The Last Great Acid Trip

Or how I won a footrace against a dog named Pig Pen

Seems like LSD and other hallucinogens are making a comeback in the zeitgeist these days. Come to think of it, seems like the word zeitgeist is making a comeback in the zeitgeist. But back to my LSD story… I’ve shared this story several times with several people over the years, but usually at late-night kitchen tables, out loud, with friendly beverages at hand. And I’ve never quite done it justice, never put it in its full context, always shortened and edited for length—and to forestall any accusations of mild insanity.

Seems like now’s the time to give it a proper telling…

Photo by cottonbro studio

I won the acid in an all-night poker game in the student lounge of Farley House at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

This was late May 1976, and we were celebrating the end of the school year—final papers and final exams finally out of the way—and I believe it was Doug who ran out of cash as the night turned into morning, and so he pushed two hits of amber windowpane into an already sizable pile of coins and bills and IOUs.

Whoever was dealing had called baseball—seven card stud, threes and nines are wild, fours you get an extra card—and Doug probably had one of those tempting hands you can get in that game, four of a kind or a straight flush, something real pretty that had to be bet strong. But I took the pot with five jacks, three natural, and I scooped up the cash and took the acid up to my room on the third floor and stashed it in a desk drawer in a Glad sandwich bag.

About a week later I was riding shotgun in a 1959 Volkswagen bus pointed toward Idaho.

Full panel, split window with a DIY paint job that was supposed to be gold but ended up somewhere between gold and dirt. My good buddy Porter was on vacation from his daily grind in the pressroom at the Lake County Record-Bee, my hometown newsrag, and I was tagging along on his sentimental journey to visit family in Idaho and Washington. Along the way we planned to see four national parks and the great city of Seattle. 

In the bus we had each stashed a sleeping bag and a duffle stuffed with a couple changes of clothes and not much more. Porter had an old beatup Hondo guitar and half a bottle of pharmaceutical speed—black beauties. I brought a few harmonicas and a paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the acid in the Glad bag. We filled a 120qt ice chest with Budweiser, we probably had some pot, and I suppose we brought some food, although I really don’t remember eating. I was just 18 years old, Porter was maybe 22, and our priorities were thusly distorted.

I was still baby-faced, couldn’t grow a beard, girlish dark brown hair down to my shoulders, thin and wiry, habitually dressed in overalls, no shirt. I was young, dumb and full of Kerouac. Intrepid. Invincible. Seeking. Ready at all times to put Hell Yes and Why Not into action.

Oh yeah—and there was the dog. Porter’s dog, named in memory of the dearly departed Grateful Dead keyboard and harmonica player Ron McKernan, AKA Pig Pen.

Pig Pen the man was a bit of a role model for Porter, being a not-so-attractive person who nevertheless had enough charm for the saucy Janis Joplin. Porter himself was not conventionally handsome and had been, you might say, unlucky in love. He stood around five-foot-four and carried a wrestler’s physique, but what you noticed—what you couldn’t forget—was his nearly albino complexion, combined with the long, straight, bright orange hair that hung all the way to the belt loops of his ink-stained Levis.

Pig Pen the dog was a sweet and sometimes skittish Australian Shepherd mix, sorta rusty blond with white patches, who really didn’t deserve to be named after a legendary, albeit lovable, slob. He liked to sleep in the back of the bus, close to the warm rattle of the VW engine. And he could run like the prairie wind.

I’m pretty sure we brought food for the dog.

We drove that bus for 15 hours, stopping only for gas and so the three of us could pee.

Well, truthfully, Porter drove and I studied the road atlas (now there’s an anachronism for ya), played harmonica, managed the eight-track tape deck, and read aloud from Fear and Loathing. Pig Pen slept in the back, running happily through his dreams.

Our first landing was a tourist bar just barely into Montana, in the little town of West Yellowstone, where it is said the men are men and the sheep are nervous, and where the dominant architectural theme is Mid-Twentieth-Century Pseudo Pioneer Cabin. 

In the great state of Montana at the time, the legal drinking age was 18 and Porter, considerate friend that he was, wanted to introduce me to the pleasures of a beverage or three in the friendly confines of a roadside drinking establishment—without the imminent threat of incarceration. 

We arrived around 10pm at the Elkhorn Bar or the Buffalo Saloon or the Itchy Bear Inn or something like that. We made fast friends with a guy named Dusty or Slim or Ranger or something like that, a bushy-bearded troubadour who looked like a younger version of Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon, and who happened to be the hired entertainment. I jammed harmonica with a few of his tunes and Porter handed him one of those black capsules, and the management had to shoo us out the door around 3am, still speed-talking and raggedly singing John Prine songs.

Porter, Pig Pen and I woke up late morning on the thinly carpeted floor of the one-room Pseudo Pioneer Cabin that Dusty Slim Ranger had been provided as a perk of his employment. We said our goodbyes, loaded into the dirt-colored bus and headed for Yellowstone—the park not the town.

Yellowstone the park is the original national park, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, about a hundred years before we showed up to sit on a bench and slurp hangover beers among the Mom and Pop tourists who were faithfully (and soberly) waiting, with their Kodak Instamatic cameras around their necks, for Old Faithful to do its geyserly best.

Photo by Mark Ingraham

What I remember most about Yellowstone Park is the bubbling ground.

Nerdly hippies that we were, Porter and I took a docent-guided tour of the mud pots and boiling pools, a wonderfully hellish landscape where old Mother Earth is thin-skinned and cranky and threatening to spit in your face or burn off a leg if you forget your place in this world. 

The second park on our itinerary was Grand Teton, just ten minutes from Yellowstone and famous for its jagged snowcapped peaks and its lush valley floor featuring the Snake River. After the mud pots tour, we set up camp in that valley, near a lake named Jenny, and we built a fire and Porter pulled out the Hondo and I blew harmonica to a couple songs.

I don’t remember what we played. Porter once wrote a song about the time we and a couple galfriends ran naked through our local fairgrounds. Yep, running through public events without your clothes, AKA streaking, was a popular activity back then—another Google-worthy anachronism for the unforgivably-young among us. Anyway, it was a great song, appropriately titled Streaking the Lake County Fair, and I like to think we played it that night in the fire-lit shadows of the Grand Tetons.

Photo by PhotoMIX Company

We must’ve eaten the acid in the morning.

I say that because the part I actually remember is bathed in sparkling daylight. It’s weird. I remember all the stuff I’ve told you about what led up to this acid trip. But I remember nothing of the experience itself except for the one indelible moment that I’ve been telling people about for years. I don’t remember eating the acid. I don’t remember how the rest of the trip went, whether good or bad or how intense, or what if anything Porter had to say about his own trip. Out of several hours of tripping in the untamed magnificence of Grand Teton National Park, I remember roughly one minute. If that.

But I’ll remember that minute forever.

Porter and I were walking on a trail deep in the forest. A well-maintained trail about half as wide as a one-lane road. Pig Pen the dog scouted ahead as dogs will do, trotting off around the bend, then circling back to check on us, then trotting off again. The sky directly overhead was pale blue, muted by morning mist. The trail was shaded by a thicket of trees on the steep embankment to our right, maybe 40 feet high and covered with pine and fir and blue spruce and more, crowded close and standing tall, allowing only splashes of sunlight to fall on the trail and shimmer at our feet like fireflies when the breeze blew across the ridge above.

Suddenly the sun broke over the hill and light came streaming through the trees, spotlighting the trail like some UFO abduction fantasy. It poured down the hill like a waterfall of light, a lightfall, that made everything it touched—the dark trees, the dense undergrowth, the fallen decaying limbs and the green hairy lichen clinging to their sides—glow fluorescent and throb with the tremulous breath of the world.

I saw it as a path, I don’t know why, there was no path, the forest there was a forbidding tangle of clawing obstacles, but I saw it as a path and an invitation. A beckoning.

I heard the sunlight hum. And I took a step toward the hill.

I don’t know if Porter even noticed that I’d stopped walking the trail, but Pig Pen had shown up at my side and seemed to sense my impulse. He sprung away from the trail, brushed past me, then stopped and looked back quickly, tail a-waggin. It was clear to me that the dog, with the spark in his eyes and the hop in his shifting stance, was playfully challenging me to run up the hill, like one kid saying to another kid, Come on, I’ll race ya.

In the past I’ve always told people I really don’t know how I made it to the top of the hill before Pig Pen. I mean, there was no way I should’ve outrun that dog. He was a young and healthy full-grown dog. Athletic, surefooted, speedy, energetic and smart as hell. It defied logic and precedent, controverted natural law, suggested the superhuman, like when a mother gets on the news for lifting a car off her child. It just didn’t make sense.

But somehow I did, in fact, reach the ridge ahead of the dog, and I think Pig Pen understood that he’d been bested. It confused him—he gave me the universally recognized WTF head-tilt. But I believe he sensed what had happened, and I like to think he was somewhat impressed. Or at least as mystified as I.

So, what does it mean?

Was I really faster than an Australian Shepherd that day? Did LSD juice my strength and coordination far beyond my normal abilities? I don’t think that was it. LSD can act as a stimulant of the nervous system, so my muscle control was no doubt enhanced. But not to the point of outracing a dog up the side of a small mountain!

I don’t think the main factor in my elevated performance was muscle power or control. I think, in that moment, I was just more capable of picking the right path up the hill and through the trees. There was an extraordinary sharpening of my focus and ability to see the next move—the right rock or log to step on, the right limb to duck under or bush to jump over. The shale underfoot was unstable, the foliage wild and overgrown, and Pig Pen hesitated more than once. I never did. I saw every step before it happened.

I’d felt something close to this once before, rock-hopping across the Merced River in Yosemite Valley. I wasn’t tripping then and the river was flat and I was not competing with a dog. But I experienced a heightened capacity for pattern recognition, a state of mind that allowed me to instinctively make decisions that were beyond my intellectual abilities. I’m guessing this is something akin to what elite athletes refer to as “the zone.” Still, what happened at Grand Teton that day with Porter and Pig Pen was another level up from my experience at the river. This was something a notch past what I had thought was humanly possible, at least for me.

And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I believe I got something—a certain knowing in the belly—from LSD that I don’t think I could’ve have gained any other way.

To me, the discovery that I possessed unidentified capacities beyond my understanding was profound. Not just to be told and accept that proposition in an abstract, intellectual way, but to experience and assimilate it deep down as empirical evidence of my own mysterious untapped potential, and by implication all of humanity’s untapped potential. 

In a strange way, it gave this lifelong nonbeliever a kind of faith.

Not in gods, demons or prophets, but in the ceaseless yearning of human beings to survive, to triumph, and to better ourselves. And the possibility that we can.

Later in life I was not so unacquainted with doubt and regret and shame and sorrow, and the many tricks that life can play on a person with a heart, and plans. I’ve been frustrated, beat up, beat down, confused, avalanched by change, stress, misfortune, sometimes through my own failures. And I have used this fundamental sense of possibility, this faith in human capacities, to remind me there are paths through even the thickest brambles of life, and over the steepest hills. This self-belief has been a treasured resource for which I am grateful.

Now there’s a lot of talk about using LSD and other hallucinogens to treat PTSD and other mental health issues. I support any legitimate scientific research in that area. But I wouldn’t recommend LSD for recreational use nowadays. I have the suspicion that acquiring drugs on the street is far more dangerous and risky than it was in the good ole Grateful Dead parking lots or dormitory poker games of the 1970s. And, frankly, it wasn’t all that safe then. 

So-called “bad trips” are a real thing. I’ve had a couple. Plus, I think it’s just generally risky to take large quantities of these drugs, particularly acid. I have known people who, as the saying goes, fried their brains on the shit. So, it’s not my job to tell anyone what not to do, but I will say… be careful out there, fellow seekers. There are reasons these substances have been treated as transformative sacrament by many cultures and religions. There are reasons people speak of their “consciousness-expanding” effects. But there are also reasons to tread lightly. 

I’ll leave you with someone else’s words…

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.” —Hunter S. Thompson

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