ON THE ROCKS
How did it pan out?
WHEN JESUS was in the desert for 40 days, the devil tried to lure him offtrack by tempting him to turn stones into bread. This seems a bit tame on the devil’s part. Lying around in my cave in the Mojave desert, California, at three in the afternoon in 38C heat, my food fantasies revolve around fish and chips and roasted meat.
Other afternoon activities include gazing at the boulder that looks like a dinosaur with a cheeseburger for a mouth that stands opposite the entrance to my cave. And orgasms. My $99 solar panel does a great job at recharging my phone and my vibrator. Sun-powered orgasms in a prehistoric cave – as rabbits hop past and lizards scuttle across rocks – are fantastic, especially if you’ve eaten a marijuana gummy bear beforehand.
It was creatures that got me into the cave in the first place. Spiders, to be precise. In June 2020, I visited a man called Garth, who lives in a tipi, and said that I’d like to move into one of his caves, “because I want to conquer my fear of spiders ”.
This was true. A few years ago, I did a couple of “vision quests” in the Pyrenees – four days and nights immersed in nature, inspired by indigenous practices. On my second, I realised I was terrified of spiders, which in shamanic thinking signifies a fear of the feminine (the dark, the damp, the hidden). It struck me that fear of spiders was weird. Why aren’t we afraid of, say, rabbits?
Whatever. I had time on my hands. It
