monetizeyourcat:

It’s just a fact of nature that Carl Sagan loved to get high

Carl Sagan’s house in Ithaca was built into the cliff wall of a massive gorge. These are literally the cliffs the word “cliffhanger” comes from, back when the motion picture industry was headquartered in Ithaca and filmed serials there. Back before it fled to LA for the weather and also to escape Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons.

There’s a way to get down into the gorge below his house that involves walking through the lawn of a Quaker peace house, dropping down some kind of drainage pit, and walking through a tunnel. My older friends taught me when I was an undergrad. You wind up a bit upstream of a waterfall with a great view of the valley below. We appreciated that this was a great view for getting high. We appreciated that Carl Sagan got high to this view. We were getting high.