I was in California editing Entheogen when Kevin invited me up to a Fourth of July gathering in the Sierra Nevadas. One of those off-grid festivals where hippies congregate in mountain meadows to dance barefoot and remember what America was supposed to be about before it forgot.
"Bring someone," Kevin said. "It's a long drive."
I thought of Ionas.
We'd gone to school together back in Athens, debated on the same team, occupied adjacent desks and the same argumentative frequency. But then life split us like a river around stone—he went to business school, got his MBA, ended up at Google. I went... well, everywhere else. We hadn't spoken in eight years, maybe ten.
But he was in the Bay Area. And there was something appealing about the experiment: drop an MBA into a hippy festival, see what precipitates.
"I'll come," he said when I called. "But I need to be back Monday morning. I have a meeting."
"Deal. You can drive on the way back."
The drive up took six hours through valleys that gradually remembered they were mountains. We traded life updates like people comparing scars—his climb through corporate America, my descent into whatever this was. Me making films about entheogens, living in warehouses, following some trajectory he couldn't quite track.
I could feel his confusion, though he was too polite to name it. Why did you leave all that? What is this actually about?
I felt like I owed him an explanation I didn't have.
When we arrived at the festival grounds, Ionas stepped out of the car wearing boat shoes, a pink polo shirt, and shorts so aggressively short they constituted a position statement.
"I'm here to meet girls," he announced.
I looked around at the dreadlocks and drum circles and unwashed sincerity.
"You might want to lose the pink polo."
"Fuck that. They're going to like me for who I am. I'm not changing for them."
"Suit yourself."
We grabbed our camping gear and started walking. He made it maybe fifty yards before circling back to the car and changing into a regular t-shirt.
I loved him for trying.
Over the next two days, I watched Ionas adapt like a chameleon with an MBA. By day two he was attempting a hula hoop, talking to strangers, not judging me for any of it. He didn't touch drugs, didn't intrude on my space, just existed with remarkable grace in a world that wasn't his.
The last night came. The music was transcendent—that particular alchemy that happens when drums and fire and darkness conspire to dissolve the boundaries between bodies. I took mescaline around midnight and surrendered to the current.
By 4 AM the music had stopped but I was still sailing. The kind of high where trees breathe and the stars hum and you remember what it felt like before you learned words. I was sitting near the dance floor when I saw Ionas sleeping on the ground twenty feet away, curled up next to the speakers like a dog who'd found warmth.
And I faced a choice.
I could wake him now—honor my promise, get him back for his Monday meeting. He'd been sleeping all night, could drive. We could leave immediately.
Or I could pretend I didn't see him. Fall asleep myself. Claim I looked but couldn't find him in the dark. Stay in this state, this frequency, this dissolution.
I sat there for a long time watching him sleep and the forest pulse.
Then I walked over and shook his shoulder.
"Hey. You ready?"
He blinked awake, disoriented. "Yeah. Let's go."
I found Kevin, told him we were leaving. He looked at me like I was insane.
"Wait until morning. We'll all drive down together."
"I promised him noon."
Kevin handed me his keys. "Your funeral."
The car wouldn't start. Battery dead from sitting three days in mountain cold.
"Let's wait until people wake up," I said. "Someone will have jumper cables."
"No." Ionas was already moving. "I'll find someone."
And he did—some half-drunk mountain man still awake from his own journey. Together they pushed the car while I steered, engine turning over uselessly. Once. Twice. On the third attempt it caught, sputtered, roared.
"You sure about this?" I asked.
"Let's go."
We drove down the mountain in dawn light to a general store just opening. One of those rural outposts where the sign out front was older than anyone shopping there.
"You want anything?" I asked.
I just wanted water. I was still very high—that mescaline plateau where everything has weight and meaning and the fluorescent lights in stores feel like interrogation.
"Yeah," Ionas said. "I want cereal. And milk. And coffee. And a bottle of water."
I stared at him.
These were the most complicated items anyone on psychedelics had ever been asked to retrieve. The variables were infinite. What kind of cereal? Individual boxes or one large one? What size milk? Do you need a spoon? A bowl? Are you going to eat it in the car? How does one carry cereal, milk, coffee, AND water out to a vehicle?
The woman behind the counter was smoking menthol cigarettes at 6 AM and radiating a very specific energy: What do you want?
"Ionas," I said carefully. "I can't explain this, but what you've asked for is impossible. You're going to have to go in yourself."
He looked at me like I was the most useless person he'd ever met, which in that moment I absolutely was, and went inside.
I stood in the parking lot staring at the forest.
The trees were pulsing. The mountains had auras. And I felt it clearly: I don't want to leave. This is what I've been waiting for. This state. This frequency. I want to stay here.
Ionas came out carrying a bowl, spoon, box of Cheerios, coffee balanced in his other hand. He had a massive smile—Look, I pulled it off, you absolute disaster.
"I can't go," I said. "I need to stay. You don't understand."
He sat down on the curb and started eating Cheerios.
"Come on, man. You promised you'd keep me company. I kept my end."
I looked at the forest pulsing with color. Then at Ionas calmly eating cereal like the world made sense.
"Fuck it. You're right. Let's go."
We got back in the car and started driving.
The road was a narrow ribbon carved between two peaks with a river at the bottom of a ravine and train tracks running parallel like something out of a Western. No cell reception for thirty miles. The radio played for a while, then faded to static.
I put my seat back, tried to get comfortable. The mescaline was still there but softer now, integrating. I started to doze.
Then I heard it—the sound of tires hitting the grooved shoulder of the highway. That distinctive rumble: brrrrrrrr.
I opened my eyes. Ionas was nodding off behind the wheel.
"Hey—you alright? Want to pull over?"
He jerked awake. "No, I'm fine. I'm good."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. Keep talking to me."
So I kept talking. About nothing. About everything. Keeping him tethered to consciousness with the sound of my voice.
Ten minutes later I felt myself drifting again.
And the strangest thing: the exact moment I closed my eyes, he closed his.
Like we were psychically linked. Like two circuits that had synchronized and were now influencing each other's rhythm. He'd woken when I was ready to sleep. Now I was sleeping as he slept.
I don't know how long it lasted. Probably seconds.
But I opened my eyes and the car was plowing directly into the side of the mountain.
Pure instinct—I grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it left. The car swerved back onto the road, veering toward the cliff on the other side.
Ionas woke up terrified and jerked the wheel left again.
The whole thing spun.
Time collapsed into a single eternal moment of perfect clarity.
We were spinning toward the cliff. There was no guard rail. Below us was a 150-foot drop to the river.
And I thought, very clearly, very calmly: *I'm going to die.*
Not in panic. Not in resistance. Just recognition. The circuit completing. This is how it ends.
The left front wheel hit something—a rock, the mountain's edge—and broke. The car spun one more time and stopped.
Three feet from the cliff.
I sat there breathing.
Then I got out and looked.
A tree stump. One single tree stump growing at an angle out of the rock face. The back wheel had caught it. That was the only thing between us and the river below.
Ionas climbed out, pale.
For thirty seconds I yelled at him. Adrenaline and terror and rage that we'd almost died because we were both too stupid to pull over.
Then I realized: we were fine. We were completely fine. Not a scratch.
And I started laughing.
A car pulled up behind us—a woman in scrubs, a nurse on her way to work. She was screaming before she even got out, certain she'd just witnessed a fatality.
When she saw we were unharmed, she stopped mid-sentence.
"I'm calling the police when I get to the end of the valley," she said, still shaking.
We waited. Eventually a cop showed up—rural sherif, the kind who'd seen everything and was impressed by nothing.
He looked at the car. Looked at us. Looked at the tree stump.
Didn't ask for my license. Didn't ask for the car's registration. Didn't ask what happened.
"Tow truck's coming," was all he said.
They towed us back to the festival. It was 9 AM now, people packing up and leaving. I found Kevin.
"Hey man!" he said, grinning. "Glad you waited for us. Let's hit the road."
"Actually... there was an incident."
His face changed. "What the fuck did you do to my car?"
He stormed off before I could explain. The car was totaled. He'd figure it out.
Ionas and I stood at the festival entrance trying to figure out how to get back to San Francisco. It was noon. His meeting was in an hour. We were 200 miles away in the middle of nowhere.
Then Ionas disappeared.
I found him ten minutes later, coming back from a small airstrip I hadn't noticed—one of those rural airports for crop dusting and rich people with Cessnas.
"Two hundred each," he said. "We can fly to San Francisco. Be there in an hour."
The pilot looked like he'd been sent over from central casting: late 60s, full head of white hair, thick mustache, Marlboro Man sunglasses, checkered shirt tucked into tight jeans. The kind of man who called everyone "son" and had flown every kind of weather.
He led us to a small two-seater trainer plane. Ionas climbed in the back. I got in front.
"This is a teaching plane," the pilot said as he ran through the preflight check. "I use it to train new pilots."
We lifted off, the ground falling away, the mountains spreading out below us like a topographic map of my entire journey. All those peaks and valleys and rivers I'd been crossing for the past year suddenly visible as a single, coherent pattern.
We'd been flying for maybe fifteen minutes when the pilot turned to me.
"You want to take it?"
I was still high. Not peak mescaline, but definitely not sober. The trees were still breathing. The mountains still had that luminous quality.
"Sure," I said.
He showed me the controls. Explained the basics. Then let go.
And I was flying.
I don't remember being afraid. I remember thinking: *This is perfect.* Of course this is happening. Of course after almost dying on the ground, I'm now flying through the air while still tripping, with my business school friend in the back seat probably questioning every life choice that led to this moment.
The plane responded to the slightest pressure. Like thought translating directly into movement. Like the controls were just an interface for intention.
The pilot sat there calmly, not worried at all. Like he knew something I didn't—that flying isn't about control, it's about listening. About feeling the plane's relationship with the air and making tiny adjustments to stay in harmony with forces larger than yourself.
Surrender as mastery.
Trust as technique.
We flew across California like that—me at the controls, Ionas silent in the back, the cowboy pilot chain-smoking and occasionally pointing out landmarks below.
We landed in San Francisco at 11:55 AM.
Ionas made his meeting. We'd arrived at exactly the same time we would have if we'd driven.
Except we'd flown.
And the whole thing—the tow truck, the pilot, the plane—cost exactly what Kevin's car was worth: $2,000.
A $2,000 lesson.
I'm writing this in New York now, July 2002, one year later. Still trying to understand what that day taught me.
Here's what I think:
The choice at 4 AM—waking Ionas instead of staying in bliss—that was the first death. Choosing honor over ecstasy. Choosing relationship over peak experience.
The cliff was the second death. The moment of accepting *I'm going to die* without resistance. Surrendering to the fall.
But we didn't fall.
And then—impossibly—I was flying.
Not despite the mescaline. Not in spite of being altered. But because of it. Because in that state I couldn't overthink. Couldn't grip the controls with the anxiety of someone trying not to crash. Could only feel the plane's subtle communication and respond.
Michael had told me: "Flow happens when you stop trying to be the river and remember you already are."
I think that's what flying taught me.
The seeker has to die before the finder can emerge.
The student has to let go before the teacher arrives.
You can't white-knuckle your way to grace. You can't control your way to flow.
You have to accept the cliff. Accept the falling. Accept that you might die.
And then—sometimes—the tree stump catches you.
And then—impossibly—someone offers you a plane.
And then you fly.
Not because you know how.
But because you finally stopped pretending you don't.