Take Me For A Ride | Page 4

a shredded poster of a man's face, and
there were many abstract photos which seemed to defy description. My
father, a production manager at a New York publishing company,
perhaps saw the world in a different light than his peers.
My mother was an elementary school teacher with black hair and
sometimes kind, sometimes intense eyes. A generous and caring
woman, she put her career on hold for more than a decade to raise a
family. She met my father in upstate New York on a hike sponsored by
an outing 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