True Hallucinations Part 2

The ch.o.r.e finished, we stowed our lightened supplies in the priest's powerful speedboat- an immense luxury in a world where the paddle canoe is the standard mode of transportation. In a few minutes we were tearing over the surface of the brown river, the moving center of a cresting wave of tremendous mechanical noise. The priest looked considerably more human and at ease here, with his brown ca.s.sock beating furiously in the wind and his long beard trembling in the spray and the sunlight. After forty minutes of this furious travel, we had gone a day's distanpe by canoe. Suddenly the priest turned the small boat at a right angle to the flow of the river,

making directly for a long, low spit of white sand. The engine cut off at what seemed the last instant, and in the shattering silence, we slid lightly aground on the sand bar. It was a spot that seemed no less desolate than any other place we had pa.s.sed in our wild ride, but the priest clambered up the bank and pointed out a broad trail much overgrown with vines. It was half a mile to the village, Padre Miguel explained, as we moved our supplies into a jumbled heap on the sand.

"I'm sure you will be well received," called the priest from the river as he wheeled the little speedboat around. Then he was gone. Long after he had turned a bend in the river and the sound of his departure had faded, the gla.s.sy surface of the river still moved and sucked against the banks as a last echo of the unusual commotion.

Silence. Then a shrill wave of insect sound swept like a drawn curtain through the area.

Silence again. There was jungle, river, and sky-nothing else. We were on our own now, without a seasoned expert in control, and we all became aware of it in that moment on that spit of sand on the sh.o.r.e of a jungle river identical to hundreds of other such rivers.

The sense of time suspended could not last. We had to find the village and make whatever arrangements we could to move our supplies from the river. We had to act before dark; there would be time later to contemplate our situation. No one wanted to stay with the mound of supplies, so we hid them in the bushes away from the sh.o.r.e and started down the trail. Vanessa brought her box of cameras; I carried my telescoping fibergla.s.s b.u.t.terfly net.

The trail was broad and easy to follow, obviously cared for. As we moved away from the riverbank, the vegetation became less lush, and we were walking through an eroded, scrubby, brush land. The soil was red, lateritic clay, and where it was exposed to the sun, it baked and shattered into sharp-edged, cubical fragments. After half an hour of walking the trail we topped a long, slow rise and looked down on an a.s.semblage of huts on sandy soil under a scattering of palms. Striking us immediately was a single unusual house near the center of the village, which was not of the thatched and stilted variety. As we surveyed the scene below, we were ourselves observed, and people began running and shouting. Some ran one way and some another. To the first person who reached us, we

asked for Dr. Guzman. Surrounded by people giggling and whispering, we reached the anomalous house.

The structure was made of palm leaves expertly woven between long arched sticks. It was windowless and rested on the ground, looking vaguely like a loaf of brown bread.

We all recognized it as a malloca, the traditional type of house peculiar to the Witoto people.

Inside, resting in a hammock that hung between two smoke-darkened supporting posts, was Dr. Alfredo Guzman. His face was unnaturally gaunt, his eyes were dark and deep- set, and his hands were skeletal, nervous. He did not get up, but gestured for us to sit on the ground. Only when I sat did I see beyond the hammock to the shadowed rear of the malloca, where a plump white woman in khaki pants sat cleaning pebbles from beans in a stone-polished Witoto pot. After we were all seated she looked up. She had blue eyes and even teeth.

Seeming to address us all equally, Guzman spoke: "My wife shares my professional interests."

"How fortunate. It must make it much easier," Vanessa offered.

"Yes." The flat reply became an unnerving pause. I decided to address the issue directly. "Doctor, our apologies for disturbing your solitude and the local social environment here.

We can appreciate your wish to be undisturbed in your work. We are anxious to push on to La Chorrera, and we hope that you will help us arrange bearers here to go with us.

Also, we are here with a special purpose. I refer to the Virola hallucinogens that you reported to Schultes."

I am telescoping my account, of course; it all took longer and moved less directly. We talked for perhaps twenty minutes. At the end of that time, we learned that Guzman would help us find bearers and depart, but that this would take some days. We also learned that Guzman was an ardent Structuralist, Marxist, and male chauvinist, that his involvement with the Witoto approached the maniacal, and that he was regarded by his colleagues back in Bogota as bonkers. He gave us no encouragement that we would find the oo-koo-he, which he said was a secret of the men that was slowly dying out. At the end of this discussion, our small party and

a dozen of the village people walked back to the river and carried our gear to a rundown, unused hut on the edge of the village.

As we set up camp, Annalise Guzman approached us with several cups of steaming coffee and chatted with us. Unlike her husband, she seemed more relieved than dismayed by our presence. As she talked, a picture emerged. She had gone to the London School of Economics, studied anthropology, and did graduate work in Colombia, meeting the impa.s.sioned older man in a similar profession. She was now living a pendulum life, going between the striving, contentious world of the university in Bogota and the tiny village of San Jose del Encanto. Her husband's addiction to chewing coca was much on her mind.

Like the males of the Witoto group, Guzman was a coca enthusiast, and he had become quite paranoid from constantly chewing it. When we saw him in the morning, he always had coca staining his lower chin. Because the tribe is very hard on women, Annalise had been told by Alfredo that, in order to become integrated into this society, she had to take on the women's role. This required pounding yucca root with stones and also making the coca, which the women are not allowed to chew at all. The men lie around in hammocks and listen to transistor radios. The women live with the dogs and the children under the houses, while the men lived in the houses. At five o'clock in the afternoon, the women are all sent to the sleeping place with the children and the dogs. The men retire into the long house for storytelling and coca chewing until four-thirty in the morning. The fart is their most highly appreciated form of humor. There are ten thousand variations on the fart and all are thought riotously funny.

We lived with these people elbow-to-elbow, staying in that uncomfortable setting until the morning of the eighteenth of February. It took that long-nearly a week-to arrange for two young boys to leave the hunting to help us carry our supplies over the trail to La Chorrera. We were grateful for the pause in travel, since the voyage on the Fabiolita had left us rather worn. I spent part of each day collecting insects, or writing, or thinking in my hammock. That week we saw Dr. Guzman very rarely. He treated us with the same remote disdain that the other male leaders of the community affected. Not

everyone was so shy; there were always several Witoto of all ages intently watching whichever one of us was most active at any given moment. In one of his oddest moves, Dr. Guzman asked us to answer any questions about the relationships prevailing within our group by saying that we were all brothers and sisters. This a.s.sertion brought the expression of amazement expected of any reasoning being. And so I think we were especially interesting to the people of the village because they were asked by their expert informant concerning all things in the outside world to believe that such a disparate group as we were all siblings. It was only one of the good doctor's peculiarities.

Once in the heat of the afternoon when I was alone, collecting insects in the forest, I came around a large tree to surprise Guzman, who was standing absolutely still, poised above a small stream with a fish spear in his hand. We walked back to the village together, and as we walked, he told me his view of life.

"Danger lurks everywhere. Never swim alone in the river. Huge forms move beneath its surface. There is the anaconda. The rivers abound with them. Snakes are everywhere. Be aware of this as you make your way to La Chorrera. The forest is unforgiving of error."

I had spent months in the jungles of Indonesia, and I had been collecting insects every day in these Amazonian forests since the journey to San Jose del Encanto had begun. I had my own idea of the risks of the forests, not nearly so dark as the thoughts of the wildly gesticulating figure who strode raving at my side. Clearly, it had been our misfortune to stumble onto what was a very peculiar scene. Guzman had been ruling his wife with an iron hand. He lived in a nightmare world of delusions brought on by coca addiction. His wife had not had any Anglos to talk with since arriving in the jungle.

Naturally she was wondering what was going on. She wasn't allowed to chew coca and he was behaving more and more like a male Witoto of the tribe.

There were strange incidents that set everyone on edge. A bushmaster, most deadly of vipers, was killed near the village and brought back and shown around. Incidents? Say rather omens or ominous events. One morning an enormous tarantula, the largest I

had ever seen, made a dash through the village, or so it seemed, since it was suddenly discovered very much in the middle of things. Had someone released it?

Two nights before we were to leave the village, a tree burst into flames near our hut. This seemed unambiguously unfriendly and we accelerated our plans for departure. But we could not continue on without bearers, and only when the men came back from the hunting party could we expect to hire them.

From Guzman we would learn almost nothing. About the oo-koo-he he said, "Ridiculous, my friend. You're not going to get it. These people don't even speak Spanish. They speak only Witoto. There were forty thousand of them killed here fifty years ago. They have no reason to like you and the drug is supersecret. What are you doing here? I urge you to leave the jungle while that is still possible." But in his way he was informative; we learned that the oo-koo-he was always made with the ash of other trees mixed into the DMT-containing resin. We felt that these additional ingredients must be the key to its oral activity, since normally DMT would be destroyed by enzymes in the large intestine.

Dennis was determined that we make a firm botanical identification of the "secret activators." Ideally we hoped to be the first to get good collections of these plants. It would be our small contribution to Amazonian ethn.o.botany.

Finally, on the eighteenth, we departed, the six of us in the company of two Witoto adolescents. The capitan of the village turned out to wish us a good journey. Even Dr.

Guzman was smiling, delighted no doubt at the prospect of the village returning to normal after a long week playing host to a delegation from the global electronic tribe.

There was no one more pleased to leave the village than I. As we strode along the wide path, or trocha, I felt my spirits rise. At last we had put all the enc.u.mbering obstacles behind us. Only Solo remained to plague me. I decided, Walter Mitty or not, I was going to have to burst his bubble. Relations inside our group were becoming too odd. Solo was doing things. He insisted on going first on the trocha. He would get far ahead, then sharpen sticks and put them on the ground in odd patterns, fetishes.

During our journey downriver, before we got to El Encanto, we had been smoking weed all the time. Solo would just sit staring for hours and hours. I finally came to understand that he was probably going to kill me and was most likely completely deranged. That, strange as it may seem, would be my fate-I was going to be b.u.mped off by somebody's psychotic old boyfriend who had somehow managed to sneak onto this Amazon expedition.

I contemplated the irony of the situation. I recalled that mushroom maven Gordon Wa.s.son and his wife had been accompanied by an undercover CIA agent during their second journey to the mushroom village of Huatla de Jimenez in the remote uplands of Mazatecan, Mexico. Psychedelic history would have been different if Wa.s.son had detected that clumsy effort at co-option. Then the CIA's absurd notion that psilocybin might forever remain what it termed an "in-house prerogative" could never have been entertained. It was only the speedy publication of the molecular structure of psilocybin by Swiss pharmacologist and LSD-inventor Albert Hofmann that had short-circuited that dark and grandiose fantasy. I thought about turning points generally. I recalled John Wayne's observation that, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." At this thought, I seized the moment and stopped on the trail and observed out loud that Solo was the world's most outrageous jacka.s.s. In other words, I just pitched the s.h.i.t straight into the fan. For a moment it looked like we were going to punch each other out right there. Vanessa began yelling and shoving. Witoto bearers were standing around open-mouthed. The incident ended as a standoff, but as the day wore on Solo decided to turn back. He had no money, and he was in terrific pain because of an abscessed tooth.

There was no reason for him to be there. The stress of isolation and bad food can push even a healthy person to the edge, and I had become convinced that he was deeply disturbed and capable of anything. He chewed coca to cut the pain of his tooth, but it didn't help. He needed medical attention. That night he came to me and explained that he did not have enough money to get back upriver. He offered me a kilo of his own crop, and I jumped at the chance to

pay him a hundred dollars. When we broke camp the next morning he was already gone.

Around us, the jungle; ahead of us, the Secret. After Solo's departure, I b.u.t.toned up my stash, hefted my b.u.t.terfly net, and felt like Van Veen, the priapic hero of Nabokov's surreal love story Ada. After all, how often does one have the satisfaction of overcoming a rival? Especially a rival who claims to believe sincerely that he is Jesus Christ and Hitler?

It was as lovely as a Bierstadt as we wended our way toward La Chorrera under the liana- tangled canopy of the climaxed Amazonian forest. Iridescent, blue morphos, b.u.t.terflies the size of dinner plates, would occasionally be surprised while lounging languidly on broad leaves overhanging the trail. They would start upwards suddenly with an amazing show of watery, splendiferous sapphire quickly lost in the gloomy heights. We set a brisk pace and as we moved along my thoughts returned to Nabokov and the seemingly prophetic lines written in Pale Fire by his character, the apocryphal American poet John Shade: ... that rare phenomenon The iridule-when, beautiful and strange In a bright sky above a mountain range One opal cloudlet in an oval forni Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm Which in a distant valley has been staged- For we are most artistically caged.

That night we made our camp at a thatch-roofed shelter with a marker indicating we had come twenty-five kilometers during the day. We ate well that night on tinned cheese with reconst.i.tuted minestrone, and in the morning we were back on the trail as the ground fogs of dawn departed. It was a day of hard work, carrying the heaviest loads by a method that allowed each person two hours on and then an hour off. Quite a physical feat. I think that we were already feeling the effects of "the phenomenon," a backwash from our experimental tampering with the laws of physics that still lay days in the future. But it is impossible to say. We stopped eating.

The women announced that we would eliminate breakfast and lunch to make better time.

It was their decision since they were doing the cooking; it was too much of a ch.o.r.e to make a fire in the damp Amazonian forest.

We would get up at four-thirty in the morning, have coffee, and walk twenty-five kilometers until about three-thirty in the afternoon. It was an a.s.s buster, absolutely. The trocha went up and down, up and down. We would arrive at a river to find no bridge and have to figure out how to cross. We had to be aware of the possibility that the bearers might steal something or desert us. In spite of the exertion, the days were an exquisite immersion in the truly immense and vibrant forest through which we were pa.s.sing. All day long on the second day we pushed forward against our flagging energies. At last we reached a shelter similar to the one we had used the night before. It was set on the top of a small hill just beyond a crude bridge arching a small river. After dark, around the fire, we smoked and talked long into the night, antic.i.p.ating the adventure soon to come that we could sense but not yet imagine. The Witoto bearers unfolded their leaf-wrapped packets of food and ate apart from us, friendly but distant.

Toward the afternoon of the fourth day, the bearers were visibly excited in antic.i.p.ation of our arrival at La Chorrera. During one of our breaks, Vanessa pointed out a rainbow that lay directly over the path we were traveling. The appropriate jokes were made and we hoisted our loads and hurried onward. In a few minutes we were walking through secondary forest and shortly thereafter emerged on the edge of a huge clearing of rough pasture. Mission buildings could be seen across this expanse. As we walked into the clearing, an Indian came to meet us. We spoke with him haltingly in Spanish, and then he spoke to our bearers rapidly in Witoto and started off with us in the direction from which he had come.

We pa.s.sed through a s.p.a.ce fenced by a wood enclosure and across a semi-enclosed courtyard, perhaps a ballcourt. On the walls of this enclosure were paintings in tempera of cartoon elves with pointed ears. We were led finally to the back porch of a more substantial wooden building that was obviously the priest's house. A

huge man, bearded and bearish, emerged in his shirt sleeves. Peter Ustinov could have played him to perfection. A basically merry person, he nevertheless did not seem happy to see us. Why were these people always so withdrawn? Something about not liking anthropologists-but we were basically botanists: how could we put that across? Our reception was hospitable and correct. We asked no more, and as we hung our hammocks in the empty guest house to which we were shown, there was a sense of relief among us all at having reached our destination.

CHAPTER FOUR CAMPED BY A DOORWAY.

In which we become acquainted with the mushrooms and shamans of La Chorrera.

Most of the Amazon Basin is made up of alluvial deposits from the Andes. La Chorrera is different. A river, the Rio Igara-Parana, narrows and flows into a crack. It becomes very rapid then drops over an edge-a lip-creating not exactly a waterfall but a narrow channel of water (chorro means "chute"), a flume whose violent outpouring has made a sizable lake.

La Chorrera is a paradisiacal place. You push very hard and suddenly you are there.

There are no stinging or biting insects. In the evening, mist drifts across a large pasture creating a beautiful pastoral scene. There is the mission, the foam-flecked lake below, the jungle surrounding, and much to my surprise, white cattle.

The afternoon following our arrival, at the edge of the pasture, which had been cleared by the Spanish priests who had managed Mission La Chorrera since its establishment in the 1920s, I held and turned over in my hand perfect specimens of the same species of mushroom that I had eaten near Florencia. In the pasture before me were dozens of these mushrooms. After examining several, my brother concurred, p.r.o.nounced them the same Stropharia cubensis we had found before, one of the largest, strongest, and certainly the

most widely distributed of any of the known psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

What to do? We had no data on the proper dosage of psilocybin. Our expedition's thinned-down drug and plant file was concerned with flowering plants, not with fungi.

Collectively we seemed to remember that in the Oaxacan mushroom rituals described by Gordon Wa.s.son, in Life magazine of all places, mushrooms were always eaten in pairs, with several pairs consumed. We determined to eat six mushrooms each that same evening. My journal entry for the next day spoke clearly: February 23, 1971 Are we indeed now in some way camped on the edge of another dimension? Yesterday afternoon Dave discovered Stropharia cubensis in the damp pastures behind the house where we had hung our hammocks. He and I gathered thirty delicious psilocy-bin- saturated specimens in about a half an hour. We each ate about six and spent last night on an enormously rich and alive, yet gentle and elusive, trip. In between strange lights in the pasture and discussion of our project, 1 am leftwith the sense that by penetrating the local psychedelic flora this way we have taken a giant step toward deeper understanding.

Multifaceted and benevolent, as complex as mescaline, as intense as LSD-the mushroom, as is said of peyote, teaches the right way to live. This particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people anywhere and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring. Through this unclaimed vegetable teacher one can gain entry into the world of the elf chemists. The experience of the mushroom is subtle but can reach out to the depth and breadth of a truly intense psychedelic experience. It is, however, extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work.

Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions, noticed a similarity of content that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon or some sort of simultaneous perception of the same invisible landscape. A tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages, but this was quick to fade, and the body strain and

exhaustion often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs such as peyote and Datura was not present.

This mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power-the power of vision- to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex.

We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter.

The emergence of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.

Such were my impressions after only one exposure to the realm of vision over which the mushroom holds sway.

The reference to "strange lights in the pasture" should be explained, since perhaps it has some bearing on some of what followed. An hour after we had eaten the mushrooms, and everyone was comfortable with the pleasant plateau of colorful, drifting, behind-the- eyelids imagery, someone initiated a discussion.

It was Dave or my brother, Dennis; Dennis, I believe. He said that we were now stoned in the home territory of the Secret and so should not remain in the confined s.p.a.ce of our thatched hut, but we should move out into the night and the warm, enfolding fog over the pasture. Not all should go, but a delegation. Who should it be? Dennis nominated Dave and myself, calling Dave the least skeptical and me the most. Vanessa objected to me as "most skeptical," suggesting instead that Dave and Dennis should go. I heartily agreed, not actually wishing to visit the dark and dewy pasture myself, and having no faith, so skeptical was I, in the transcendental potential of the errand.

So off they went, first loudly proclaiming the total enveloping power of the ground fog, and then in a theatrically absurd short time and from offstage, they hollered out that they saw a hovering, diffuse light in the pasture nearby. Investigation pursued. Hollering continued but faded. Light persisted. Diffuseness persisted. I decided it was time for cooler heads to intervene. Off into the enfolding, wet night I went. I crossed carefully through the barbed wire

that surrounded the pastures; it was wet to my fingers but warm-seeming even at night, so steamy is the Amazon. Once united with Dave and Dennis I found the situation closer to their description than I had expected. There was a dim light on the ground a few yards away. It seemed to retreat as one walked toward it.

We moved about thirty meters in its direction in a series of short advances. Enveloped in dense and drifting fog, we felt far from our companions back at the house.

"We can follow this light but we had better not go too far or we'll get lost since we don't know the area at all."

Dave was pleading for a retreat, but we continued to press on. Sometimes the light seemed to be hovering above the ground just twenty feet ahead and then, leaping and falling again, it would recede as we approached. We would run forward to catch up with it, yet it continued to remain ahead of us. For ten minutes, we chased this hovering, receding light, but then decided to go no farther. As we turned to depart I seemed to see a flickering of the diffuse light that, to my mind, suggested someone dancing before a fire.

I momentary abandoned thoughts of UFOs and recalled instead the series of ominous incidents preceding our departure from Dr. Guzman and his scene at San Jose del Encanto. Was this a shaman dancing around a small fire? Did it have something to do with us? No illumination was ever shed on this incident, but the general eeriness of it antic.i.p.ated all that was to follow.

The words of my journal are revealing. I wrote matter of factly of "gaining entry into the world of elf chemists"; I called the mushroom a transdimensional doorway and linked it to a transformation of life on the planet. A younger, more naive, more poetic self is revealed-a more intuitive self, at ease with proclaiming wild unlikelihoods as hallucinogenically derived Gnostic Truth.

And yet these ideas have changed very little in twenty years; then I was eager to be convinced by demonstration, and demonstration was given. I was changed and was obviously eager to be changed. It was true of me then and is still true now, for since the coming of the mushroom all has been continuous transformation. Now, years later and with two decades of reflection on these things, I can still discern in that earliest experience many of the motifs that have persisted through the years and remained mysterious. At one point during that evening, Dennis and I both seemed able to see and describe the same inner visions. Off and on over the years this has happened several times with psilocybin.

The wonder of it remains.

In those early mushroom experiences at La Chorrera there was an aura of the animate and the strange, the idea that the mushroom was somehow more than a plant hallucinogen or even a shamanic ally of the cla.s.sic sort. It had begun to dawn on me that the mushroom was in fact a kind of intelligent ent.i.ty-not of earth-alien and able during the trance to communicate its personality as a presence in the inward-turned perceptions of its beholder.

In the days following that first mushroom experience, the lives of my brother and I underwent a tremendous and bizarre transformation. Not until Jacques Vallee had written The Invisible College (1975), noting that an absurd element is invariably a part of the situation in which contact with an alien occurs, did I find the courage to examine the events at La Chorrera and try to fit them into some general pattern. I have told various parts of our story over the years, never revealing the entire incredible structure to any one listener, knowing full well what it seems to imply about our mental condition during the time of the experiences.

Any story of alien contact is going to be incredible enough by itself, but central to our story as well are the hallucinogenic mushrooms with which we were experimenting. The very fact that we were involved with such plants would make any story of alien contact seem highly dubious to anyone not sympathetic to the use of hallucinogens. Who would fail to attribute our "UFO experience" to the fact that we were tripping? But that is not the only difficulty with telling this story. The events at La Chorrera generated a great deal of controversy and subsequent bitterness among the partic.i.p.ants. Several ideas of what was taking place were represented, each basing itself on data unavailable to or deemed irrelevant by the competing interpretations. What some of us took to be a metamorphosis toward the transcendental, others took for an outbreak of obsessional fantasy.

We were poorly prepared for the events that overwhelmed us. We began as naive observers of something-we knew not what- and because our involvement with this phenomenon went on for many days, we were able to observe some aspects of it. I feel satisfied

that the method of approach described here is generally effective for triggering whatever it is that I am calling the alien contact experience. (It may also be dangerous, so don't try this at home, folks.) Our first Stropharia trip at La Chorrera occurred on the twenty-second of February, 1971, only a little more than twenty-four hours after our arrival at La Chorrera and following the four-day walk through the jungle from San Jose del Encanto on the Rio Cara-Parana.

My journal entry on the following day makes it clear that I was spellbound. It was the last thing I could bring myself to write for several weeks. All day I was suffused with contentment. I knew only that the mushroom was the best hallucinogen I had ever had and that it had a quality of aliveness I had never known before. It seemed to open doorways into places I had a.s.sumed would always be closed to me because of my insistence on a.n.a.lysis and realism.

I had never had psilocybin before and was amazed at the contrast with LSD, which seemed more abrasively psychoa.n.a.lytic and personal. In contrast, the mushrooms seemed so full of merry elfin energy that casting off into a visionary trance was all the more enticing. I sensed nothing of the magnitude of the forces that were gathering around our small expedition. I was thinking only that it was great these mushrooms were here. Even if we didn't find oo-koo-he or ayahuasca, we would always have them to fall back on, and certainly they were interesting.

Our plan was to spend about three months slowly getting to know the botanical and social environment of the Witoto, who were living traditionally in a village about fourteen kilometers down a trail from the mission at La Chorrera on the Rio Igara-Parana. We knew oo-koo-he was taboo, so we were in no hurry. The day after our first mushroom experience was spent checking our equipment, after the rigors of the overland walk, and generally relaxing in the casita to which Father Jose Maria, the Capuchin in charge, had kindly shown us. We gathered more mushrooms that afternoon and dried them near the cooking fire.

We decided we would take mushrooms again that night. I pulverized them into a snuff, which we all took. It was delicious, like some chocolate-related essence, and it was generally thought a success. I felt elated and very pleased with everything and impressed with what an extraordinarily beautiful place we had come to be in.

But it was a different sort of experience. We were exhausted from the trip the night before, and as we all sat around waiting to get stoned, there was a lot of bickering between Vanessa and Dennis. Apparently he had had enough of her and said, "You know, you're pretty weird, and I'm going to tell you why," at which point he launched into a long monologue of acc.u.mulated gripes.