Take Me For A Ride | Page 4

club.
When I was fourteen, I sensed that my father was growing tired, detached, and depressed, but I did not understand why. He expressed abstractions better than emotions, and found it difficult to vent the angers and frustrations which had accumulated from work and from home.
Nor did I understand that my mother freely gave to me what she, in her youth, had sorely missed: love. Oblivious to the magnitude of her workload--she taught full-time and was pursuing a Master's degree-- I grew angry with her as a teenager partly because she seemed insecure and overbearing, and partly because she expected me, my brother, and my father to help keep the house clean in the way that she wanted.
Despite my family's love for the outdoors, for our dog, and for one another, the emotional fabric that bound us together often seemed on the verge of ripping apart. And the problems only intensified as my brother and I grew older.
Two-and-a-half-years my elder, my brother was an avid backpacker and rock climber with jet-black hair, Gandhi glasses, and a gentle but determined disposition. He too felt that something in our family was "out of whack," and we occasionally discussed what we would do when we left home. But unlike me, he had no one to buffer him from my parents who, I was starting to discover, were only human.
I was a sensitive child. I was so sensitive that the sounds of someone chewing made me upset. I was a light sleeper. I was also a slob, a knee-jerk rebel, and something of a nerd when it came to doing things like making friends with girls. Nonetheless, I decided that I could work out whatever I needed to work out in a healthier environment than at home; the countdown to the last day of high school, after which I planned to set out on my own, began when I was around fifteen. Meanwhile, I read a lot and spent time with friends, some of whom also enjoyed hiking and bicycling.
In the summer of 1976, when I was sixteen, I bicycled from the White Mountains of New Hampshire to Boston with people from an outing club. One morning, as I watched my traveling companions prepare their daily dose of hallucinogens, I realized that I wanted to be part of their fellowship. The desire, however, was checked by a gut-level impulse to avoid drugs, so Jim, a sinewy guy stooped over a pot of boiling morning glory seeds, turned me on instead to The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This was a popular account of Carlos Castaneda's purported apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian medicine man Juan Matus, or Don Juan.
From the cover of the book peered a menacing and surreal painting of a crow.
"But a crow isn't always a crow," said Jim softly, paraphrasing Don Juan as he stirred the seeds. "Sometimes it's a powerful sorcerer in disguise."
Intrigued by the paradox of the crow, I plowed through The Teachings of Don Juan and through Castaneda's A Separate Reality and Journey To Ixtlan. At summer's end, still drugless and clueless as to whether crows were birds or sorcerers, I left Boston clutching a Castaneda book.
Back in New York, I chose to see the world less through the eyes of an eleventh grader taking honors physics and history, and more through the eyes of a sorcerer's apprentice. I incorporated into my daily routine Don Juan's recommendations. As an exercise in humility, I spoke aloud to plants. To *see* beyond society's description of reality, I tried to stop my thoughts. To expand my awareness beyond the confines of the waking state, I sought to wake within a dream.
My interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional reality led to an interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional education, and, that fall, I thought about switching to a public experimental high school founded in the late '60s. I firmly believed that I would thrive in a world without grades, attendance taking, tests, and requirements. In January, 1977, with the guidance of my brother, I managed to persuade my reluctant parents to let me join.
I chose to continue taking physics and history at the traditional school; other subjects I took at the non-traditional school where, in a creative writing class, I wrote:

Teachers force us to perceive, The surface world of reason: "A tree is but a pole with leaves, Whose habits change each season."

I thrived within a self-designed, academically rigorous educational program, but experienced no breakthroughs in my search for Hidden Realms of Perception until the following summer. The experience came when I was working ten-hour days and five-and-a-half day weeks on a farm in southern New Hampshire. In my spare time, I was designing and building an electricity-producing windmill, which ended up towering some twenty