Joseph Martin Waters
Authors Note

Lured by colorful descriptions of psychedelic visions, I was one of tens of thousands of teenagers in the late 1960s who ran away to California from a safe middle class home, in a culturewide vision quest.

The culmination of the journey occurred on a cold rainy night in January, when after days of hitchhiking, we were dropped off in Big Sur, a vast national park straddling the California coast.  Up on a high cliff, in the middle of the night, we took a powerful dose of LSD overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
I spent hours drifting in and out of a state of infinity, where one cannot think, because there is no past or future, only the present that one is exquisitely part of, and then coming down for a few seconds to observe what was going on before slipping back into the abyss. I remember finding myself out in the ocean, somehow being part of the waves and the moonlight and the wind. It was gut wrenching and amazing. The effects of this journey I feel to this day.

Remembering that chapter in my life, I realized that the vision quest is universal and I recalled the journey of Siddhartha.  This story is my reimagining that journey set in a time of extreme cultural change, when experimentation and longing was at a zenith for that generation, outcomes varied and sometimes harrowing with results unpredictable.
Joseph Martin Waters

May 26, 2025