Why You Shouldn't Camp on LSD

One Easter weekend, way back in 19-blahty-blah, me and my friend Jorgensen decided to drive up north and camp out in the woods. We brought a tent and some cans of Sterno and various food items, but more importantly we packed a gallon of vodka, three baggies of weed, and a few hits of LSD, just to make it memorable. Smoking pot on the way was a given, but about halfway there we decided to make it interesting and so broke out the acid early. We each took a tab and kept going.

I won’t bore you with the details of what being on acid is like. You’ve no doubt heard enough stories about that. But we’re driving along the freeway, getting fairly close to our destination in the wilds of northern Michigan, when it starts to snow. Hard. And it keeps snowing and snowing and snowing. By the time we arrived at the woods we’d set our minds to, it was a full-blown blizzard. On Easter weekend.

Well, naturally, there was no one else around. So after it stopped snowing Jorgensen set up the tent, I went walking by myself, trudging through snow up to my thighs. Whacked out of my skull on acid and weed, with a tumbler full of vodka and Seven-Up. I stumbled across a deer in a clearing, who looked at me for a full minute, judging me I felt certain, before leaping into the air and disappearing.

I kept walking, pretty much lost but not that worried about it, when I saw a face peeking at me from some brush. It was a man, with deer antlers on his head. I said, “Uh… hey,” and he vanished.

Saw him again a few minutes later, and that was when I realized that wasn’t quite normal.

I made my way back to the tent, where Jorgensen was smoking another joint and trying to get some soup heated up on one of the Sterno cans. I told him about the guy with antlers, and he of course dismissed it as a case of me being baked out of my skull. I shrugged, because he was probably right.

So we’re sitting there in front of our tent in the snow, trying to get the goddamn Sterno can to work, when a pick-up truck pulls up right in front of us and the guy driving honks his horn. We look up at him rather stupidly, and he rolls down his window, leans out and yells, “What the hell do you two think you’re doing?”

Jorgensen looks at me, and I say to the guy, “Uh… we’re camping, man.”

The driver says, “Camping?? What the… you dumb asses have pitched your tent right in the middle of the road!”

We look around us and notice that, yeah, it does seem to be a long, narrow clearing after all. Very quickly, we take down the tent, too stoned to be embarrassed, and hustle off to the side. The guy yells one last time, “Dumb asses!” before driving off.

We pitched the tent farther into the woods and I don’t remember anything else about that evening. We went to sleep.

When we woke, we were soaked to the bone and there was snow everywhere in the tent and we were freezing. We both decided to call the camping trip a wash. We packed up, both of us sneezing and shivering, got in the car, and drove away.

I saw the guy with antlers one more time as we left, peering at us intently as we drove off. I thought about mentioning it to Jorgensen, but decided it didn’t matter. I rolled up a joint and lit it and settled back for the long drive home.