MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,542
I just returned from the most memorable camping trip of my entire life. Were it not for good friends and good drugs, I'm very sure it would go down as the absolute worst.
It just so happened that three friends of mine, who are seldom free at the same time, were all willing and able to camp this past weekend. I'd looked at the weather report, and seen that after 1AM, there was a 30% chance of rain each hour through the following morning. So I packed 3 large tarps, thinking we'd probably get a few drops on and off through the night. As we pulled into the beautiful and thickly forested state park, it started to sprinkle. My wife asked me one more time if I was sure I wanted to do this, and I said yeah, let's give it a shot, since we had no idea when next we'd get a chance to camp with these particular people. The sprinkles stopped just as my friend M showed up with lots of rope and a ratchet set, and we set about hanging tarps around the trees and creating a big plastic roof over much of the campsite. Meanwhile, my other friends D and A went looking for firewood, and came back with a few enormous logs, at least 6ft long and 2ft in diameter.
No sooner had M and I gotten the fire going than the rain started again, this time for real. So we added wood to it in order to counteract the effects of the increased wetness, and soon we had a raging fire going with a few of those giant logs. We waited and waited for the rain to let up. It didn't. Finally we realized that although the fire wasn't going out, nor were we going to be able to cook on it. So D volunteered to go into town to pick up pizza. The rest of the evening just consisted of us sitting around under the ever droopier tarps, chatting, eating pizza, and drinking beer. The tarps kept us dry enough, as long as we remembered to dump out the pockets of water that collected on them, and stay away from the places where the water flowed out.
Eventually it got dark, and it came out that I'd brought some LSD with me. D had his two little kids with him, and didn't want to do any. My pregnant wife, likewise, did not partake. But A and M and I each put a hit on our tongue around 9PM, the kids went to sleep in their tent, and that's where the real adventure began.
Once it got dark and the LSD started to kick in (with the help of some marijuana), the whole scene started to take on the feeling of some sort of survival challenge. I had the illusory feeling that the forest did not extend very far beyond our campsite, as though we were on a movie set or pre-arranged challenge course of some kind, like in the movie 'The Truman Show'. The whole thing took on the feeling of a series of important tasks we had to complete in order to finish the course and get to the end. There were the ropes that needed to be tightened and the tarps raised. The fire needed to be stoked and fed. The table needed to be kept dry. A source of light needed to be found, other than the fire. I ended up putting an LED headlamp in an empty water bottle and hanging it, which shed a decent amount of light and earned me the praise of the other campers. I thought that if I were stuck in a real survival situation, my ingenuity would prove highly valuable. The rain was absolutely relentless, and came down violently for much of the night. I was surprised at just how untroubled I was by the whole situation. Normally I would have been grumpy and miserable, and suggested we pack up and leave. But it all just felt like a good healthy challenge at the time.
At some point, M announced that he'd brought an uncooked duck from the supermarket, and intended to cook it on our furnace of a fire. It was a mixture of hysterical and creepy to see M walk around the red glow of the massive fire with a giant knife in one hand and a plastic wrapped duck in the other. Bright lightning and thunder accompanied him as he slashed the duck's wrapper open and let the bloody juices drain onto the fire and sizzle. It looked like he was performing some kind of ancient animal sacrifice. (I remember thinking that if it's a sacrifice to the rain gods, it's sure working!)
For some reason, I had a knack for stoking the fire that no one else could match. So I was put in charge of doing that. The problem was, all we had to fan the fire were pieces of the cardboard pizza boxes, and those don't hold up too well in the rain after a while. So I mentioned that I was going to my car to get my ratty old atlas to use as a fan. It was already missing a couple pages, and I figured we could just turn it to the page of a state we'd never drive through, and let it get wet on that page. D said to me, "Yeah, but aren't you worried your atlas will get ruined?" To which I replied simply, with a mischievous tone, "Fuck Nebraska!" D, who was not tripping, joined in with a facetious, "Yeah, fuck them! Who the hell needs Nebraska?!" I got pretty tickled about this, and ended up laughing harder than I've laughed in months, until tears were running down my face. I ended up using the atlas as a bellows for only about a minute, until I noticed it getting wet and suddenly said out of nowhere, "Oh wait, if I ever drive cross country I'll probably need Nebraska, won't I? Oh shit!" This made everybody else laugh as a ran to put the atlas back in my car.
My wife and D eventually went to bed -- miraculously our tent was dry on the inside. My wife hadn't believed me when I told her that, since I was tripping. But it was true. That left just A and M and myself -- the ones who'd dosed. But all through the night, I kept feeling like we had a campsite full of people. I'd look up at the chairs where my wife and D used to be, and be surprised to find them empty. It was hard to believe only the 3 of us were still up. We talked about all kinds of things as the duck cooked, and kept coming back to one central topic: What if this weren't just one night, and instead we lived like this all the time? What if we were refugees, or nomads, or prehistoric people living in a primeval forest thousands of years ago? And that was when I realized that there was some very primal sort of joy to be found in camping. It could be challenging and at times uncomfortable, but it's an excellent bonding experience between friends because it gets us working together on overcoming lots of little challenges. I realized that the more I helped the people in my life overcome the challenges they faced, and let them do the same for me, the better friends I would have.
At one point when the fire needed stoking, M and I looked at each other like a pair of psycho killers, and one of us said to the other, "I've been eyeing D's cooler lid for some time now. What do you say we cut it off and use it?" We ended up resisting this urge, and making the cardboard last, since D has said he didn't want his cooler wrecked. But we were awfully tempted.
It took many hours, but finally the duck was cooked. A and I worried it wouldn't work, and M had assured us every time that it would be "Nice and moist"
. We laughed about this. We laughed about how giant the logs were. We laughed about "Fuck Nebraska". We emptied the roof. Finally, we ate great mouthfuls of smoky greasy duck meat out in the pouring rain. It was not a particularly visual trip -- the distortions were very mild and intermittent. The effects were mostly mental and emotional, drawing me into the tasks at hand, focusing me on the present moment, and shaking great peals of laughter from me at the silliest little things. I wore my typical joker grin my my face all night, as I almost always do when tripping. Also, as usual, I couldn't sit still.
I crashed around 4AM, my tent still miraculously dry. None of my friends were so lucky -- they all ended up sleeping in their cars. I would've let them into mine if we'd had the room. I was awakened 2 hours later to my cell phone ringing, displaying the number of my landlord (!) at 6AM on a Sunday morning. I feared something was terribly wrong, but I was in no state to talk to him. It gave me great relief to listen to his voicemail and realized he'd pocket dialed me.
We all woke up around 9, and quickly broke camp and headed for a diner for breakfast. I still felt a strong glow from the LSD, which was enough to make even this filthy task seem worthwhile. We made quite the appearance at the diner, reeking of campfire and cracking jokes like kids, in the midst of all the quiet local yokels on their way back from church.
Would I have preferred to see the forest in daylight on LSD? Of course. Nature is the greatest trip toy. Would I have preferred to sit by a nice dry fire in a nice dry chair and play the bongos M brought? Of course. It was pretty much the antithesis of an ideal camping trip, as far as material comforts were concerned. But I find myself looking back on the night fondly, as I'm sure I will for years to come, and am so glad I did it. Adventures like that are more fun to in retrospect anyway.
For what it's worth, I'm surprised I didn't trip harder on 200mcg. There are times I've taken "one hit" of acid, and had quite strong visual and thought distortions, enough to make it very hard to act sober. I'm kind of glad this wasn't one of those times, but I'm pretty sure if I want to get to that state again with these particular doses, I'll need 2 or 3. Either I've just become mentally more used to that headspace and thus more psychologically tolerant of LSD, or I've been sold some wicked strong doses in the past, unbeknownst to me.
It just so happened that three friends of mine, who are seldom free at the same time, were all willing and able to camp this past weekend. I'd looked at the weather report, and seen that after 1AM, there was a 30% chance of rain each hour through the following morning. So I packed 3 large tarps, thinking we'd probably get a few drops on and off through the night. As we pulled into the beautiful and thickly forested state park, it started to sprinkle. My wife asked me one more time if I was sure I wanted to do this, and I said yeah, let's give it a shot, since we had no idea when next we'd get a chance to camp with these particular people. The sprinkles stopped just as my friend M showed up with lots of rope and a ratchet set, and we set about hanging tarps around the trees and creating a big plastic roof over much of the campsite. Meanwhile, my other friends D and A went looking for firewood, and came back with a few enormous logs, at least 6ft long and 2ft in diameter.
No sooner had M and I gotten the fire going than the rain started again, this time for real. So we added wood to it in order to counteract the effects of the increased wetness, and soon we had a raging fire going with a few of those giant logs. We waited and waited for the rain to let up. It didn't. Finally we realized that although the fire wasn't going out, nor were we going to be able to cook on it. So D volunteered to go into town to pick up pizza. The rest of the evening just consisted of us sitting around under the ever droopier tarps, chatting, eating pizza, and drinking beer. The tarps kept us dry enough, as long as we remembered to dump out the pockets of water that collected on them, and stay away from the places where the water flowed out.
Eventually it got dark, and it came out that I'd brought some LSD with me. D had his two little kids with him, and didn't want to do any. My pregnant wife, likewise, did not partake. But A and M and I each put a hit on our tongue around 9PM, the kids went to sleep in their tent, and that's where the real adventure began.
Once it got dark and the LSD started to kick in (with the help of some marijuana), the whole scene started to take on the feeling of some sort of survival challenge. I had the illusory feeling that the forest did not extend very far beyond our campsite, as though we were on a movie set or pre-arranged challenge course of some kind, like in the movie 'The Truman Show'. The whole thing took on the feeling of a series of important tasks we had to complete in order to finish the course and get to the end. There were the ropes that needed to be tightened and the tarps raised. The fire needed to be stoked and fed. The table needed to be kept dry. A source of light needed to be found, other than the fire. I ended up putting an LED headlamp in an empty water bottle and hanging it, which shed a decent amount of light and earned me the praise of the other campers. I thought that if I were stuck in a real survival situation, my ingenuity would prove highly valuable. The rain was absolutely relentless, and came down violently for much of the night. I was surprised at just how untroubled I was by the whole situation. Normally I would have been grumpy and miserable, and suggested we pack up and leave. But it all just felt like a good healthy challenge at the time.
At some point, M announced that he'd brought an uncooked duck from the supermarket, and intended to cook it on our furnace of a fire. It was a mixture of hysterical and creepy to see M walk around the red glow of the massive fire with a giant knife in one hand and a plastic wrapped duck in the other. Bright lightning and thunder accompanied him as he slashed the duck's wrapper open and let the bloody juices drain onto the fire and sizzle. It looked like he was performing some kind of ancient animal sacrifice. (I remember thinking that if it's a sacrifice to the rain gods, it's sure working!)
For some reason, I had a knack for stoking the fire that no one else could match. So I was put in charge of doing that. The problem was, all we had to fan the fire were pieces of the cardboard pizza boxes, and those don't hold up too well in the rain after a while. So I mentioned that I was going to my car to get my ratty old atlas to use as a fan. It was already missing a couple pages, and I figured we could just turn it to the page of a state we'd never drive through, and let it get wet on that page. D said to me, "Yeah, but aren't you worried your atlas will get ruined?" To which I replied simply, with a mischievous tone, "Fuck Nebraska!" D, who was not tripping, joined in with a facetious, "Yeah, fuck them! Who the hell needs Nebraska?!" I got pretty tickled about this, and ended up laughing harder than I've laughed in months, until tears were running down my face. I ended up using the atlas as a bellows for only about a minute, until I noticed it getting wet and suddenly said out of nowhere, "Oh wait, if I ever drive cross country I'll probably need Nebraska, won't I? Oh shit!" This made everybody else laugh as a ran to put the atlas back in my car.
My wife and D eventually went to bed -- miraculously our tent was dry on the inside. My wife hadn't believed me when I told her that, since I was tripping. But it was true. That left just A and M and myself -- the ones who'd dosed. But all through the night, I kept feeling like we had a campsite full of people. I'd look up at the chairs where my wife and D used to be, and be surprised to find them empty. It was hard to believe only the 3 of us were still up. We talked about all kinds of things as the duck cooked, and kept coming back to one central topic: What if this weren't just one night, and instead we lived like this all the time? What if we were refugees, or nomads, or prehistoric people living in a primeval forest thousands of years ago? And that was when I realized that there was some very primal sort of joy to be found in camping. It could be challenging and at times uncomfortable, but it's an excellent bonding experience between friends because it gets us working together on overcoming lots of little challenges. I realized that the more I helped the people in my life overcome the challenges they faced, and let them do the same for me, the better friends I would have.
At one point when the fire needed stoking, M and I looked at each other like a pair of psycho killers, and one of us said to the other, "I've been eyeing D's cooler lid for some time now. What do you say we cut it off and use it?" We ended up resisting this urge, and making the cardboard last, since D has said he didn't want his cooler wrecked. But we were awfully tempted.
It took many hours, but finally the duck was cooked. A and I worried it wouldn't work, and M had assured us every time that it would be "Nice and moist"
. We laughed about this. We laughed about how giant the logs were. We laughed about "Fuck Nebraska". We emptied the roof. Finally, we ate great mouthfuls of smoky greasy duck meat out in the pouring rain. It was not a particularly visual trip -- the distortions were very mild and intermittent. The effects were mostly mental and emotional, drawing me into the tasks at hand, focusing me on the present moment, and shaking great peals of laughter from me at the silliest little things. I wore my typical joker grin my my face all night, as I almost always do when tripping. Also, as usual, I couldn't sit still.I crashed around 4AM, my tent still miraculously dry. None of my friends were so lucky -- they all ended up sleeping in their cars. I would've let them into mine if we'd had the room. I was awakened 2 hours later to my cell phone ringing, displaying the number of my landlord (!) at 6AM on a Sunday morning. I feared something was terribly wrong, but I was in no state to talk to him. It gave me great relief to listen to his voicemail and realized he'd pocket dialed me.
We all woke up around 9, and quickly broke camp and headed for a diner for breakfast. I still felt a strong glow from the LSD, which was enough to make even this filthy task seem worthwhile. We made quite the appearance at the diner, reeking of campfire and cracking jokes like kids, in the midst of all the quiet local yokels on their way back from church.
Would I have preferred to see the forest in daylight on LSD? Of course. Nature is the greatest trip toy. Would I have preferred to sit by a nice dry fire in a nice dry chair and play the bongos M brought? Of course. It was pretty much the antithesis of an ideal camping trip, as far as material comforts were concerned. But I find myself looking back on the night fondly, as I'm sure I will for years to come, and am so glad I did it. Adventures like that are more fun to in retrospect anyway.
For what it's worth, I'm surprised I didn't trip harder on 200mcg. There are times I've taken "one hit" of acid, and had quite strong visual and thought distortions, enough to make it very hard to act sober. I'm kind of glad this wasn't one of those times, but I'm pretty sure if I want to get to that state again with these particular doses, I'll need 2 or 3. Either I've just become mentally more used to that headspace and thus more psychologically tolerant of LSD, or I've been sold some wicked strong doses in the past, unbeknownst to me.
) thank you for your trip report! it was a good funny read