Mondo & Me -- A Pleasant Summer's Day

The following is an approximate excerpt from the upcoming Mondo 2000 history, Use Your Hallucination by R. U. Sirius. Originally written for the Mondo 2000 History Project. Use Your Hallucination, coming soon to a universe near you.

I’m pretty sure I was along for more than one climb up those hills, but there’s one that stands out in my memory. It was that part of the year when it’s sunny and warm without being too warm to climb up a hill, and not much chance of fog. The LSD was well-manufactured; we dropped while we were still at sea level, and started up the side of the cliff. There was some kind of wooden “stairs” fitted into the side of the hill that facilitated climbing, at least until you get to this old WW-II observation bunker. I think there may have been another 10 feet of stairs above the bunker, but after that you were on your own. It wasn’t particularly steep, but it was most definitely uphill.

I don’t know how Marc decided we were far enough up the cliff. Thing about hiking around West Marin (of which I’ve done an absurd amount considering I’m not very outdoorsy), whenever you get to a trail summit, you find there’s an even higher summit just beyond. So maybe we kept on walking until Marc was tripping so much he couldn’t walk any more. I dunno. But that was about when it seemed to hit me; the effort of hiking would have kept the more psychic effects at bay until then.

I don’t really recall much of the trip itself; it was clear and not too disorienting, the environment felt safe. I had a good time. I think I remember Ken and I cracking each other up, but it’s not like we had to be high for that to happen. Where we’d stopped looked out over the ocean pretty much due West. Like I said, it was that part of the year when it didn’t get too foggy during the day, and to be sure we didn’t see any that afternoon. As dusk neared, and the Sun began to approach the horizon, we were still pretty high; and as it set, as it got lower and lower in the sky, as the air cooled off, a bit of fog started to form in the distance, along the horizon. Then the Sun’s disk touched the horizon. It was so low in the sky, we could look at it directly, and the lowness of the angle, with the reflections off of the ocean’s surface, made it look as if the Sun was hovering just above the water. As it got about halfway down, two clouds moved in from the sides, and blocked just enough, symmetrical, bits of the (now half-) Sun’s edge, making a shape like a flattish disk with a spherical center, seen from the side. A glowing orange disk with a fat part in the middle, floating over the ocean. An orange flying saucer. A glowing orange flying saucer, hovering over the water in the distance. Far distance? Near distance? Who could tell? Ken said he saw some zappy-like rays shooting off into the sky. I didn’t see that. I saw a frakking flying saucer. An orange one.

The Sun continued to set, and the saucer became obscured by clouds (ahem, cough, cough). Let me tell you, there’s nothing like jogging down a hill in the fading twilight when you’re still high on acid. The effective employment of gravity got us down to the cove in time for actual darkness, which was exaggerated a bit due to our location at the bottom of a valley. Walking back to the car, several cows gave us the ol’ hairy eyeball. “These guys are back”, they seemed to be saying to each other. A couple of us tried to approach a few of them in a friendly manner, but they were having none of us. Tipping, as ever, was ironically suggested. None of us would actually do that, of course.

Here’s Google Earth’s view of Tennessee Cove. The beach is at the bottom to the right. What looks like a deepish, straightish line just above the beach is the “staircase”. That green, protected area at its top is, I believe, the bunker. Follow the trail along the cliffs to the mesa where we stopped. Those small figures on the beach and along the trail are, I believe, cows.