A group of us took my camper perched atop a 1947 Willies pickup for a long trip into the mountains in mid state Washington in very early spring. There were 5 of us, we took several cases of beer, a couple dozen tabs of high grade acid, each of them at least two way, we took peyote buttons, dexadrine, doriden, and anything else each of us happened to have in our medicine bags.
We got up into the mountains to where the snow was several feet deep in the middle of a dirt road, parked, lit up my wonderful catalytic heater and set down to work.
We set up a game of monopoly - right there in the middle of this cramped, made for two wooden camper, wedged ourselves into the corners, set up our lighters and cigarettes and ashtrays. We alloted each with their money, their markers, agonized over who would be the banker and began what was the most hellish game of monopoly ever plaid.
You see, we randomly laid pills all over the board. The do not pass go square had a tab of acid, park place had some speed, the tax square had the doriden - and so forth. We determined that as we played we had to eat what ever pill was on the square we landed AND the tab was replaced with another.
Now I don't really remember which pill was on which square but I do know that in the 8th or 10th hour we all began to loath the game of monopoly and we began to forget who's turn was whos. We all lost track of which pills each person had and how many - the doriden and the speed tended to keep us from flying around the room under the influence of all that acid. We were cooped up in this tiny camper with a little heater while the outside temperature plumeted to far below zero. Allthe while we were drinking beer after beer after beer. After a while this tiny room, filled with sweating tripping farting guys became our entire universe except for the times when we, one by one crept outside to pee and toss our trash. This was to go on for a grand total of four days - the monopoly game was never quite complete, ever, we lost cash, we misplaced the markers - especially the dog, over and over again (I think it was the dog). The dice? My friend Paul, wise as he still is, had put a dozen dice in his pocket and each time the dice bounced into the recesses of the couch or the bed or the tiny stove one of us would exclaim "THAT IS IT, WE ARE DONE, why... we can't go on without dice, let's figure something else to do" whereupon paul would produce another set and we would go on. None of us even had the presence of mind to question how he kept finding the dice and it was only a week later cleaning up the filthy mess of my camper that I wound up counting all the dice I found.
sometime early the next morning we decided to venture out at least to strech our legs and I demanded that none of us go more than a few feet from the camper, I was certain that we would all get hypothermia and die there in the middle of the road. That didn't happen, we took a several hour walk and finally went back to the camper to continue our damn game. I don't know why but it was infinitely important that we continue to play. If for some reason we quit the game, the universe would end, everyone in the world including ourselves would die a painful death so it was up to us to continue to roll the dice and continue to decifer the meaning of the spots on them and continue to attempt to figure out which direction we were to move and to put our finger on where we started from and count, one by one, at times with all of us helping "one......two......three......four......five .....six - ooops, you landed on the blue acid! and we were chided and goaded into eating it. Now I was keeper of the acid - I always was, and after the end of the second day I claimed that we could not continue unless we halved the dosages - I lied, we could have continued far longer but i was beginning to have trouble with my emotions and I feared landing on yet another full tab of those little double dome things, I perpetually hoped i would land on the Doriden because it seemed to bring me down a bit but we were all ruthless on each other - you LAND on the pill you EAT the pill whatever it was.
On the third day we were running low on beer and we heard the whine and thunder of snow mobiles where for days we had heard absolutely nothing. Recall, we had stopped in the very middle of a real honest road that people used to go from place to place, not over to the edge, not in a bend in the road just right there in the middle.
We were terrified. Recall that we were the center of the universe and that our game was paramount in keeping the wheels of God himself turning at a measured clip, we were Esential to the workings of all things and we must get back to the game.
Except that the snow mobiles didn't pass us by, there was a knock at our tiny door and two park rangers were waiting for us to emerge from our wooden, warm, stink ridden cave.
When we emerged into the new light of the morning we surveyed our camp sight.
That is a picture that remains with me. It was a scene of depravity. The truck was compleley surrounded by yellow stain, eminating stripes radiating from the truck - it was like a child's drawing of the sun with a rust-orange truck and a home made camper in the center - it was the result of gallons of pee the markings of primitives of their tiny territory and, in the morning it stank. Now surrounding that was a layer of detrius, cans of olympia beer, some crushed some whole, bottles , squat and round EVERYWHERE in a range of 15 yards in every direction from the camper - a halo of beer leavings. The five of us, and the two rangers surveyed the site for what honestly seemed like hours, all of us actually seeing it for the first time, we looked at the absolute squalor in unison. We were high enough to take in the totality, we saw if from 100 feet above, we saw it from a thousand feet, we saw it from every angle at the same time.
we saw it through the eyes of the rangers, we saw it in it's acid totality and we were shrunken in our embarassment. Then we were fearful as no one could help but see that our eyes were pools of black and brown, our cheeks were bruised, blood vessils in our noses burst and gleeming in that cold morning sun, our breath fetid from slim jims, cheetoes, sardines and pickled herring. We were sure there would be some sort of instant recrimination, jail time, pillory, public humiliation, why the GAME would be stopped and all people would die in their tacks.
but the sceen was so horrific that I believe the rangers were incapable of rational reaction. Oh, the YELLLOW of the snow, the imensity of it, the streaks, melted into tiny canyons where it has refrozen almost instantly. that coil of frozen shit sprinkled with toilet paper over there "hidden" behind a pitiful stick or two - hell it seemed like a nice blind at the time.
"uh... you boys WILL pick up your.... garbage before you go, won't you?" "you ARE leaving soon, right?". We were reduced to very long pauses, weakly substituting for considered thought followed with an "aaaah, well, we uh, mumble turn to a partner and htat partner simply repeating our sutumbling "response". Only one of our member, Neil, was capable of long term coherent thought and he spoke for our band, or band that was amazed and grateful that he WAS capable of cogent understandale thought. and with that the snowmobiles slowly glided away, with the rangerslooking back in what must surely have been horror.
When the doriden had finally overcome the speed and the diminishing potentcy of the acid we dutifuly pickedup our trash and made the long trip home, as it turns out - on fumes oth of the fuel kind and of the mental kind - seems as though our catatlytic converter used more than we had anticipated.
I counted my supply several days later, I had brought 28 tabs of high potency acid with me, I had 3 and some crumbs left. I never heard a count on the speed but I know they were flying off the table at times. The doriden? a full prescripton bottle of 30 was completely empty. We had neve gotten around to the peyote 0 thank god, I don't know what the rangers would have thought about pounds of puke layed thickly on the yellow snow.