The Man Who Fell For Earth

"I usually like to walk around in a perpetual fog," Woody Harrelson says, as a haze of secondhand pot smoke wafts across his tanned face. "But not today." Harrelson is standing barefoot at a party amid redwood trees, just north of San Francisco, wearing his usual all-hemp outfit of T-shirt and baggy drawstring pants. Inhaling a deep breath, the daily yoga practitioner and pro-hemp activist gazes pensively over the treetops and starts rubbing his buzz-cut head. Several seconds pass. He says nothing. Instead, Harrelson, a passionate environmentalist who launched his acting career in the mid-'80s by delivering hilariously dopey one-liners on Cheers, crinkles his forehead and starts crying. And we're not talking about the forced drip of a Hollywood tear faucet, the kind an actor of Harrelson's caliber surely can turn on at the mere sight of a can of Kodak. We're talking the genuine, boyish tears of a 40-year-old man who grew up the poor midwestern son of a single mom, who loves his two little daughters and their polluted planet, and who has recently begun realizing that his own nature isn't anywhere near as perfect as that of the deep-green trees reaching for the sky above him. "I've been so shaken up lately that I can't even bring myself to smoke weed," Harrelson says, gulping a glass of organic red wine. "It's been four days since I burned one. I mean, I'm going around tellin' everyone how I think they should live, but I'm realizing I have to start taking a good look at myself. You know, try a little introspection for a change." But what has really got Harrelson's 100 percent hemp undies in a bunch at this moment is the bloody bicycle accident suffered a few days ago by one of his closest friends, a man he calls his "brother"-Kentucky hemp activist Joe Hickey. Hickey's roadside brush with death, witnessed by the actor, has compelled Harrelson to question everything he is doing with his life, including his heretofore prideful pot-smoking practice. (About two weeks later, Harrelson's wife, Laura, would also be treated at a hospital for cuts and bruises suffered after getting blown over by a speeding tractor trailer.) Hickey's wipeout happened halfway through Harrelson's 35-day, 1,000-mile bike tour from Seattle to southern California, a neohippie crusade that the outspoken vegan and hemp activist, accompanied by a dozen or so equally passionate environmentalists, launched in mid-April with a rally at the University of Washington and ended in May at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Throughout the tour, nearly 20,000 people came to see Harrelson. Two days before Earth Day, about 3,000 people crowded into an outdoor amphitheater on the Eugene campus of the University of Oregon, holding signs that proclaimed EUGENE HAS A WOODY FOR HEMP and shouting "Woody for president!"