean and I took our trip in the summer of ninety-five, I had begun suffering the law of diminishing returns: the more I smoked, the less I felt, and what I felt when I felt anything was confused, numb, and unenlightened.

  Every drug I took failed to deliver mystic insight.

  Mushrooms amplified colors and produced amusing tracers, but portals never opened inside bedroom closets as in the film Poltergeist.

  Acid made wallpaper patterns swim like living MC Escher prints, but whatever world it hurled my friends and I into, I wasn’t disembodied enough not to feel the strychnine in my achy spinal column, and police still left tickets on the windshield of my Volkswagen that I illegally parked on a busy commercial street while we stumbled around high.

  The mescaline I once ate while camping near Sedona made me see red eyes in the forest all night. But the mythic creatures I hoped they were attached to never emerged to deliver wise messages, and the one other person who thought they saw those eyes was tripping on acid. Still, I always stayed on the lookout for new interdimensional transport.

  After crossing the border, Dean and I drove through the darkness past Bellingham, looking unsuccessfully for places to sleep. The air was cool and moist, the night still. Vast networks of tiny country roads filled the woods, but we found no overnight options. The trick, we discovered, was to locate a hotel in a relatively safe neighborhood whose lot was filled with enough cars for ours to blend in. We needed to roll in, park between paying customers’ cars and rearrange the luggage to make room for our beds without attracting security guards’ and other patrons’ attention; otherwise, guards tapped on the window and kicked us out.