We didn't know the real rules. We didn't even have real Frisbees. I was using the lid from a 5-gallon food bucket as a driver and my buddy had a heavy metal lid from a paint can. Another guy had an Aerobee, but it didn't have the weight to really punch through the thick underbrush. For precision work we used Woolworths specials--basically light junk disks in day-glo colors.

The rules we invented for Off-road disk golf work like this: you decide on a hole--typically the most-distant visible tree (we were in a densely-wooded river valley). If a disk gets caught in brambles or a tree, you take a one-stroke penalty and throw from where it drops. When everyone has finished a hole (by tapping the tree), you point out the next most-distant visible tree and start again.

18 holes took us all day. By the end we were many miles from the cabin, covered in scratches and sap, soaking wet (one guy fell into a stream and we all went in after him), and tripping like pigs on ice. Then we looked around and realized night was falling.

The Vermont woods are pitch black and scary already, but when my buddy started speaking in tongues and calling out Shub-Niggurath (a reference to the story The Whisperer in Darkness, which was written just a few miles from the place, when HPL summered in Brattleboro) someone panicked and started running, and then we were all running. We dropped our disks and busted ass back to the cabin in the dark, laughing and screaming like mad people.

There's nothing finer than drying out next to a hot wood stove, drinking maple water and whisky (a Lumberjack), and feeling the psilocybes work their way through your pre-frontal cortex. That night we slept in the cabin's hay loft and I woke up before dawn and listened to the coyotes calling to each other across the dark hills.