Babo and Mushrooms

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Babo and Mushrooms


Images of the historic American West dance through my hemispheres. I have been watching Little Big Man. It was a movie I saw at the Drive Ins in Tucson. I had to see it three times to put it together in it’s entirety, because Drive Ins, those airy, dusty pillars of sight and sound, where all things were possible in the confines of metal and glass, were the province of dates with young high schoolers. Sheleen Lemar was one name I remember. Others are lost to time but not to feelings, the feelings of fight and conquest.
The glorious history of the American West was once a life force in several friends and me. It was in us as we hefted our old backpacks and headed down trails in desert and mountain where society croaked and solitude breathed.
Baboquiviri is the Center of the Universe, at least to the Papago Indians who live in this dusty southwest corner of Arizona. Nothing is more attractive to a couple of guys on shrooms, i.e. psychedelic mushrooms, than the Center of the Universe.


Here is what Wikepedia has to say about shrooms:

Sensory
As with many hallucinogens, the sensory effects are often the most dramatic of the experience. Common doses cause effects such as a noticeable feeling of heaviness, relaxation, enhancement and contrasting of worldly colors,[4] strange light phenomena (such as auras around lights sources),[3] surfaces that seem to ripple, shimmer, or breathe,[4] and other such visual hallucinations.[1]
Higher doses elicit a variety of intensified and distinct perceptual changes: complex open and closed eye visuals of form constants or images,[6] objects that warp, morph, or change solid colors (juxtaposed with the free-flowing colors of LSD), a sense of melting into the environment, trails behind moving objects, and auditory hallucinations.
Natural and artificial sounds seem to be heard with increased clarity; music, for example, can often take on a profound sense of cadence and depth.[4][6] Intriguingly, some users speak about the feeling of their senses overlapping or synesthesia, a rather interesting experience wherein the user perceives, for example, a visualization of color upon hearing a particular sound. The surface detail of everyday objects is viewed with increased acuity.[4] Unusual natural designs, such as wood grain, flow like rivers. Interesting textures can be quite stimulating to some users. A simple action such as pouring water into a glass can be extremely visually stimulating.
Emotional
Feelings of bliss, relaxation, wonder, anxiety, sadness, or fear have all been reported.[3] Some users may experience intense episodes of hilarity, such as laughing for the duration of the psychedelic experience.[1][6] Emotions can be experienced with increased sensitivity.[3]
Higher doses carry the increased possibility of a surreal event known as ego death,[4] whereby the user loses the sense of boundaries between their self and the environment, creating a sort of perceived universal unity. Users may experience intense feelings of connectivity with a higher power. Contradictory emotions, such as euphoria and despair, can be experienced simultaneously.[4] A sense of paranoia may be present,[3] and if provoked enough, could culminate into a bad trip. However, the possibility of a bad trip happening can be reduced by a comfortable set and setting.



This is what they look like.




Of course they didn’t look like that in the freezer of the Tarantula Arms. The Tarantula Arms? It was the nickname we gave the vomit-green stucco buildings on Euclid where we lived as undergraduates at the University of Arizona.
A little history of the Tarantula Arms. It was an apartment building a few blocks away from the University of Arizona campus. Rube and I rented it, but many others enjoyed its slack-eyed comforts during our time.
When we first went to check it out, the landlady, who looked like a trailer-park version of Wednesday Addams, showed us the second floor loft that would be our home for the next year and a half. She told us, dramatically, that there had been a body found in the attic, as if that would seal the deal for us. It did. During our stay there were no more bodies found inside the building, but there was one in the trunk of a car that came to be parked out front for week.


I don’t know who actually named it the “Arms”, but it was apt. The place enveloped us and the many friends who found it a swank place to hang out. Something was always going on there. Impromptu gatherings that were not really parties, but were sort of parties if you define that as people gathering and having fun and interesting times.

Here’s a picture of the back porch of the Arms. This would be a typical scene: people coming and going, dogs, someone looking inexplicably at a pan.



The man with the long dark hair is Dave Morris, who figures prominently in the Baboquiviri escapade. In fact, if not for Dave, I would never had enventured to Babo on Shrooms, so it is something I must hold in a bit of gratitude, since it is now a memory I hold dear of a life once lived and adventures once had.


Dave, sad to say, is now doing time for several misdeeds, drugs, fleeing, that sort of stuff. We think he’s in a work camp now. He was at Pima County for a while. I know of no one who has visited him, though Jay went out there once, but then walked away indignantly when they asked him to write down his social security number.
An interesting trivia about the Arms. It had bay windows in my bedroom nook that looked across the parking lot to the women’s dormitory. Of course, someone brought in the requisite telescope and we had our fun, but not excessively so. Not like the fun that Mark Delesdernier had. He was a friend of Bob Estes, who came over with Bob after being discharged from some sort of military service. He still had the haircut and the free-at-last facial expression. Mark was introduced to the telescope and the women’s dorm and took to it like honey on a snapping turtle.
The first time I had to go to class and Mark asked if he could stay and scope things out. No problem. He was still there when I got back from class. Turned out, he was back in the optic saddle every day for the next week, glassing all day and often into the night. I had to kick him out at bedtime. Finally I called Bob Estes and tasked him to break it to Mark that the Beaver Astronomy course was at an end.

From left to right: Me, Rube, Scott, Dave in front of the Tarantula Arms.

The Arms was the starting point of many trips into the wilderness, caravans of beat-up 60’s era cars waddling into the sunset crammed with gear and excitable matriculators. Many voyageurs of the day came through our digs, including Dave Morris and Scott Vojta. We met Dave in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University, where several of our pod had started out. Dave and Scott were from Crystal Lake, a suburb of Chicago, and there was a connection from that geography with a number of Arms people. Dave and Scott had lived in Portland, Oregon for a while, before hitchhiking down and taking up residence in the Arms. Now, I live in Portland. Scott Vojta lives in Flagstaff and Dave is incarcerated in Tucson. Funny how things end up.


Rube, Me, Jay, Leslie Lindig (who got a great dinner out of Jay once)

They just showed up and moved in with Rube and I. It got pretty cramped for a while, but Scott turned out to be a great cook and started making breads with fascinating ingredients. You could live off that bread. We did.
What probably saved an unpleasant end, was that the Arms became condemned and suddenly we didn’t have to pay rent and no one showed up and told to us to move and the apartment across the hall was vacant so Dave and Scott moved in there and decorated their side with palm fronds. All was groovy.


Dave, in particular, was a connoisseur of psychedelics and was adept at guiding others down the path of fluidity. Over the Christmas holidays that year I eschewed the usual hearth and football games pudding and took a series of mind-bending trips under the tutelage of our provincial Prankster. It turned out to be a trilogy. It turned out the trilogy ended before the holidays were over and I was back to a sort of normalcy before classes began, but it was a changed normalcy, not to make too much of the spiritual evolution that psychedelics are famous for.


Descent into Havasupai Canyon on an illegal trail without reservations.


Forget the first two trips. That is, you forget them, I never will. An amalgam of images inhabits from those first two. Roads becoming rounder and never ending and each curve having the same “Pat’s” hamburger joint. A Dickensian image of rooftops on stores on 6th Avenue, black silhouettes like chimney sweeps popping up and down behind rooftop entries while exciting police cruisers menaced below. The Heart of the Sunrise viewed from the top of Wildcat’s Stadium above the calculus of empty seats and the ghost of roars. You can sense where it all leads.
But it was the final trip, the climax of the trilogy that led me back home and I shudder to think what would have become of me if I hadn’t taken it. The first two trips had been mescaline or LSD, heck I can’t remember, but the third was shrooms. They had been sitting in the freezer for a while. It was just Dave and me at the Arms one night. Dave was also a connoisseur of Carlos Castaneda. Dave suggested, “Let’s take the shrooms and go out to Babo and spiral up the mountain and ascend into the universe.” Sounded good.
We threw together some pack gear and took the shrooms and drove out to Babo, which is outside of Sells on the Papago reservation, about an hour and half from Tucson. The night was dark. Duh. Black clouds scurried overhead. We headed up the trial.
I don’t remember how we got separated or why we chose to ditch our packs for the climb. But, I remember sitting on a large boulder by the trail. Dave walked by.
I said, “Dave”. Dave whirled.
“Who’s there?”
“Dave, it’s me.”
“I knew you’d be out here. I knew you’d guide me. It’s just like Chinese checkers in the desert. I’m going to the top, but I’m not stopping.”
Dave thought I was Don Juan. I let him keep thinking that and he eventually headed up the trail. I headed up the trail behind him but soon he was nowhere in sight. By now it was inky black and huge fog banks were pushed overhead by a cold wind. I could barely see the trail. I had a conversation with myself about fear and about how fear could be separated from the mind by an act of will and I was willing my fear to separate and it was actually working pretty well.


Which was a good thing because, suddenly, there was a huge roaring sound all around me. It didn’t have a focal source, it was all enveloping. It’s one of those things that happen so fast the mind can’t process it. But the image clicked and it’s still in its cortical file to this day. Coppola could have used this image in his overwrought Black Stallion movie. I was only able to shutter click a few frames of the bouncing withers of the herd of Indian ponies as they disappeared into the swirling fog. They had run around me in the blackness without ever touching me, flowing like an equine river around a very stoned stone.
That alone would have made this trip a worthy one, without the later near-death experience.
There is a point where the Babo trail runs into a stone face and one must begin a basic rock climb to make it to the top. In the daylight the climb is not excessive, although it is exposed and potentially dangerous as Mike Flood found out when he fell off and broke both his legs and spent four days in a sleeping bag waiting for a rescue that was initiated, actually, by Jay who was supposed to go on a ride with Mike (he prefers to be called “Miguel” in the manner of most people in Tucson prefer nicknames) and when Miguel didn’t show up, Jay called his work and he hadn’t reported for work on Monday and Jay knew he was going to Babo and eventually a search was started and they found Miguel in a state of sanguine discomfort peacefully contemplating his death.
I don’t know if the shrooms were waning, but Dave showed up at the rock escarpment and we wisely decided not to try the climb in pitch darkness and headed back down the peak. It was raining by then. It was cold. We didn’t have adequate thermal protection and I became increasingly cold and eventually sleepy.
Dawn came. We were lost, disoriented. We couldn’t find our packs. I told Dave I needed to rest and promptly lay down in the dirt. Dave told me later that he couldn’t wake me up for five minutes and started pounding on my chest. When I woke up I could hardly walk. We might have been totally off a trail by then. Somehow we stumbled across on old cowboy shack. There was a fireplace. We gathered wood. We had a few matches. We tried to light tinder with the matches and it wouldn’t go. We were down to the last match. It lit at the last second. I started to revive with the heat, but didn’t think I could walk very well. Dave said he would go look for our packs. I couldn’t believe it.


An hour or so later Dave came in with both our packs. Maybe this was a miracle or maybe it just seemed that way to me. We ate. I felt stronger and we finally made it back, all the way to the welcoming Arms and bread and friends and whatever the future held.



My future wife sitting next to Dave before his decline.