Portland in 2011 was like a Chinese buffet of New Agey spiritual counterculture. I dabbled in everything: I had reiki done on me, I got into improvisational dance, I owned a tarot deck, and I smoked tons of weed.
This was all deeply inauthentic. Let me just say that outright. If there were a prison for crimes against the soul, I would be serving a life sentence. That would explain a lot, actually.
Probably the most authentic experience I had the entire time I was out there happened the night after I took part in a three-day shamanic dance workshop on MLK weekend that year. We were driving back from the venue, a mineral springs in the mountains near Salem, and realized we'd taken a wrong turn after driving eleven-point-five miles up an impassable, snow-covered route and getting our car stuck. The reason I know it was eleven-point-five miles is that we calculated the distance after walking the entire way back to the retreat center in the dark. It was cold, and at one point I actually took a shit in the woods. We didn't have any toilet paper, I just had to tough it out.
I survived, though. A few hours later and we had made it back to the springs, I had finally wiped myself, and my companions and I were passing a joint around and reading each others' auras in the mess hall, waiting for a tow truck slowly to wind its way up the mountain to fetch our vehicle. It had practically been worth all the trouble.
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Later that April, deciding according to some kind of Nietzschean stoner logic that this experience had made me a better person, I drove out to Mt. Hood on Walpurgisnacht, the witching eve before Beltane – May Day, for those of you unacquainted with the neo-pagan liturgical calendar. I intended to do a midnight ritual, whereby I would glue back together the pieces of a ceramic goddess Isis statuette, which some guy my housemate was fucking had carelessly knocked over and broken the previous year.
The thing was, I didn't bring any camping gear to Mt. Hood with me. Or food, or a light source. Not even a sleeping bag. Basically all I had with me was my Isis statuette, some matches, a ceremonial candle, and some rubber cement. I figured it was springtime, and would be plenty warm; I would fast all night, and sleep under the stars.
I reached the trail-head around sunset, and marched into the woods. It was a stark, austere landscape, overcast as night fell, and before long the woods gave way to acres of recently clear-cut wastes, trunks jutting out endlessly like gravestones in the expanse, stacks of stories-long lumber raised like forlorn ziggurats. I trudged on, and by midnight had happened upon an elevated landing in the center of a flowing stream, which I'd crossed precariously along a fallen tree trunk to reach.
Anyway, it got way cold. Once the ritual was complete, and the adhesive applied, I didn't get any sleep. I'd gotten my boots and socks wet, and I spent the better part of an hour trying to warm my freezing bare feet before resigning myself to their being incessantly in pain. It dawned on me that I might be in trouble, but by then, it was too dark to book it out of there. I spent an endless night watching the skies, which had swelled with clouds that I was sure would open up on me, as if to pronounce some terrible last judgment.
Eventually, morning came. I gathered my things, and started to make my way back across the tree bridge to leave. I lost my footing, and fell up to my waist in the stream. I waded to shore, limped, and then practically crawled the way back to my car, lugging my boots by their shoelaces, as I couldn't fit my feet into them. I made it back, but wound up with frostbite, and have permanent nerve damage in one of my toes now.
You know what the worst part was? The rubber cement I'd applied to my Isis statuette didn't hold. I had failed to fix it. Story of my life.
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Later that October, around Samhain, I took a train up to British Columbia. I didn't have much of an itinerary: I just walked everywhere, halfheartedly loitered around the Occupy camp in Vancouver, went to museums and aquariums and smoked weed.
Later that week, in Victoria, I met a young woman at the youth hostel where I was staying. She was from northern France, loved Hunter S. Thompson, and dressed like a sailor. I have to admit, I fell pretty hard for her. By the time I'd left we'd exchanged email addresses, and corresponded intermittently for a couple months after I'd made the return trip to Portland. After that, though, she didn't write back to me.
During all of this, I was in therapy, digging through deep, repressed childhood memories. On top of that, I was going to EST-style spiritual work seminars, digging through deep, repressed childhood memories. This is how my guilt-addled privilege sought to correct itself: by way of weekly psychoanalysis and group chakra-opening intensives.
Anyway, I was smoking a lot, and not sleeping right, and I started making odd statements to people around me, and my thought patterns became increasingly erratic. One day, something in me just gave, and a change came over me. It came on quietly, and it came on quick. Before I knew what was happening, I'd packed up my things, walked to the bus station and boarded a Greyhound. The last thing I remember was noticing that the atmosphere was on fire.
