Drinking Alone in the Woods and Life's Other Peak Experiences

Getting drunk alone in nature was the closest I've come to religious experience.

Watching the sky darken and the stars come out. I was walking along the power lines and then cutting through the woods to go to a concert at the community college. Before I left the house, I'd dumped half the juice from a glass bottle of Ocean Spray Cranberry and filled it back up with vodka from under the kitchen sink. I'd sipped at it for a couple of miles and felt warmer and lighter until, somewhere along the path, I thought “this is better” and laid down in the underbrush.

It was spring or fall. Cold enough to be wearing a long wool coat, warm enough that that was enough to keep warm while still.

Stillness, there on the darkening ground. Everything was freighted with significance. The bare branches creaking against the sky. The rustle of some rodent in the leaf litter. I rolled over to a tree and explored the texture of bark. Different trees, different bark. There was no fear as the dark settled in; I knew these woods well enough to be drunk in them, even if drunk was itself a new thing.

Owls. A skunk who didn’t give a shit about me. The mad shadow-flicker of bats, reminding us that mammals can fly.

The smell of decay was sweet in the way that decay is always all right, in nature, and as the Milky Way started to assert itself in the darkness I realized it was absurd to think this planet was the only place that could be like this, alive. Life clings to everything once it gets a foothold, moss on that rock over there, motion even in the dirt of the center of the footpath, some mite in the grit of it, the tremble of dirt visible with the naked eye even at night, two inches away from the ground. (I didn’t carry a flashlight and cell phones were a decade away). Stars and soil.

In short: your standard micro-macrocosm experience. It hit me how it was absurd to think we were the center of the universe here. But at the same time, in an infinite universe, everyone gets to be the center.

I thought I was going to sneak most of the vodka into the concert but I decided it would be wasted there.

I stood, and found that walking felt more like swimming. So I sat again. I knew: it was important to be drunk alone. Once you’re drunk around other people, all you’re going to see is the other people. You’re gonna want to be funny and impressive and you’re probably going to want to fuck some of them. Once that’s on your mind, it’s all that’s on your mind. The power of this marvelous new feeling was I could listen and not speak.

I was two hours late for that show, because I had to let these woods soak in.

It was an alcohol free event anyway, and I walked in past the bouncer holding my mostly-empty juice bottle and felt kind of bewildered that it was so easy.

This woman from my biology class rushed over. “I’m so glad you made it. My daughter is here and she thinks you’re just the coolest.” Community college was weird because so many of the students were older. You probably wouldn’t date your classmates but you might end up dating their kids.

I don’t remember any of the music. I don’t remember that woman or her daughter, except that I thought it was kind of great they went to a local rock show together. I don’t remember how I got home, either, whether I walked along the sidewalk or caught a ride with someone.

But I’ve never forgotten the woods on that night. Those hours in the woods were what I’d call one of life’s “peak experiences,” right up there with the first and last time I solo-flew an airplane. It’s the feeling I was chasing, later, in my heavier drinking phases.

It's up there with the perfect day of sailing,

With my wife and my best friend, when we’d just sat at anchor, waiting out the dangerous currents of some tricky passage, and we'd grilled a lunch of steak tips and corn on the cob and now the wind and water was ripe for cruising again and my wife hauled up the anchor and the 1971 Atomic Four engine purred steady beneath me and the sun was warm on the skin.

On this perfect day I looked at my friend with sudden horror, and said, “What if this is as good as it gets? What if we never have another moment as good as this one?”

"Try not to think about it," he said. "Moments like this aren't for thinking."

In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim bounces around from moment to moment in his life, experiencing the good times and bad over and over again. The lesson: you’ve got to do your best to concentrate on the good times and ignore the bad ones.

Man, that book really fucked me up. It meant we might be condemned to live our lives over and over again, and I can only come up with a handful of hours I’d like to repeat.

It also put the pressure on. Are you happy enough today? You’d better be, because once it’s over, there’s no changing it.

Anxiety does this to a person. It poisons memories. The happiest people do their best to sweeten them. But I’ve always owned houses on the verge of foreclosing or falling down, facing a future that feels like something to endure rather than anticipate. There's so much on my plate right now that I don’t want to eat.

Later, my grandmother’s second husband stole that sailboat, and even later I held his ashes in a cheap plastic tub because nobody else wanted them. Dumping them into the ocean was the most hollow satisfaction you can imagine.

Moving on.

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