The Fine Art of Goofing Off
By 1970 at least two million Americans had tried LSD, and up to three million lived in communes. The counterculture continued to expand during the early Seventies as the main stream culture sunk into greater and greater violence. Native Americans had occupied Alcatraz Island in November of 1969. In 1972, at Wounded Knee, Native Americans held off US marshals and FBI agents for 71 days.
On September 9th, 1971, almost 1,000 prisoners seized control of the maximum-security prison in Attica, NY, protesting brutal living conditions. Putting down the uprising claimed 43 lives, 11 guards and 32 prisoners. IA federal court described the guards' reaction as an "orgy of brutality" and ordered the state to pay $8 million to inmates who were tortured after the uprising, after 2002 investigation.
Nixon, up for reelection in 1972, doubled down on his policy of suppressing dissent. He based his campaign on what he called the "American majority” or more commonly the “Silent Majority.” He claimed to speak for those who were sick and tired of counterculture freaks, women talking out of place and African American revolutionaries. The Republican party crafted a new coalition of Southern whites and northern workers, both traditionally democrats. It was a total victory over the Woodstock Nation and the counterculture. It marked the beginning of a long term alliance that remained fundamental to Republican presidential campaign in to the Twenty-first Century.
Nixon also created the so-called Plumbers Unit in the basement of the Executive Office Building to plug suspected leaks from his administration. The New York Times had published a selection from the Pentagon Papers (June 13, 1971), and The Washington Post followed suit five days later. Nixon compiled an “Opponents List” as part of the “Political Enemies Project.” White House Counsel John Dean explained: “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
Nixon had two foreign policy triumphs before the election. In February of 1972 he spent eight days in China, met with Mao Zedong, and began a long overdue normalization of relations. In May he traveled to Moscow for a week of discussions that ended in a strategic arms pact, SALT I, that would be signed by Nixon and Premier Leonid Brezhnev on May 26. In July the White House announced the first sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union. Kissinger assured the nation that “peace is at hand" in Vietnam.
It was one of the most lopsided races in American Presidential election history. Nixon beat his Democratic challenger George McGovern by 520 Electoral College votes to McGovern's 17. He got a whopping 60% or more of the popular vote. Television network analyses showed Nixon won a majority of the votes from Catholics, blue-collar workers, union members and Italian-Americans, all of whom had been Democratic in 1968. About three-quarters of the 1968 Wallace supporters backed the President. It was the first election in which 18-year-olds could vote and network polling also indicated that first-time voters split their votes about evenly between Nixon and McGovern. Nixon even scored gains among both Jews and blacks, though they remained predominately Democratic.
The shattered, splintered, increasingly violent left had been roundly repudiated. The progressive labor coalition that had launched Freedom Summer in 1964 was shattered. What happened to labor in the 1970s is another story that will have to wait. For now, I want to emphasize the sense of exclusion that Nixon’s triumph created. If Nixon’s “Silent Majority” had an anthem, it was “Okie from Muskogee.” “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,” Haggard sang, “Cuz we like livin’ right and being free.”
Progressives and Hippies grew their hair longer, let their beards fill out and more and more took Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” KQED received a grant to do a series of programs on leisure in America. We convinced the powers that be to do a short series of films in animation called, The Fine Art of Goofing Off. Henry Jacobs, a radio producer and a good friend of Alan Watts, who had explained Eastern mysticism to KPFA audiences for years, created an extraordinary soundtrack. Bob McClay, a brilliant artist did the animation (in those days, animation was done a frame at a time, with thirty frames per second, so this was tedious work.) I was the producer.
The project took almost a year. We began each week with a meeting just after dawn in Henry Jacob’s hot tub in the redwood forests of Marine County. The tub would be hot when the team arrived, and we would strip down and slip into the water. Henry would roll a huge joint, the first of several, and we would begin to free associate about leisure activities that Americans took part in or, in our opinion, should take part in. I would sit with one arm out of the water, taking notes.
I’d type up the notes and we’d meet in more sedate circumstances to pare them down to the activities that seemed to offer the most comic promise. We’d take these ideas to The Committee, an impromptu San Francisco comedy group, which would riff on the ideas in an ad lib session. Henry would edit the audio tracks down to their essence and Bob would animate them. We hired Victor Moscoso, an underground artist to do fake commercials for the series in the underground comic style that emerged in the late Sixties in San Francisco.
John Leonard, who had been my Drama and Literature director at WBAI in the early Sixties, wrote a review for Life Magazine, under the pseudonym he used in those days, Cyclops. I quote it at length, because of what it says about the times. John began, “Having spent what seems like the last six years watching Eric Sevareid and Theodore H. White kick the philosophical ball around on CBS during lapses in its convention coverage, one began to wish that the philosophical ball would kick them back. Is it absolutely necessary that gown men pile such a heavy load of platitude on the innocent moment? Has either of them ever giggled'? One longs for comic relief‑a liberating fecklessness.”
He continued, “I propose for Mr. Sevareid, Mr. White and their fellow solemnites a course in remedial unseriousness. PBS has such a course (no credit), in three half‑hour parts, starting this week. It's called The Fine Art of Goofing Off. Some wholly unserious people out at San Francisco's KQED put it together. Producer Chris Koch, who used to be intermittently serious in the old days of Pacifica radio, has clearly been trifling with the Ecstasy Kids down at Esalen.”
“The Fine Art of Goofing Off looks at work and leisure, the "pursuit" of happiness ("sit still and let happiness pursue you for a "while") and the idea of time. There is a carburetor that talks like a sociologist, a lump of clay that plays with itself, commercials in behalf of drudgery, a rock group called Funky Hair and the Painted Guitar … audience participation games (the tallest person in your living room is Supposed to get up and follow a dot around on the TV screen), doodling and other soul satisfying nonsense.”
It was the last project I produced for KQED.
Back to the land
Have I made it clear enough? The United States seemed to be spinning out of control in the early Seventies, with endless violence, escalating confrontations and increased police surveillance. In the military, as the war dragged on the army disintegrated. Frank Browning and Banning Garrett published an article in Ramparts Magazine called The New Opium Wars implicating the CIA and top South Vietnam officials in drug trafficking. It provoked the San Francisco Mime Troop to write and produce a play called The Dragon Ladies Revenge, which still captures the madness of those years. The opium the West had used to conquer China in the 19th Century was coming back to the West in our opium addicted Vietnam veterans.
The dream of owning your own piece of land, fertile and large enough to support a family, is an original American homesteading dream. How could it not appeal to me? I read everything I could get my hands on about back to the land movements. They had a long history in the American experience. I admired Thoreau for his devotion to simplicity, his resistance to authority and his love of nature. I read about Brook Farm, which lasted only a few years. Most important to me was Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life, which chronicles the Nearings' move to an old farm in Vermont to live a self-sufficient and simple life apart from the mainstream.
In the Introduction, the Nearings write that they dropped out in the mid Thirties when American was “gripped by depression and unemployment, falling prey to fascism, and on the verge of another world-wide military free-for-all … The society from which we moved had rejected in practice and principle our pacifism, our vegetarianism and our collectivism. So thorough was this rejection that, holding such views, we could not teach in the schools, write in then press or speak over the radio, and were thus denied our part in public education. Under these circumstances, where could outcasts from a dying social order live frugally and decently, and at the same time have sufficient leisure and energy to assist in the speedy liquidation of the disintegrating society and to help replace it with a more workable social system.”
I found the Nearings inspiring. They built a stone house, maintained a large vegetable garden and generated some income from a small maple syrup enterprise. They said they survived on about a half day of work with the rest of their time available for reading, socializing, and playing music. They planned well and worked hard, but I could plan well and work hard.
Francis Moore Lappe’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet was another inspiration, connecting food choices like vegetarianism and organics to the political and ecological values the counterculture was trying to put into place.
Richard Langar’s Grow It!, John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency on 5 Acres (it turned out Seymour himself farmed 40), and magazines like Countryside, Organic Living and Mother Earth News portrayed a small, neat house with a well-stocked larder filled with smoked bacon and ham hanging from the rafters, canned peaches and cherries, applesauce and pickles, pears and sauerkraut, jams and jellies, set out on neat shelves in a cool, underground cellar. There would be bins of apples, carrots, turnips, potatoes and beets stored in moist, clean sand and tins of dried beans and peas. Why, we’d even make our own beer and wine!
The growing underground economy seemed ready to help. Rural communes would feed urban ones. Skills could be swapped. Small co-operative grocery stores opened. Between 1969 and 1979 as many as ten thousand new food co-ops sprang up across the country. They followed in a tradition that dated all the way back to 1844, when a group of striking weavers in England organized a cooperative store to supply themselves with basic goods.
By now, the counterculture had its own dress code, its own vocabulary, its own media. An underground wire service, Liberation News Service reached one million readers who supported six hundred New Left and GI underground newspapers.
The Whole Earth Catalogue started publishing in 1968 and was the most important publication for potential dropouts. Founder Stewart Brand, later wrote an article entitled "We Are as Gods.” "At a time when the New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power—tools and skills. At a time when New Age hippies were deploring the intellectual world of arid abstractions, Whole Earth pushed science, intellectual endeavor, and new technology as well as old."
Brand and his friends recognized that a growing group of young biologists, designers, engineers, sociologists, organic farmers, and social experimenters wanted to make civilization “sustainable." The idea that we need to protect this small and fragile planet, led to the iconic image of earth from outer space featured on the first Whole Earth Catalogue cover.
The catalogue contained an astounding collection of ideas, book reviews, how-to manuals and tools. The I Ching, Carlos Castaneda’s The Way of Yaqui Knowledge, books on yoga, self-hypnosis, creative glass blowing, how to build your own computer, ship out on a freighter, find a hot springs, make your own light weight camping equipment, build an outhouse, use the direct energy of the sun or practice the survival skills of Paiute Indians. In fact there were lots of survival books, catching the spirit of the times. There were all kinds of tools from Heathkit electronics to an engineering compass recommended with a dynamite blasters manual, to hack saws, pipe wrenches, knives, buckskin, cut beads and Melrose Yarns.
For while, everything seemed possible.
Llano Arrival
The more we talked about it, the more dropping out seemed to be both a real possibility and a grand adventure. Mimicking the Nearings, we planned to buy land in Vermont which we both loved from our time at Bennington. Our best friends from Bennington, who had joined us in Los Angeles when we lived there, had moved back to Vermont when we went to San Francisco. They said they wanted to buy Vermont land we us. We drove East in the early Spring with our infant Zeke to work out the details.
Neil Rappaport was a brilliant photographer from New York City, who had done prison time for heroin possession. He specialized in large format cameras using 8 X12 inch glass contact plates, photographing old Vermont craftsmen, farmers and their families around Pawlet, Vermont, like the last slate workers where he hung on ropes from the face of the slate cliff, wielding his enormous camera. He also taught photography to inmates at the state prison and later at Bennington College. Suzanne was a schoolteacher. The warm greetings we received on our arrival, quickly deteriorated as Neil became more and more silent after eating a late spaghetti dinner.
“Don’t unpack,” Neil said as we headed up to their guest room. I want you out of here tomorrow. You can’t stay here.”
The next morning Suzanne was embarrassed but Neil was unfriendly and adamant. The idea of buying land with them was over. We didn’t know what to do. We had relied on the Rappaports to find the land and make the local contacts. Without them, what were we doing there? We later learned from Suzanne that she and Neil were in a bitter battle over whether to have children. Neil didn’t want them, and our arrival with a baby in tow was simply too much.
The Berkeley commune was already up for sale. The two couple’s we had shared it with were divorcing. Alexa and I were the only survivors of Rabbit Gulch. Now we needed a destination. Someplace to settle. We had friends who lived near a Hog Farm commune in Llano, New Mexico, and we drove by to see them on our return to the Bay Area from Vermont. It was beautiful. Land was for sale — sixteen acres for $16,000. Our friend would buy half. We could have an eight-acre piece of land with a three-room house for $8,000. With the sale of Rabbit Gulch, we would have enough money to live on for a year or two while we figured out how to survive.
The commune was sold. In March of 1972 I put my wife and young son on a plane to Albuquerque, loaded a 1958 Chevy pickup truck until the springs were flat and then crammed stuff into a trailer until the hitch almost touched the ground. When I ran into snow crossing the Tehachipie mountains, the window on the drivers side didn’t close and the heater didn’t work, but what the hell, wasn’t I a pioneer reversing the manifest destiny of America, heading east on Highway 66 with the songs of Woodie Guthrie ringing in my head? The rear bearing began to give out in Needles, but I kept nursing the pickup forward.
I drove into our mountain valley on a wing and a prayer, with oil dripping on the clutch plate, which kept slipping on the hills. It was shockingly beautiful. The land was saturated with unnaturally intense light, giving everything an extra dimension. Our land was on a raised plateau, a llano, above the old Spanish town of Penasco that lies in a long green valley on the Western slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The valley is surrounded by forests of piñon, juniper and pine. Jicarita mountain, a majestic Queen Victoria, sits five thousand feet higher at the end of the valley. To the West across the Rio Grande two thousand feet below, mountain ranges shimmer into the distance.
It began snowing the day after I arrived, and it continued to snow for another week. Alexa and Zeke were down with the flue and we were camped in a tiny house with people we hardly knew. But we had a vision, and I threw myself into getting the house we bought ready to live in. We knew where we were going. We had read the inspirational literature and we had an idyllic picture of the life we would forge, although the image was fuzzy around the edges.
I never really questioned the possibility of raising enough food on that piece of scenery at 7,500 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A careful, considered examination of the possibility of sustainable farming in Llano would have convinced me to look elsewhere, but at the time it never occurred to me. I was mesmerized and completely confident of success.
My city friends said our subsistence life was “a noble experiment” or “basic and romantic.” Euell Gibbons, a respected naturalist and advocate of wild plants as food sources, dismissed all of us as “the new generation of dewey-eyed amateurs pouring from the cities into the country-side longing to raise apple trees and honeybees and snow white turtle doves.”
Henry Jacobs and I were having a Japanese tea lunch when I told him I was leaving the Bay Area to live in the country. He popped a sushi morsel into his mouth and asked me what I’d do for good food. Henry was typical. Everyone thought I was crazy. Leave Berkeley with its saunas and bookstores, its live music (Brownie McGee and Sunny Terry or Commander Cody at Mandrakes), everything accompanied by a steady supply of drugs and a decent job?
In New Mexico, to the local Spanish we were hippies, part of an influx that began in 1967 when the Hog Farm bought 13 acres of land at the end of the llano. Hog Farm founder Wavy Gravy (born Hugh Romney) said the iChing admonition “the Southwest furthers” had drawn him to New Mexico. Jean Nichols, who came at the same time and still lives there, explained in more detail: “We were rejecting the American Dream as it was. We thought that it was hypocrisy, the whole capitalist thing. So we were going for peace, equality, and justice in practice. We’re all one family—everyone in the world is connected. We were trying to stop the war machine by creating a culture of peace—that was a big part of it. We were also having fun. The stereotype of the Sixties is “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” There was that, but there was a lot more—good hard work. A lot of us had rejected the social mores, where you go out and get a career and live a comfortable life. Living communally seemed to be a practical alternative. We didn’t want to compete and have more than our neighbors. We wanted to live simply and with respect for the earth.”
The Hog Farm had a large commune in the Bay Area and one along the Canadian/Vermont border. In 1969, the Hog Farm provided medical services (and much more!) at Woodstock for the 400,000 who attended. Hundreds of these young people later descended on the Llano farm. There was no way that these inexperienced young people could make it through a harsh Llano winter and Wavy Gravy and most of the campers went back on the road.
The core that stayed and made it through the winter were tough, and some of them started playing outlaws in the Spring. For several summers they lived on horseback in the national forest, only coming down every few weeks for supplies. Bearded, long haired single men and women dressed in homemade leather clothing, fishing, hunting out of season and occasionally frightening normal campers. Local law enforcement was frequently after them, but in those days hippies knew the mountains better than most rangers. Some of the outlaws were still around when we arrived.
Llano the First Year
The farm we moved into was run down and overworked. Cows milled about the abandoned house until I got the previous owner to haul them away. There had been barns, corrals, cross fencing, an orchard, sheds and equipment, but before he sold his land the farmer carted everything away and cut the orchard for firewood.
We repaired the house with adobe bricks made from mud and straw, dug holes for a dozen baby fruit trees, put out two rows of strawberries and began to plan the summer garden. We did not have a water well and hauled our washing water from the acequia in two buckets — about 8 to 10 loads a day. We carried drinking water in five-gallon cans from our neighbor up the road. I dug an outhouse across the acequia with breath taking views of Mt Picuris.
We heated the small three rooms and cooked with wood. I made frequent wood runs to the national forest, seeking dead piñon and cedar trees. I’d cut them to fit in the bed of the pickup, haul them home and cut the logs into stove length pieces, then split them with an ax or a sledge and wedge on the more gnarly pieces. It took 10 to 12 chords a year to heat and cook and I could get two cords a truckload on a good day.
We were poor and did not use experts to solve our problems. We repaired, patched and mended as best we could. It took a lot of work because something was always broken. Equipment took a terrible beating. The back roads ate up pickup trucks, barbed wire fences ate shirts and jackets and the daemon wind played havoc with doors and windows.
Even though spring came late that first year, we were barely able to get a garden ready for planting. The growing season is short at 7,500 feet, so we hustled to turn over the heavy clay soil and work in truckloads of manure and rotted sawdust (just like the books said!). We got the manure and sawdust free for cleaning out of our Spanish neighbors’ barns. They all used chemicals. A close friend and I would shovel cow shit and discuss philosophy. He was a physicist who had dropped out after working for a defense contractor. I’d majored in philosophy in college. So we were shoveling real shit while shoveling the shit of philosophical discourse. I thought Plato would have been pleased.
At the last possible moment to plant and still harvest a crop, the garden was half the size we wanted and a tenth of size we needed. We thought we were working hard, but everyone around us was equally stressed.
Once the season started, anyone working the land was ruled by a logic beyond their own volition. You irrigate, weed and harvest when nature dictates, and spend time trying to be in harmony with nature by understanding its signs. We wanted to have milk and eggs, so that summer bought goats and chickens. They complicated things. I built a barn out of the cheapest left over lumber from our local saw mill. The barn faced east where it caught the morning sun and offered protection from the prevailing Western winds, which could drive you mad, the kind of wind you have to lean against to do your chores and winter or summer it was a cold wind.
I covered the roof of the barn with fiberglass panels and took the time to embellish the front wall with an intricate herringbone pattern. We added a chicken coop and a corral for the goats. Animals of any kind are an enormous escalation, which is one reason vegetarians like the Nearings did without them.
By the following Spring the goats would have babies and we’d let the hens hatch their eggs to replenish the flock. There would be roosters and billies as well as hens and does. We were vegetarians. What would do with the boys?
In October of 1972 I delivered our second child at home. Only one friend, Anna Manana, was there. She took care of our first boy. Alexa was completely confident. She wanted to have her baby at home. I was not so sure. We visited a doctor in Taos who told us everything would probably go okay. If it looked like a breech birth, I could probably make it into Taos (a forty minute drive) in time to deal with the breech in a hospital. Worst-case scenario, Alexa would begin to hemorrhage in which case she’d be dead before I got her to the hospital and the baby would be unlikely to survive. “Good luck and call if you need anything,” he added, but we didn’t have a phone of course.
I was terrified, but when Alexa’s time drew near, I boiled up some sterile water, kept a fire burning in the cook stove, and prepared a big tapioca pudding, which was sweet and rich and full of protein. Alexa announced that she was taking a walk in the backfield. When she returned she said she thought it was time. I put the water on to heat and took the pudding out of the pantry. Once the birth started, my nervousness disappeared entirely, and I was caught up in the moment. Our second son popped out a few hours later with no unexpected difficulties. We all ate tapioca pudding. I cut the umbilical cord and tied it off as instructed and buried the placenta. The next morning, like the pioneers of the past, we were all back hard at work.
Most days we worked from dawn to dusk, but we made it through the first winter and by the spring had several high-quality milking goats, and a flock of good laying hens that had survived the winter.
Peyote
When the crops were put away that Fall, we turned our collective attention to peyote.
Peyote was deeply associated with New Mexico, one of the centers of the Native American Church, which uses peyote in its religious ceremonies. There is documented evidence of peyote's use for at least five thousand years. Peyote had been used by many beat writers and early Hippies. I’d never tried it, but I went on one of the first picking runs to Southern Texas.
The picking fields were a thousand miles away in the scrubland outside of Del Rio, Texas. We drove straight through from Llano, south along the Rio Grande through Sante Fe and then across the high plains of eastern New Mexico on highway 285, through Roswell, Green River, and Carlsbad, where the highway starts to follow the old Pecos trail into Texas, across the empty, forbidding Staked Plains that had driven men crossing on horseback mad. The Staked Plains had stopped the Spanish explorers and provided a hiding place for Comanches who resisted the American army until well into the 1880’s. Highway 285 ended at Highway 90, heading East and West along the Rio Grande again.
It was dark by the time we crossed into Texas and there were no other cars on the road. At 3:00 am south of Forth Stockton we saw a tiny speck of fire burning in the immense darkness of the flat plain and endless sky. As we approached it remained in front of us, and then there it was, along the side of the highway, a car burning with flames shooting up, windows burst out, nothing could possibly have been alive. We slowed and stopped. There was no sound but the fire, we saw nothing but emptiness in every direction. We continued on our way, passing around another joint, separately convinced it was a sign. We were in Peyote country now.
Our picking map was for a location outside of Del Rio, but we hoped we could find new picking fields of our own. We dropped out of the high Texas desert into the broad valley of the Rio Grand, a landscape cut through with gullies full of mesquite, chaparral and an intimidating variety of cactus and thorns, all tough enough to survive desert extremes.
We pulled off the road at several likely spots, scrambled down the bank into gullies of dry wash and started searching. Peyote grew under the bushes, low to the ground, the territory of scorpions, black widow spiders and sidewinders, and the grey/green buttons could be hard to find. We were unsuccessful at a series of stops and finally drove straight through to Del Rio, across the Amistad Reservoir. We could see the first housing development on the next ridge as we turned onto a side road and parked the car behind low trees.
Full of excitement, we left the car and started cautiously to look through the undergrowth. Nothing. Not a sign of the tiniest button. An hour went by. We checked the picking map. This seemed to be the right place. Another hour. We searched more frantically. We stopped being cautious about the new houses going up on the ridgeline. We stopped worrying about scorpions, black widows, and snakes. Another hour went by and we were near tears from exhaustion and the searing heat. It was late afternoon. Time was running out. Four or five fruitless hours had passed.
Then we spotted one, small button, about an inch across. A good button can be from two to five inches across. We cut it carefully just above the ground to preserve the root and encourage new growth. We sat in a small circle, carefully removed the fluff coming out of the eyes and divided the button in three parts.
Fresh peyote is the bitterest substance I have ever eaten, more nauseous than the salty taste of the strychnine vine in the Amazon, infinitely more bitter than roasted coffee beans. We chewed our pieces slowly and carefully, swallowing small, well-masticated portions to keep the gorge down. We sat and waited in the late afternoon light, and the tension and anxiety drained away, like a deep sigh liberating a troubled soul. In concentrating so heavily on the bitter taste and our bodies instinctive rejection of it, the world outside disappeared for a few moments, and when the medicine was finally down, safe and secure, we looked up and opened our eyes as if seeing everything for the first time. And there was peyote everywhere, under every bush.
I still cannot explain what happened that late afternoon in Del Rio. We had worked our way up a wide, shallow draw, sandy soil with scattered hillocks of brush and cactus, and then started back down again when we found our first button. So we had gone over the same ground that now had an abundance of peyote. I do not believe that we could have missed it the first time unless we were already in some altered state. We chewed new buttons as we worked, and high as we were, we never questioned our discovery. We knew peyote had found us. We were on a mission.
Within an hour, we had three huge burlap sacks full of peyote buttons, which we hauled back to the car. We were afraid to put them in the trunk because of the heat that would build up during the long haul across the desert, so we put them on the floor of the back seat where they filled in the foot space to seat level. I lay in the back seat with a blanket over the peyote.
We drove west on Highway 90, back the way we’d come. Someone passed around a joint but I declined a beer. We turned off 90 heading north on 285 as the last light left the sky. That’s when we were pulled over by the Texas Border Patrol. It was not a happy moment. Friends had spent time in the Del Ro County jail while their lawyers tried to work something out on drug charges and when the lawyers failed the prison time was serious. Texas had draconian drug laws and peyote was not exempt.
One officer checked driver’s licenses in the from seat and told the driver to get out of the car and open the trunk. It was empty. Another officer shined his light on my face and asked where I was from. I was in the back of a two door Volvo, and the cop was looking at me through the front door window, so he was shining his light on my face, not the floor. I passed the Anglo test and they waved us on. The peyote gods were still with us.