Nomad Codes

Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán.
    Soon after McKenna arrived home, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He’d long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his fifty-two years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna’s mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up in a labyrinth that, as he later put it, “somehow partook of last week’s dreams, next week’s fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin.” Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure.
    When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6’2” frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a Robert Service poem his grandfather used to chant, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold.
    The ambulance guys knew McKenna’s rep and were convinced he had OD’d. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna’s right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna’s amazement, his doctor described the thing as a “fruiting body” that sent “mycelia” throughout the surrounding tissue—mycological lingo straight out of The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, now an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing. Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. “No one escapes,” said the doctor.
    McKenna was facing something that no shaman’s rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose between chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife—a machine that could blast the tumor with two hundred converging beams of cobalt radiation. At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano to meditate on McKenna. He was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend. From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell went on the air and asked his thirteen million listeners to participate in “great experiment no. 8.” At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell’s listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. “It’s not something I really believe in,” says McKenna. “But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it.”
    Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn’t quite believe what was happening to him.“There are only about a thousand of these GBMs a year, so it’s a rare disease. I never won anything before—why now?”
    Like everybody else, McKenna suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. “So what about it?” he asked his doctors. “You wanna hammer on me about that?” They assured him there was no causal link.
    “So what about thirty-five years of daily dope smoking?” he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors.
    “Listen,” McKenna told them, “if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation.”

    Word of McKenna’s condition spread like taser fire through the listservs that are the backbone of the psychedelic community. The suddenness of his illness freaked folks out. “It was almost like the night when Howard Cosell came on Monday Night Football and said John Lennon had been shot,” says Jordan Gruber, an attorney who works at NASA and the founder of Enlightenment.com , a web site devoted to spiritual psychology. “It was a similar sort of terrible shock to the nervous system.” Within thirty-six hours of his seizure, fourteen hundred messages had poured into McKenna’s e-mail box. A typical missive: “I love you for who you are and are becoming and all of what you have