e
angers and frustrations which had accumulated from work and from home.

Nor did I understand that my mother freely gave to me what she, in her
youth, had sorely missed: love. Oblivious to the magnitude of her
workload--she taught full-time and was pursuing a Master's degree--I
grew angry with her as a teenager partly because she seemed insecure
and overbearing, and partly because she expected me, my brother, and my
father to help keep the house clean in the way that she wanted.

Despite my family's love for the outdoors, for our dog, and for one
another, the emotional fabric that bound us together often seemed on
the verge of ripping apart. And the problems only intensified as my
brother and I grew older.

Two-and-a-half-years my elder, my brother was an avid backpacker and
rock climber with jet-black hair, Gandhi glasses, and a gentle but
determined disposition. He too felt that something in our family was
"out of whack," and we occasionally discussed what we would do when we
left home. But unlike me, he had no one to buffer him from my parents
who, I was starting to discover, were only human.

I was a sensitive child. I was so sensitive that the sounds of someone
chewing made me upset. I was a light sleeper. I was also a slob, a
knee-jerk rebel, and something of a nerd when it came to doing things
like making friends with girls. Nonetheless, I decided that I could
work out whatever I needed to work out in a healthier environment than
at home; the countdown to the last day of high school, after which I
planned to set out on my own, began when I was around fifteen.
Meanwhile, I read a lot and spent time with friends, some of whom also
enjoyed hiking and bicycling.

In the summer of 1976, when I was sixteen, I bicycled from the White
Mountains of New Hampshire to Boston with people from an outing club.
One morning, as I watched my traveling companions prepare their daily
dose of hallucinogens, I realized that I wanted to be part of their
fellowship. The desire, however, was checked by a gut-level impulse to
avoid drugs, so Jim, a sinewy guy stooped over a pot of boiling morning
glory seeds, turned me on instead to The Teachings of Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This was a popular account of Carlos
Castaneda's purported apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian medicine man
Juan Matus, or Don Juan.

From the cover of the book peered a menacing and surreal painting of a
crow.

"But a crow isn't always a