CelticWanderer
Well-known member
Ok so here's the set up. I was working natural resources for a company on the islands of Southeast Alaska. Partied way to hard, all the time, and I think my roommate, who also happened to be my crew that day, and I partied harder than the rest. This thread got me thinking about the experience that I'm about to relate which led me to opening a journal for details that I haven't opened in years. I still can't tell you if this was a good trip, a bad trip, a religious type of thing or what - if I had to choose one it would be - (D) All of the above and more. I also still don't know what the fuck happened to my Nalgene, I lost it that day or my roommate took it, but if I still had it I would damn sure reserve a special place on the wall for it. I suppose I was preachy in my last post with me recommending that no one should do this so I apologize. You're all grown and if you come across the same situation, go ahead, it's your eyesight. I say that because I'm pretty sure this shit was turpentine as it came from a spruce and I'm just glad it didn't end badly for either of us, not one of my smarter moments. This is a much longer post than I typically write and I tend to overwrite everything but if you get bored it might pick back up, or maybe not. This may be the closest story to actual PINE CONE LIQUOR you ever hear. Long live Early Cuyler and Unknown Hinson, especially if they kick me down some royalties! Enjoy!
One of the responsibilities for this job was that we had was to determine the age of the trees within our study areas. In order to do this you use an increment borer. Without getting into a lengthy boring explanation, an increment borer is used to manually drill a ‘hollow screw’ into a tree and come back with a circular tree ring sample the diameter of the inside of the ‘hollow screw’. You then count the tree rings to be able to tell the age and growth rate of the tree. This process leaves a small hole in the tree which the tree fills with its sap in a couple of weeks. Typically the tree fills it with sap if it’s healthy, the tree that we bored that day had an entirely different reaction. As we pulled the bore out of the last tree that we sampled that day a stream of light brown fluid came shooting out towards us with enough force that it looked like a water hose - tree jizz. I was still trying to figure out what the Hell was going on when my roommate shouted ‘tap sap moonshine, hurry up and get it”. I plugged the hole with my thumb as he rummaged through our packs and found two thirty two (or forty) ounce Nalgene water bottles for the collection. I still didn’t know what in the Hell was going on but it would soon be explained to me. He took over the collection process and told me to go look at the top of the tree. I had to walk about a hundred yards before I could see the top and when I got there I saw that the top was completely gone, it had broken off years earlier in a storm and had been collecting water ever since. The water that the tree had been collecting over the years had accumulated and completely rotted the inside of the tree so that while the tree appeared alive it was dead inside and barely clinging to life. I realize that trees are ‘non feeling’ entities, depending on your beliefs, but I knew that the will for life was strong, even when you didn’t have anything to go on for. In my mind, this tree wasn’t living but rather slowly dying, giving up the ghost over decades instead of overnight, barely clinging to life, hoping things would get better. So he collected two bottles full of tree sap moonshine and we started the long, two mile hike, back to the truck. We thought about plugging the tree to keep the rest of the fluid inside but I convinced him to let it go and maybe it would help to hasten the trees demise, maybe we could help end the process. That argument really didn’t do it for him, he still wanted to plug it, so I told him that we would never be able to find the tree again anyway and that seemed to do it, we left.
As we started back towards the truck my roommate kept talking about what a rare find and gift from God this was, to which I replied, “It’s your gift, not mine. I’m not drinking any of that shit”. He replied, “Fine that’s more for me and you have no idea what you’re missing”. As soon as he said that I started to wonder what it was that I was missing and that was enough to cement the idea of trying it, in and of itself. I still thought that he was trying to put one over on me and told him so, I wasn’t about to try something before he had taken it, I told him that as well. So he took a drink, then another, and then another. Each time he drank I could see his face contort into a Hellish vision of revolting nastiness that I had not even seen during my first beer experience. He told me that the rain water collected in the tree over time and naturally fermented when it combined with the sap. I had drank real moonshine in the South on several occasions which made me way to comfortable with the situation before me. I asked him to explain what it felt like and the only description he could give was ‘good’, he stopped speaking in the eloquent sentences at which he was so good at and had quickly devolved into one word answers by the time he started stumbling around fifteen minutes later. My roommate had taken about sixteen ounces of the liquid and he was stumbling and falling all over the place, then laughing like a madman because of it. This was something that I had never seen him do before then no matter how much he had drank and smoked. I decided that I had to try it, that maybe just a little would get me in on the experience without making me into the blathering stumbling idiot that he had become, it was a wrong decision. So about a mile and a half from the truck I decided to do it, I drank ‘tree sap moonshine’.
It smelled rank to an extreme degree, the acrid stench would actually burn your nostrils like turpentine or paint thinner which was probably closer than what it was than alcohol. As I was busy smelling it and having second thoughts my roommate said, “Don’t play with it, take a big drink or hand it to me. Stop playing with it”. So I took my first drink and drank a couple of ounces before I stopped, handed him the bottle and he drank some more, then I downed another two to three ounces before putting the bottle away and continuing on. The liquid burned my throat and made my stomach feel like it was on fire as it quickly entered into my bloodstream. It started to take effect on my mind about ten minutes later and I instantly knew that I had made a mistake as soon as the green world in which we were walking turned completely pink, then completely blue, then completely orange. I had done mushrooms several times in the past and the effects that I was feeling at the time were about ten times stronger than any shroom high that I had ever been on. I hadn’t even taken anywhere near the of the amount that my roommate had and I was fucked up beyond all belief. I could remember which direction that we were headed but for the longest time, time really didn't matter anyway, I couldn’t remember why we were headed there. While I normally had no trouble walking, especially in the woods, my feet just wouldn’t cooperate with my brain. It seemed as if there was some kind of ‘nerve block’ around my waist that wouldn’t let the appropriate nerve impulses through to make my feet move like they should. I soon lost all vestiges of feeling in my lower body and while I could see my legs, for some reason I thought that my left knee cap, the one I had surgery on, was missing. I kept reaching down to feel the knee cap with my hands and making sure that it hadn’t fallen off. I think the reason for that was that it no longer hurt, in fact, there wasn’t a part of my body or soul that hurt - I felt ten feet tall and bullet proof. I just had a problem making my motor skills operate in concert with my mind and I knew that this was not anywhere near the place for that to happen. So we sat down and I called in that we would be late arriving at camp that evening as we had fallen behind and were just leaving our work site right then, that bought us a couple of more hours before we would be missed. My roommate drank a few ounces more, I declined, then reconsidered, I shouldn't have. When I sat down I had hoped that the hallucinations and severe lack of coordination would leave me as quickly as they had appeared but no such luck.
I called in on the radio to say that everything was fine and that we were making our way towards the truck from our most distant plot. As soon as I was finished talking I became violently ill and I threw up everything that I had eaten for what seemed like the past month. I’ve never been so sick in all my life, not even with the migraines that I had experienced in college. I was so ill that I couldn’t even sit up straight without falling over, I had to lay face down over a fallen log so that I could vomit without having to move, moving seemed like too much effort at the time. All the while that I was doing this my roommate sat about ten feet away, smiling just as widely as he could smile. He told me that part of why he was smiling was the moonshine and a bigger part of it was seeing me on my first trip. He knew about the hallucinations but had decided to skip that part earlier when I asked what it did to you, in order to see me drink it. The trip was amazing and terrifying all at the same time, I had thrown up so much that I knew I was going to die and the hallucinations were so strong that I knew I would go blind just before I died. While I may have convinced myself of my impending death it really didn’t concern me at the time. We started moving towards the truck after a half an hour or so, I don’t really know how long it was, it seemed like we had been sitting there for days, and what a long strange walk it turned out to be.
We both started running into to random objects such as trees which magically appeared out of nowhere, and each other. Every time we would do this we would laugh hysterically at our misfortune. We fell down so much during the rest of the walk that we spent more time on the ground than we did walking. Several times I remember falling down and just crawling along the ground for fifty yards or so because it seemed like too much effort to get up until I found ‘just the right tree’ to help me. Since I witnessed my roommate crawling along the ground as well I knew he was feeling the same effects and probably to a much higher degree because he had drank much more than me and had been able to keep it down. As I continued to walk, and fall, and crawl back towards the truck I reached a strange disassociation state in which I felt that the actions I was taking were not my own. It felt as if my soul were attached by the smallest of threads to the rest of my body. I was so intensely interested in that feeling I didn’t even recognize the truck or the fact that we had arrived at our destination when we got there or that "we" was just me. The only thing that I remember is crawling into the back of the truck to lay down and hope that this was over with quickly. I no longer knew nor did I care where my roommate was, I only knew that I was safe and tripping balls in the middle of nowhere. I thought that I was dying and the idea filled me with joy, what a way to go. My roommate had actually stopped to smoke weed about a quarter of a mile before we reached the vehicle. Since he recognized the area he knew that he could get back by himself so he wasn’t surprised when he tried to stop me to smoke and I just kept going. When he told me this upon reaching the truck forty-five minutes later I vaguely recalled him trying to stop me but either I didn’t hear him correctly or I just didn’t care, I kept stumbling. As I lay in the truck bed for an eternity my whole world turned upside down. The trees that had stood solid and strong for hundreds of years all of a sudden started wavering back and forth like a childs ribbon in the wind. They were still firmly rooted in the ground but now every single one of them was dancing wildly into the sky. I could feel the ground moving beneath the truck, not like an earthquake but rather like the gravel road had somehow turned to mud and was sliding quickly from beneath the wheels. The various sounds of the birds calling around me was magnificent. It was if every bird had their own megaphone and every single one of them had it on full blast broadcasting their horny to the world. The angry, rain-laden clouds in the sky were constantly transforming shapes so that they would become exactly what I wanted to see and some clouds changed shapes several times before I lost sight of them or became more interested in a different cloud. The five to ten mile an hour breeze had also ‘magically’ built into a thirty mile an hour gust, a gust which seemed to penetrate every pore of my body and become a part of me. For the longest time as I lay there the wind became a part of my body and a greater feeling of freedom I had never had. I felt that if I were only to stand up and spread my arms that the wind would lift me to wherever I wanted to go, to freedom, to a higher reality. Towards the end of the moonshine experience my upper body started getting hot, I still couldn’t feel my lower body but I felt if I were on fire from the waist up so I did the only thing I could think of, I stripped naked from the waist up and laid back down. All of the effects of the wind that I have previously described were now multiplied by a factor of at least ten and the freedom that I had previously felt was pale in comparison to what I was feeling now. I laid there enjoying the unbelievable experience for as long as I could until the boss called on the radio, we were already a half an hour late and he was checking on us. I told him that we were just getting to the truck and that it would be thirty minutes before we got back to camp, I got up to find my roommate.
I looked for him for about five minutes, although it seemed like three hours, before I started calling his name. After another five minutes he answered, mad as Hell that I had awoken him from his dream. Then he asked what had happened to my clothes, I forgot to put my shirt and jacket on before going to look for him. He had walked off into the wilds about a hundred yards, found a comfortable tree to lean back against, promptly sat down and passed out. His anger was short lived when I told him that we were overdue and they were about to come out looking for us. While what we had done wasn’t technically illegal as far as listed narcotics go we both knew that we would be fired if we were caught. This was not an option for either of us because I needed the work experience to get a ‘real job’ and he needed the money to buy some “kind winter gear” for the upcoming snow season. So off we went towards the truck, arguing back and forth about who would drive when we got there, no one wanted to be responsible in the shape that we were in, I ended up driving.
I’m not sure how I drove the miles back to the camp that I did - based on the things that I saw at the time. It was a manual shift truck and I was aware of my left leg working the clutch but I had to watch my leg do so every time because I couldn’t feel it working, I had not regained any feeling below the waist. I remember slamming on the brakes several times so that we didn’t run right into trees that had fallen across the road while we were working, the problem with that was that there were no trees actually there. We did make it back though and just as the boss was getting in the truck to come look for us at the time. Since the three of us were already outside, he chewed the both of us out a little for being late. I don’t think we said two words between us for his entire speech. There was no defense to be given and neither of us wanted to give away the shape that we were in by speaking. The boss knew my roommate was continuously smoking weed so he didn’t question him about why he looked ‘off’. He did ask me what was wrong with me, I lied and told him I was tired. Well, it wasn’t a complete lie, I was tired but I was way too fucked to sleep. I found that out because I went inside and immediately to my bed. I knew it was better to hide this from everyone, and keep to myself.
So I went to lay down and while all I was wanting was to sleep, sleep was the last thing that came for me. I lay there for several hours before I was able to nod off and saw some pretty amazing things as a result. I saw the raised texture bumps on the roof start to crawl, move, and pulse in rhythm. They would crawl for a minute in patterns that weren’t readily discernible to the human mind, then throb for a minute, then be completely still for five more minutes. The best part of the show was waiting for them to start the whole process over again because it was fascinating to no end to predict how they were going to dance the next time. As soon as that show was over the light show started. I forgot why it was that I turned my bedroom ceiling light on, I think it was to be able to see if my kneecap had floated off again but I remember laying there in bed on my back looking directly into the uncovered light bulb burning above me in the middle of the room. As I looked at the dim yellow bulb blazing away in all its glory the light fixture disappeared and was replaced by a hole the size of a basketball in the ceiling. From out of this ceiling hole poured a much brighter, much more intense light that was brilliant white and whose beams stretched all the way to the floor in the perfect circle the shape of the ‘hole’. I wanted so much to walk across the room and touch the light but my body wouldn’t move because my mind was sure that if I touched the light that it would disintegrate my hand so I stayed put. A couple of minutes after the light appeared through the hole in the ceiling paint started bubbling around the sides of the hole and flowing across the ceiling in a multitude of brilliant colors the likes of which I had never seen. Every color of the rainbow that God forgot to include came out of that hole, made its way across the ceiling and flooded down the walls that night. I watched the colors for what seemed like an eternity before I finally passed out to sleep and when I did dream, I had the best dream that I’ve ever had in my life.
I fell into sleep and starting falling off a cliff as I always do when I fall asleep. I always jostle awake right before I hit the ground but not this night. On this night, just before I hit the ground I spread my arms and the wind filled me completely, making me lighter than air as I flew off from the bottom of the cliff. Up and away I soared from the Earth until I could see the entire globe like an astronaut looking from the moon, only I didn’t just see one side of the earth, somehow I was seeing into every corner of the Earth at once. I thought this is the view of God, maybe I’m about to have the religious experience that I wasn't even sure that I believed in. So there I was above the Earth, arms still outstretched, I started pummeling back toward Alaska at a breakneck speed that must have been several hundred miles an hour at least. I was shooting so fast in my dream that I actually had the fire trail of atmospheric resistance that you see in all the space movies. Although I was engulfed in flames, I felt none of it as I plummeted to Earth picking up speed, bracing for the crash. Then, just before I touched the top of the tree line by camp where I was sleeping I just stopped, mid-air, mid-flight, I just stopped. I didn’t swoop away as an airplane would if they were pulling out of a dive and I didn’t hover like a helicopter, I was just still, like a movie on pause. Then I started moving again but not exactly flying this time, it was more like I was sitting still and the world was turning beneath me at an amazing rate of speed. I could only see the trees as a blur but I could clearly see the animals interacting beneath me. When I would see the animals it felt as if the world slowed down in order to let me watch them go about their day to day tasks of survival. So the world spun beneath me on the way across Canada and I experienced some of the most amazing scenery that I've never seen complete with a wildlife show, I enjoyed both the scenery and wildlife immensely. The world continued to spin beneath me and it spun all the way back to that small farming town where I had grown up, then the world stopped. I was initially disappointed at where I had ended up but that only lasted as long as it took to begin ‘flying’ again.
I began flying over the roof tops of the homes and buildings that I had grown up around as a child. To my surprise not only could I see what was going on outside the homes but within the homes as well. I saw everyone I went to high school with, people I hadn’t seen in over ten years, having their most intimate moments. There was plenty of sex but I observed even more fighting and discord going on below than I had imagined possible. As I soared on I arrived at the realization that life is mostly pain and darkness, that you lived for the few bright spots within the darkness, all of which were way too few and way too far in between. As I soared I came to a part of town that I didn’t recognize, I didn’t recognize it because I knew that it hadn’t been there when I was child and that no such spot existed today. As I approached the first house, I slowed to try and look in and to my shock the house transformed into the face of a woman that I had never seen before. It shocked me so badly that I sat straight up in bed, the dream was over. I remembered the face that woke me for years after that, I should have heeded that warning and since I didn’t I’ll remember that face forever. I also knew why my roommate had been so pissed off when I had awoken him in the woods, if he was having even half the dream that I had just had I probably would have killed whoever had awoken me. I knew that I had just had the best dream that I ever would in my life and the face at the end of the dream struck me with a foreboding feeling that I just couldn’t shake. Since I was still feeling groggy from the deep sleep and the after effects of the moonshine I chalked it up to a drug induced hallucination that I would never forget. I thought it would just be stupid to worry about the woman’s face from the dream, I had never met anyone who looked that before so I just thought it was a dream and not the foretelling that it really was at the time.
THE END
Yeah, the face story may be for another time but probably never.
I'm tired of editing so I'm done for now, if there's anything wrong with the style/usage it's bc I ran out of juice before I had a chance to make it right.
That was friggin amazing. What a story dude! Sounds like you were astral projecting or someshit when you were dreaming, only reason i say that is cause you went to very specific places and moved in very unusual ways.. Christ, I could not imagine stumbling through the alaska wilderness tripping my face off. Sounds like one of those drugs that woulda been used for shaman rituals or rites of passage.
I have to know about the face now D:Yer a fantastic story teller, I'd write that shit down in a book before ya kick the bucket. Stick in a free bin at second and Charles or something.
