Trip (Patreon)

A fictionalized account of the first time I took mushrooms, in 2021. A Scottish volcano crater.

Dove is experiencing joy related to the beauty of simple things and Turtle is experiencing driving. Turtle says Americans are always dumbstruck by gorse, they’re obsessed with gorse, and Dove is momentarily embarrassed out of her delight: not just an American then, a predictable one . . . but back to the gorse (sweet yellow flowers bursting from the shoulders of the road)! The gorse is so obviously beautiful and so everywhere Dove can’t imagine the kind of person who wouldn’t make a comment. She likes its ugly name, one letter from gore.

Turtle and Dove are driving to the most westerly village in Scotland. The trip is almost two hundred miles on a sinuous road surrounded by tall, olive mountains, winding through the highlands, through the valley of Glen Coe, over the Ardnamurchan peninsula, stretching just shy of the Atlantic, where there lives the glacier-eroded crater of what was, sixty million years ago, an active volcano. Turtle and Dove will stay in the crater for two nights. They plan to swim in the ocean, and look at each other. There might be otters. Turtle brought mushrooms. Dove hasn’t done that before; Turtle has, once.

The breeze from over the cracked window smells like rain and coconut. It’s foggy, then sunny, then foggy again. They’re wearing sweatshirts. It’s a strange combination of sensory inputs. June isn’t one thing.

You look very pretty, Turtle says to Dove.

Hee hee, Dove says.

This is their first trip together as a couple. Dove is conscious of what this means for their narrative. The first trip is for discovering what your companion is really like.

Right now, they are honestly in love. But Dove experiences a great deal of anxiety about her and Turtle’s relationship, and Turtle does not.

They started dating just before the disease legislation, which meant, for a while, they only spent time with each other. Once the curfew got dropped it became clear how expansive Turtle’s social life really was. Dove resented her trajectory from Turtle’s sole companion to part of a beloved many, when Dove only ever wanted to be with Turtle. The parties make her sleepy. The nights out make her sleepy. Dove’s love is concentrated, like a laser; Turtle’s love is enormous and indiscriminate, like the sun.

Dove is uncertain that there’s any way to reconcile this difference. The thought of them breaking up registers in her body as a hot, phantasmic dread.

They’re in a Tesla, which is Turtle’s dad’s work car. It’s not, like, ours, Turtle had said. That morning Dove had overheard Turtle’s dad, an intense and closed man, giving Turtle a stern talking-to.

One hour in Dove feels car sick. She doesn’t normally get car sick. She reconsiders her notion of herself with this new information, her as the kind of person who gets car sick, weaker than before. She wonders if now she’ll always be a car sick person, or if her symptoms come from Turtle driving an electric car like an epileptic drag racer. She tries to enjoy the scenery. Her stomach is full of labyrinths.

At some point it becomes too much and Dove lays her head against the center console. It’s uncomfortable but not more uncomfortable. Turtle threads his fingers through her hair. Dove relaxes.

The Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon plays infinitely. Walls of trees appear and disappear. Time stutters around. Partial sleep, dreams made of words, a little car puttering through the green and brown mountains. After some time Turtle, who had spent the drive feeling free and powerful, ruffles Dove’s head. Nearly there, he says softly.

The road hasn’t straightened any, but Dove can sit up, cured in the knowledge that it will be over soon.

-

They arrive in Kilchoan at ten in the evening. The sky is light, glacier blue.

Their cabin is shaped like the bisected trunk of an enormous tree, like a loaf. Turtle fiddles with a code box to open the sliding glass doors. Inside it’s small but comfortable: boiler, twin bed, lightly stocked kitchen. No phone service or internet, which, for their purposes, is comfortable too.

Without unpacking they head to the beach to take a look. It’s not an insubstantial walk. Dove is just glad to be out of the car. They weave through assemblages of leery sheep, trek up and over a knoll. At sea level the ocean’s blurry with mist and gray-blue. Rounded tufts of seagrass burst from the shore. The world roars with meditative static.

Dove is happy (she likes the ocean). Turtle is happy (Dove is happy).

While Turtle takes pictures of the horizon line, the tall grass, and the algae-dappled rock slabs, Dove slips out of her shoes and onto the wet sand. Foam slides over her feet. The water is breathtakingly cold. Dove steadies as the tide recedes through her. She likes that sensation, the gentle sucking from somewhere deep inside the earth, the feeling of being swept out from beneath herself. She wonders if Turtle is watching her. No: he’s admiring a distant lighthouse. Dove tries to be glad they’re both enjoying themselves in their own way. But what she really wants is to be admired.

Thinking, Dove wades further into the water until the bottom of her trousers are soaked.

Success registers with Turtle’s high laugh behind her. When Dove turns, he’s reaching for his laces.

Dove smiles. Her feet and ankles are completely numb.

-

On the drive that day, before the cabin, somewhere between Dove’s nauseas, they stopped off at a place Turtle remembered from childhood: a ski resort in Glen Coe, built at the foot of a tercet of mountains called the Three Sisters. The site the resort sat on remained, as dreamy as Turtle had described, but the lodge had been demolished. All that was left was a non-operational ski lift and a handful of small random-seeming buildings. Turtle was disappointed; he was excited to show Dove the lodge. Dove said that’s okay; Turtle said the lodge had a really cool fireplace.

Before they continued their journey, they both needed to pee. Turtle went outside. But they couldn’t find a bathroom for Dove, and after their third false start Turtle spotted a man out of earshot moving objects in a shed.

Go ask him, Turtle said.

Dove hesitated. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t sure he worked there, or if he didn’t, but both were bad, and she was embarrassed of her accent combined with her cluelessness, and then she worried they’d been standing there for too long, and that they looked weird, and she genuinely thought she might piss herself, and, overcome by this onslaught of anxieties, Dove became totally incapable of action, a machine devoid of hardware.

I’ll just wait, Dove said.

Wait for what?

Until we . . . get there.

It’s another two hours.

OK. (Pause.) I don’t know what to do.

Turtle looked at her flatly, then went away.

Dove stood.

After an easy exchange, Turtle returned. You have to get better at that, he said, grumpy.

Dove wilted into herself. Turtle guided from a few paces ahead. They didn’t speak.

Dove peed for a long time, then lingered in the stall to let her mind come back. To expedite the process she bashed herself once in the forehead.

Turtle, as he waited, thought of his dad.

Dove reappeared, her eyes a little raw. You would not believe how long I just pissed for, she said to lighten the mood. Heh, Turtle said. They got back in the car and moved forward in time.

-

In the morning Turtle and Dove wake up slowly and have thorough, meandering sex. At the finale Dove gets on top, trying very hard to keep her balance.

Turtle thinks Dove is a revelation.

After, while Turtle relaxes, Dove anxiously pees, then swallows three full glasses of water to prevent a UTI, to which she is prone. She takes a pink pill. Sex is not just one chore.

The weather today is sunny and clear. Outside sheep mill around in their family units, idly bleating. As Turtle eats breakfast Dove conspires to touch one, but the sheep are wary and distrustful of her, no matter how gentle her approach, no matter how clearly she thinks be a sheep.

At the beach the water is spangled. Turtle runs into the ocean and then becomes it. Dove feels a surge of attraction towards him because of his boyishness, and his lack of fear. She’s happy that they’re here together. She loves him.

Dove follows behind but only slowly, inch worming, acclimating each new segment of her body to the cold before continuing. The water is at her ribs now but Dove won’t submerge her arms.

It’s much better once you’re all in, Turtle says, his little brown head bobbing in the waves.

Then Dove is being pulled out by her legs and rotates, squealing, into the sea. For a moment she is totally under, blind and deaf, nowhere. Then she’s back in the scene, the white sun in her eyes, her mouth ruined with salt. Turtle says, a beast, Dove, a beast, oh lord, it’s coming back! and pounces again.

Turtle practices his strokes. Dove floats. Water paws the black rocks. There is love on the planet.

They leave the water to rest and snack. After they eat Turtle props his phone against a rock and hits record, then jogs back to the ocean. He gestures for Dove to join him. Again they grapple and play-fight in the shallows. This time Dove feels false in the eye of the camera, like she’s performing the role of girlfriend. She imagines herself in the future watching the video. She wonders if she’ll be able to enjoy the memory, or if it’ll always be tainted by this thought she’s having right now.

-

Turtle and Dove shower together and dress. Dove is thrilled to be back in her warm clothes. They drive to nearby Kilchoan, which again is silken with summer fog.

Kilchoan is a small village indeed, but very scenic, and sometimes Turtle and Dove spot a beautiful occasion – deep green hills, a misty jetty studded with boats, pink wildflowers – and feel inspired to touch each other. Dove photographs Turtle in front of an enormous gorse bush. They get dinner at the pub inside the Kilchoan House Hotel where the waitress is gentle and smiley with them. They exchange photos while they eat. On the way back to the car they come upon a black and white cat who rubs its face roughly against Dove’s knees, and even though it’s clear the cat is indiscriminately social, Dove is glad to be liked, and feels maybe that the cat knows something of her soul, like her loneliness, or her total aversion to causing pain.

-

Turtle has dumped out the mushrooms and is arranging them into four tiers: small cap, medium cap, big cap, and miscellaneous. I should have more than you, he says, and Dove agrees. Dove sometimes thinks that doing drugs with someone is more intimate than sex: the decision, the conspiracy, the anticipation, the change.

Turtle first took mushrooms one month ago with one of his pretty friends, who grew them. Turtle has known this friend much longer than he’s known Dove. We just giggled a bunch, Turtle had said of the experience. Immediately Dove felt competitive. Dove is curious about all things, so she wants to do the mushrooms; in a different, equal way, she must do the mushrooms.

They look like limbless people, Dove thinks as Turtle arranges, gnarled limbless people with big swollen heads. It occurs to Dove this is not an ideal thought for this moment. She had scrolled around a mushroom forum in preparation for today, and there was a consensus that to do them you ought to begin in a positive state of mind. Dove forces herself to think instead that they are good and friendly mushrooms. But this replacement thought is made of tissue. She knows what she saw.

They portion and eat. Each handful makes Turtle wince and smack his lips. Dove had dreaded the taste and brought chocolate to layer on top, but now she finds the reality of them isn’t so bad: nuts, soil, pumpkin seeds.

After ‘eat’, there are no plans related to the mushrooms. They decide to play cards at the round dining table until it becomes impossible. One hand: no news to report. In the middle of the second hand, Turtle leaves suddenly for the bathroom and returns changed.

Then it hits Dove. I see, she says.

Dove locks the door and lifts the toilet cover in the same urgent motion. She communes with her privacy. The cabin is very small. Turtle is sitting almost directly on the other side of the bathroom wall, which is inches from her. Dove cannot make anything do anything. Without the words, she thinks something like, why are you desperate to hide what you obviously are, why are you so embarrassed about the rules of your body, he was just in here doing exactly this! Her shame doesn’t save her. Dove turns the faucet on. It’s not enough. She lines the water with paper and buries her face in her hands.

Dove exits the bathroom. You could have mentioned, she says.

Turtle says, what? Then: oh! Yeah, surprise.

-

After two more hands of cards, they both think they might feel strange, but they aren’t sure.

Dove proposes that they walk to the shore, remembering a thread on the mushroom forum about water. The thought of seeing an even more beautiful ocean makes her feel soft and excited. Maybe she can put her feet in it. Turtle says OK.

Outside a sheet of cloud is purpling with twilight. The stalagmites of the cloud sheet, the lower whipped points, are blood orange. Crumbled gold leaf glitzes at its far edge, near the hidden sun. There’s a panel of clear peachy sky just above where they know the ocean is. With the frame created by the cloud sheet and the volcano crater’s black ridge, it’s like peeking through a hole in a wall. To see this, Dove is remade in pure joy. Turtle photographs Dove. Dove photographs Turtle. Turtle is posing with a sort of dopey smile Dove has never seen him do before, which makes her laugh. She realizes he must be feeling strange, and then, too, does the strangeness descend onto her.

Now when Dove looks at the sky: the sketch of a geodesic dome, faint white geometry, like the Epcot ball turned inside out.

Hm, she thinks. Ba-dum, says the heart.

I’m feeling something, Dove says.

Me too, Turtle says, and they begin their walk.

Early on they realize walking into the sunset necessitates an equal and opposite return journey away from the sunset. They look back to gauge scale and notice that where they’d come from, above their little cabin, a cataclysm of charcoal cloud is happening, total melodrama. The organ in Dove’s head plays a harsh, religious chord. Turtle laughs at their predicament, how scary it feels.

Dove also finds it funny, but more intellectually than actually; actually, she feels dread related to the darkness above the cabin and starts to regret her suggestion of a walk in the first place.

She says nothing.

Wow, there are a lot of sheep, Dove thinks. Sheep everywhere. They’re loitering beside the trail, stomping up and down grassy hillocks, bleating in the reverberant distance, swivelling around the black finger-snouts of their sock puppet faces. Dove is aware of the sheep in the same way she’s aware of death. She hates that they’re looking at her. Through their yellow slitted eyes, which bulge from their long football heads, they look at her. They know her. There’s hundreds.

Dove thinks, oh my god. Dove thinks, oh no.

Desperately Dove casts around for a different thought and remembers Turtle. Sweet Turtle. She looks at him. Turtle is walking with purpose, his gaze level. Dove wonders what kind of time he’s having in there. It’s difficult to come up with the words to ask. Has he noticed the sheep? It doesn’t seem like it. Dove decides it’s best he doesn’t know.

Just before they reach the final descent to the sea, in the dwindling light, Dove notices a small shadowy mass in the middle of the trail. Friend or foe? She realizes: a toad! Oh, a toad. She’s overcome with affection. She needs to touch the toad. She goads it into her palm, its weight stimulating and real, then rises and offers the sight to Turtle, the toad at stomach-level, and Turtle says oh, look at that, genuinely pleased, and Dove’s palm, which is sensitive, charts the toad’s soft belly, and its little oscillation, and, um, the subtle rearranging of its muscles when it decides, oh no, Dove understands, to jump, and nothing will stop the toad from leaping out of her palm and plummeting, that sweet ball, it is falling, it is falling, and arriving at the ground where it makes contact with the sound of a balloon filled with sand. Its legs are splayed.

Dove desynchronizes.

Turtle scoffs. He experienced this event at regular speed.

Then: tiny, labored movement from the toad. It shuffles to the edge of the trail and disappears into the tall grass.

Christ, Turtle says, I thought he was dead.

Black bile floods the basement of Dove’s heart.

Turtle says, maybe next time leave them be.

Ha ha, yeah. (Pause.) Do you want to go back?

Yeah. Yeah.

They turn around without seeing the ocean, which had been the point of the walk.

-

Turtle and Dove fold into the couch inside the cabin and reminisce about their walk, how ludicrously eventful it felt. Turtle says it had, like, three acts, or five, maybe, he’s not sure.

Outwardly, Dove laughs. Inwardly she is dark. The walk back was fine; the problem of the scary cabin had been completely eclipsed by the incident with the toad. Dove replays the moment. The toad was alive. Surely just stunned. She wonders if she should ask Turtle what he thinks of the situation. But then she comes upon the truth: Turtle hates her for dropping the toad.

Of course, Turtle hates her for dropping the toad. It’s as obvious as sin.

Dove eyes Turtle. He is intently studying a glass of water.

Dove can’t mention her suspicion. Impossible. She’s struggling to say even normal things. Language trudges limply through the trash heap of her mind, begging to die.

Unsure of how to proceed, Dove’s attention drifts to the ceiling. It’s made from knotted slats of wood. She stares. The knots begin to swirl around. A Petri dish, Dove thinks, little cells. Then it is a tide pool full of urchins and limpets and crabs. They swim, twirl, bump noses. Boop. Crayfish scuttle in to join them. This vision makes Dove think of the place she grew up, of the lake as big as a sea, of wheatfields at pink dusk jewelled with insect light, her body soft and small.

As an act of reunification, Dove wants to explain the experience she is having to Turtle. The only words she has access to are: the ceiling looks cool.

Turtle looks. Oh yeah, he says, it does.

She cannot be sure he understands.

-

When the visions dry up they move to the bed. It might be raining. The sarcophagal ceiling is now so low and near they can rest their feet on it. Dove, almost totally mute at this point, finds reprieve in using her notes app to piece together the revelatory gibberish of her thoughts: looking for patterns?, the tone is so dark, trying to make something better but just making it worse, Turtle hates me. A lot of the notes have to do with Turtle hating her.

Turtle, for a long time now, has been imagining euphorically what it might be like to be a shark.

Very little giggling has taken place, Dove realizes with shame. Instead it’s been a serious affair marked by self-consciousness, fear, and misunderstanding.

Between the ratkings and the dead ends, Dove does have one idea over the course of the long night that feels more real than the others: that choices cannot be right or wrong, are only hues, gradations, different paths; these aren’t good mushrooms or bad mushrooms, they’re neutral mushrooms – and her and Turtle’s relationship isn’t good or bad, it’s just a decision, one decision among an incomprehensible matrix of all possible decisions, that could lead to one thing happening, or something else.

-

Turtle wakes from happy dreams of swimming in blue water to the sound of little sobs.

-

They pack up the car with their suitcases, the wetsuits, the leftover food. Goodbye cabin, they say. They never saw otters. Back they go the way they came, through the mist, through the tunnels of dandelion, through the mountains. Turtle drives the same. Dove is sick the same. In Edinburgh they greet Turtle’s parents and tell them what they can about their trip. Tomorrow Turtle and Dove will take a train to London.

Dove is different. Turtle doesn’t understand. But he knows to be gentle, and when Turtle wants to go into town to see old school friends, so very awake, he kindly forbids Dove from going. And how Dove luxuriates in the empty room, alone for the first time in days!

In bed, Dove scrolls through the trip photos, hearting the prettiest ones, unsure what to do with them. Dove remembers the video. There they are, tiny replicas eternally bound to their moment, two dark flashes looping and looping around the metallic shoal. Both look beautiful, luminously young, and vivid with happiness. They look ‘good’ for each other: a sameness, somewhere. Dove watches the video. She is moved by these people. Dove watches the video. She wants them to last. Dove watches the video. She memorizes the choreography, the order of the sounds. Inside her a latch catches. She zooms into Trip Turtle, then Trip Dove, her mouth a little rose, her eyes wet and black. It’d be impossible for anyone to know what she was thinking.