Light at the Edge of the World (5 page)

I did indeed write down Alex's tales, transcriptions of dozens of hours of conversations recorded intermittently over twenty-five years, committed to paper a few years before his death. Only after it was done did I realize that in a sense I had committed a form of violence, a transgression that bordered on betrayal. Extracted from the theatre of his telling, the landscape of his memory, the sensate land and the sibilant tones of the wild, the stories lost much of their meaning and power. Transposed into two dimensions by ink and paper, trapped on the page, they seemed child-like in their simplicity, even clumsy in their rhetoric.

But, of course, these stories were not meant to be recorded. They were born of the land and had their origins in another reality. Some time after I first learned of We-gyet from Alex, I asked him how long it took to tell the cycle of tales. He replied that he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they had strapped on their snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, and walked the length of Bear Lake, a distance of some 20 miles (32 km), telling the story as they went along. They reached the far end, turned and walked all the way back home, and the story, Alex recalled, “wasn't halfway done.”

In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded.
For Alex and his father, this sense of place, this topography of the spirit, at one time informed every aspect of their existence. When, at the turn of the century, a Catholic missionary arrived at their village at Bear Lake, Alex's father was completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. He could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing and all the things that made life worth living, in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He could not conceive of a world without wild things.

Alex lived for more than 90 years; his wife Madeleine reached 103 , passing away a few seasons before Alex followed her to the grave. A year before he died, Alex gave me a small gift, a tool carved from caribou bone. Smooth as marble, though stained from years of use, it fit perfectly in my hand, the rounded and slightly serrated spoon-like tip protruding neatly from between finger and thumb. I had no idea what it might have been used for. Alex laughed. He had carved it more than eighty years before, following the lead of his father. It was a specialized instrument, used to skin out the eyelids of wolves. Only later did I realize that the eyelids in question were my own, and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was, in his own way, saying good-bye.

PERHAPS BECAUSE I never knew my grandparents, who died before I was born, I have always been drawn to elders, enchanted by the radiance of men and women who have lived through times that I can only imagine: an old school-master who scrambled out of the trenches on the first day of the Somme; a family doctor who treated the wounded along the partition line between India and Pakistan, when rivers of blood divided the Raj; Waorani shaman who knew the Amazonian forests before the arrival of missions. I am enticed by their memories, and, in a culture notably bereft of formal modes of initiation, I find comfort in their advice. From men like Alex, I have learned of a world without form, infused with spirit and prayer. But equally important to me is the landscape of the concrete, the formal realm of science.

In the early 1970s, a time of few heroes, there was one man who loomed large over the Harvard campus, Richard Evans Schultes, a kindly professor who demanded nothing but devotion to knowledge. In time, mountains in South America would bear his name, as would national parks. Prince Philip would call him “the father of ethnobotany.” Students knew him as the world 's leading authority on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, the plant explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1938 . Three years
later, having proved that
teonanacatl
, the flesh of the gods, was indeed a mushroom, and having identified
ololiuqui
, the serpent vine, the second of the elusive Aztec hallucinogenic plants, Schultes turned his imagination to the forests of South America. Taking a semester's leave of absence from the university, he disappeared into the Northwest Amazon, where he remained for twelve years, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen indigenous tribes, all the while in pursuit of the mysteries of the rain forest. He collected over twenty-seven thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand medicinal plants and over three hundred species previously unknown to science. For his students, he was a living link to the great naturalists of the nineteenth century and a distant era when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolate, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents.

By the time I met Schultes in the fall of 1973 , it had been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth floor aerie in the Botanical Museum, dressed conservatively, peering across several large stacks of dried herbarium specimens. Introducing myself as one of his undergraduate students, I mentioned that I was from British Columbia and that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just as he had done so many years before. The professor looked up
from his desk and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South America, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months.

There was, of course, method in Schultes's casual manner. He took for granted the capacity of anyone to achieve anything. In this sense he was a true mentor, a catalyst of dreams. Though not by nature a modest man, he shared his knowledge and experience with his acolytes as naturally as a gardener brings water to a seed. Sometimes his faith in a student would lead to disappointment, but not often. His own achievements were legendary, and merely to move in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.

In Schultes, I found the perfect complement to Maybury-Lewis, my anthropology tutor. Whereas Maybury-Lewis awakened the soul through the sheer power of his intellect, the wonder of his words and ideas, Schultes inspired by the example of his deeds. In all the years I was formally his student, we never had an intellectual conversation. It was not his style. He was a true explorer, and the very force of his personality gave form and substance to the most esoteric of ethnobotanical pursuits. He would pass along these thoughts that were both gifts and challenges. “There is one river that I would very much like you to see,” he would say, knowing full well that the process of
getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure that were you able to reach the confluence alive, you would emerge from the forest a wiser and more knowledgeable human being.

Typical of the way Schultes operated was his suggestion, offered casually just before I left for South America, that I look up one of his former graduate students, Tim Plowman, in Colombia. Tim, who would become a close friend, was Schultes's protégé, and the professor had secured for him from the U.S. government the dream academic grant of the early 1970 s, $250,000 to study a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, the most sacred medicine of the Andes, coca, the notorious source of cocaine.

It was a remarkable assignment. Though the drug had long been the focus of public concern and hysteria, and efforts to eradicate the coca fields had been underway for nearly fifty years, astonishingly little was known about the actual plant. The botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf, the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant's role in nutrition, the geographical range of the domesticated species, the relationship between the wild and cultivated species—all these were mysteries. No concerted effort had been made to document the role of coca in the religion and culture of the Andean and Amazonian
Indians since W. Golden Mortimer's classic
History of Coca
, published in 1901. Tim's mandate from the government, made deliberately vague by Schultes, was to travel the length of the Andean Cordillera, traversing the mountains whenever possible, to reach the flanks of the
montaña
to locate the source of a plant that had inspired an empire. Eventually, Tim and I would spend over a year on the road, a journey made possible by the great professor and infused at all times with his spirit.

We knew, of course, that coca was the most revered plant of the Andes. The Inca, unable to cultivate the bush at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, replicated it in fields of gold and silver that coloured the landscape. No holy shrine in the land could be approached unless the supplicant had a quid of coca in his mouth. No field could be planted, no child brought into being, no elder released to the realm of the dead unless the transition was mediated with an offering of coca leaves for Pachamama, the Goddess of the Earth. To this day in parts of the Andes, distances are measured not in miles or kilometres but in coca chews. When Runa people meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Soothsayers divine the future by interpreting the patterns of leaves cast onto cloth and the patterns in the venation of the leaves, a skill that can only be possessed by someone who has survived a lightning strike.

In time, Tim would solve the botanical mystery, identify the point of origin of the domesticated species and reveal how they had diverged through centuries as their cultivation had spread over much of a continent. But perhaps his greatest research contribution came about from a simple nutritional analysis, the results of which horrified his government backers, even as they transformed scientific thinking about this most sacred of plants. Coca leaves do contain a small amount of cocaine, but only about as much as there is caffeine in a coffee bean. When the leaves are chewed, the drug is absorbed slowly through the mucous membrane of the mouth; it is a benign and useful stimulant in a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Highly effective as a treatment for altitude sickness, the leaves proved also to be extraordinarily nutritious. Rich in vitamins, coca has more calcium than any plant ever assayed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggesting a vital role in a diet that traditionally lacked dairy products, especially for nursing mothers. It was also suggested that the plant enhances the ability of the body to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, again an ideal complement for a diet based on potatoes. In one elegant scientific assay, Tim revealed that coca was not a drug but a sacred food, a medicinal plant that had been used without any evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for over four thousand years by the peoples of the Andes.
This revelation put into stark profile the draconian efforts underway then and continuing to this day to eradicate the traditional fields with herbicides that poison the myriad streams cascading out of the mountains to form the headwaters of the Rivers Amazon.

 

COCA WAS THE lens through which the ancient rhythms and patterns of life in the Andes gradually came into focus. Wherever Tim and I travelled, we encountered evidence of worlds that had never been vanquished, indigenous communities that despite desperate struggles remained inextricably linked to their homelands. Nowhere was the spirit of survival stronger than among the Ika and Kogi, descendants of an ancient civilization that had flourished on the Caribbean plain of Colombia for five hundred years before the arrival of Europeans. Since the time of Columbus, these Indians have resisted invaders by retreating higher and higher into the inaccessible reaches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on Earth. Ruled to this day by a ritual priesthood, they consider themselves the Elder Brothers. We, who to their minds have ruined much of the world, are deemed the Younger Brothers.

Tim and I entered the mountains from the south, along a narrow track that rose in a day and a night through
cactus and thorn scrub to a steep river draw carved into the rising flank of the massif. Just after dawn, having made our way through the shadowy darkness, past scattered houses of stone linked one to another by small fields of coca, leaves translucent in the early morning light, we came upon a portal to the sun. Framed within its arch was a solitary figure, a silhouette blocking entry to the upper valley of a river known to the Indians as the Donachuí.

His name was Adalberto Villafañe. He was a young man, perhaps twenty, strikingly handsome with fine features and black hair flowing down past his shoulders. He wore a white cotton cloak held at the waist by a belt of fibre. His leggings were of the same rough cotton. His sandals had been cut from a rubber tire and, together with his fez-like hat of woven sisal, revealed that he was Ika. The Kogi, a more reclusive people, disdain the use of hats and shoes, and live higher in the mountains, closer to what they believe to be the heart of the world. Across each of Adalberto's shoulders hung a woven bag decorated with brilliant geometric designs. These contained coca. In his left hand was a small bottle-shaped gourd. A thick quid of the leaves created a bulge in his cheek. As we explained the purpose of our visit, he removed from the gourd a lime-coated stick, which he placed in his mouth. He bit down gently. A trickle of saliva ran past his lips as he withdrew the stick, now wet
with coca. Reflexively, he began to rub the head of his gourd with the stick, a habit of years that had resulted in a crown of calcium carbonate, the lime of burnt seashells, built up around the top of the gourd, shaped carefully, a symbol of prestige, the measure of the man.

At the time, I did not know that Adalberto's gourd had been a gift from the priest who had officiated at his marriage. The lime is essential, for it makes potent the plant, adding alkali to saliva and thus facilitating the absorption of the small amount of cocaine within the leaves. When a man marries, the priest presents him with a perforated gourd and, before his eyes, makes love to the bride, thus suggesting through ritual the fundamental notion that as a man weds himself to a life of matrimony, fidelity and procreation, so he weds himself to the destiny of the ancestors and a lifetime dedicated to the sacred leaves. Nor did I know that the Ika and Kogi societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing leaves and chanting the names of the ancestors. What I saw in the moment was a simple man, decent beyond words, who found satisfaction in our explanation and was willing to accompany us into his homeland.