The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (37 page)

Guzman’s agitation clearly went beyond his annoyance at us for disrupting his fieldwork. He seemed edgy and hyper-vigilant, clearly in some kind of state. His habit of chewing copious amounts of coca had apparently triggered something like an amphetamine psychosis that had rendered him extremely paranoid. He carried his machete with him at all times and would wander about, cutting swaths through the grass and muttering things like, “The snakes, the snakes are everywhere, waiting to strike! You must never let down your guard,” and on and on, his eyes burning with the intensity of an Old Testament prophet. There were no snakes, at least none that we could see. The man was clearly troubled, and possibly worse. It was also clear that his shy and chubby wife was aware of the situation and concerned, possibly terrified, but we weren’t about to intervene in their strained relationship. We made plans to move on as quickly as we could, which meant rounding up porters to carry our stuff. It’s not as if we needed more motivation to move on, but we got it anyway when a large palm tree next to our hut “spontaneously” caught fire in the middle of our second night there. Whether Guzman had put someone up to that or others resented our presence, we took it as another sign our short welcome had worn thin.

Fortunately, we quickly found a couple of Witoto lads of about seventeen to help us. They were short and stocky and went about barefoot, which is actually the best way to go in the Amazon if you have the thick layer of callouses on your feet that these kids had. They were taciturn and spoke almost no Spanish. Being tenderfoot gringos, we were equipped with state-of-the-art backpacks, all nylon, padded straps, aluminum frames that rested on the hips, really very nice. Our Witoto bearers rejected them. They took their machetes into the forest and returned ten minutes later with some leaves, strips of bark, and fibers from a liana, and quickly fashioned them into loosely woven baskets with shoulder straps. They dumped our high-tech packs into these baskets, and the trek began. Theirs was actually the superior technology. I tried on one of the baskets, and it was as comfortable as my North Face version. Like tourists everywhere, we had seriously over-packed. We tried to consolidate our gear into two large packs that the bearers could carry, along with three smaller packs that we could trade off among us; the rest we stuffed into a trunk we’d brought—I don’t know what we were thinking—and asked Guzman to store it for us until we returned. He reluctantly agreed, no doubt just to get us out of there.

After a day of preparations we started down the trail, or
troche,
in the early dawn mist. We’d been told the journey would take four days, with crude shelters spaced about a day’s walk apart. Our goal was to reach the shelters in time to make camp before darkness fell. We must have presented quite a spectacle as we departed the village, disappearing down the trail in our white linens and robes, Terence leading the way with his butterfly net fully deployed, and our bemused porters bringing up the rear. They soon got well ahead of us when we stopped to rest. It was the morning of February 18, 1971.

Looking back, I marvel that we even survived the ensuing trek, which was hellish. Every morning we rose before dawn, made coffee, shared a large spliff, and set out. Much of the Amazon is very flat, but in this area there were many small rivers and shallow ravines, most of which were bridged by crude log bridges. These consisted of nothing more than a large tree felled over the gap, covered with moss, and slippery as could be, like much of the trail. We were slipping and sliding through slick mud for much of the way, down one ravine, up to the next ridge, then down again in a monotonous pattern.

I’ve always feared heights, and every time we came to a bridge I was terrified I’d slip off into the ravine below—not a great distance but enough to do serious damage. My eyes became fixed on the ground to avoid tripping on roots or slipping. We smoked constantly, partly because Terence did so as a rule and saw no reason not to on the trail. The cannabis may have helped us put up with the conditions, but I also think it exhausted us, or compounded our exhaustion. The jungle was not particularly hot during those long afternoons; the canopy overhead protected us from the bright sun, and it was often misty and gloomy under the immense trees. During our frequent rests, I sometimes took off my shirt and hung it on a branch to air it out; it would soon be covered with a dense mass of stingless bees apparently attracted to the sweat. During those breaks, the vast silence of the forest, broken by the occasional bird or insect trill, pressed in on us from all sides. The place felt haunted by its history. I thought of the Indians who had met a horrible fate there, the cruelties they had endured in pushing that trail through thick forest.

It was the second day, I recall, when things finally came to a head between Terence and Solo. The tension between them had been palpable and growing ever since we had departed from Puerto Leguizamo. Solo said little, but his eyes blazed with a glittering fury. He clearly hated Terence for stealing his girlfriend, as he saw it. Solo was growing nuttier by the day. He was also in extreme pain from his rotting teeth and multiple abscesses. He needed to get back to civilization and have them treated. What’s more, there was only room for one alpha male in this particular troupe of monkeys, and it wasn’t going to be him. Inevitably, there was a confrontation. An embarrassing standoff on the trail took place, eventually defused when Vanessa intervened. We continued our slog down the trail in sullen silence. Later, Solo declared that he had decided (perhaps after consulting the Beings of Light) to return to El Encanto and head back upriver. We all mumbled he was probably right, in view of his medical situation. The face-saving out enabled him to depart somewhat gracefully. We stopped for the night, and by dawn he’d slipped away.

We passed two more exhausting days on the trail. The women had stopped cooking; there was no way to make a fire with the damp wood. We were reduced to tins of sardines and smoked meat. Our energies were flagging but it didn’t matter. As though hypnotized, we pressed on. We were young and in decent shape but not particularly athletic or trained for a wilderness ordeal. Somehow we managed. On the afternoon of the fourth day, right on schedule, we transitioned from the deep gloom of the primary jungle into sparser secondary forest and then emerged into a rough clearing. We could see the mission buildings situated on the far side. A rainbow had accompanied us for the last few kilometers of our journey, and it seemed an appropriate and encouraging omen. We had traversed the narrow passage to La Chorrera.

Chapter 30 - On the Edge of the Abyss

In some respects, everything in life before we arrived at La Chorrera was a prelude to the events that engulfed us there; and everything afterward has been a reflection of them. Terence chronicled the events in
True Hallucinations
. Though his account may seem unlikely and bizarre, I believe it is largely accurate, even if interpretations vary as to what it all meant. I can’t vouch for every detail, if only because I was lost in hyperspace for much of the time, or overwhelmed by psychosis, again depending on interpretation. Anyone with an interest in the “facts” of our story, if the word even applies, should regard Terence’s narrative as required reading.

As for my narrative, I’m faced with three tasks in the next few chapters. The first is to tell the story of what happened over those weeks. Second, I want to describe my experience while I was away in hyperspace, or, if you prefer, disengaged from consensus reality; this is a part of the story only I can tell. My third task is to step back and attempt a more analytical deconstruction, beginning with the first of many philosophical questions: What the hell was going on?

Mission La Chorrera consisted of a small church with a wooden bell tower, the padre’s residence, a police outpost near the dock on the river, and a cluster of buildings that included classrooms and a few other simple structures. At the end of our trek, we were exhausted and grateful for the chance to hang our hammocks and recover in an empty hut. After a few days, however, the teachers who usually lived there arrived with the bush pilot on his monthly mail drop, and we relocated. The padre, a Capuchin priest by the name of Father José Maria (another coincidence in that he had the same initials as our father, Joe McKenna), let us stay temporarily near the mission in a hut on stilts we quickly dubbed the “knoll house.” A number of Witoto families had recently arrived to pick up their children from the mission school at the end of its academic year. In a few days, the padre told us, the families would depart and there would be numerous empty dwellings to choose from. We had our eyes on another raised hut set off in the forest, but until that opened we were quite happy where we were.

The knoll house stood on a rise perhaps 200 yards away from the mission but still in the pasture, a large area cleared from the forest to accommodate a herd of humped zebu cattle. The riverbank was about 100 yards from the knoll. The impressive geological formation that gave the place its name was called the
chorro
, the Spanish word for a stream or gush. It was something like a waterfall but shallower, the remnant of a primordial volcanic event that had ruptured the underlying bedrock, forming a circular chasm. The Igara Paraná formed a roaring cataract at this point, and below that a small lake. This formation marked the end of the navigable portion of the river, so La Chorrera was the end of the line in more ways than one.

The combination of pastures, cattle, and frequent warm rains had created an ideal habitat for
Psilocybe cubensis
, the same mushroom species we’d encountered earlier in Florencia and Puerto Leguizamo. These mushrooms are known to be pan-tropical; they occur in both hemispheres, in any place with a warm climate where cattle are raised; in fact, they can be considered symbionts of the cattle, whose dung provides a rich substrate for them.
Psilocybe cubensis
, then classified as
Stropharia cubensis
, are the most widespread and common of the tropical psilocybin mushrooms. We found them growing everywhere in the pastures around the knoll house and beyond. There were big, beautiful clusters of carpophores sprouting out of nearly every cowpat, quite impossible to ignore. We must have arrived at the peak of the season; earlier in our trip we’d only spotted a few specimens. Needless to say, we were delighted at this unexpected good fortune.

By then, Terence and Ev had canoed to a Witoto village upriver and returned with the plant materials for home-brewing some ayahuasca. We still believed the object of our quest, the real mystery, to be
oo-koo-hé.
But mindful of Guzman’s cautions, we made discreet inquiries about that while otherwise amusing ourselves with the mushrooms. The specimens were succulent and quite delicious, their slight bitterness easy to overlook in light of our scant food supplies. We’d brought rice, beans, and tinned meats, wrongly assuming we’d be able to purchase other foods along the way. We could buy fruit, eggs, and
yuca
, or manioc root, from the locals, and condensed milk and noodles from the tiny
tienda
at the mission, but our diet was spare and boring. We found that a few mushrooms added to boiled rice or an omelet provided just the thing to perk up an evening’s meal; and the best thing was that the after-dinner entertainment was built in. We had not yet understood that the mushrooms were the real Secret. We regarded them much too casually as mere recreation. As a result we found it very easy to eat them daily, either as part of the meal or as a midafternoon snack, with no immediate adverse effects. They were an excellent complement to the cannabis, which we smoked constantly, along with the occasional hit derived from shavings taken from our fresh supply of
Banisteriopsis caapi
, the vine added to ayahuasca as a source of MAO-inhibiting compounds. We found that smoking the bark while on mushrooms synergized the closed-eye hallucinations in a most pleasant and intriguing way. We dubbed this serendipitous discovery “vegetable television.”

It didn’t take too many days of such behavior for events to evolve in some fairly peculiar directions. As anyone with experience will tell you, the mushrooms stimulate conversation, and they give one “funny ideas” that seem to be quite novel, even hilarious. Being constantly on a low dose of mushrooms gave new verbal agility to an already very verbal bunch. Our conversations, full of non sequiturs and amusing puns, flowed freely, much as they had during our first trips at Puerto Leguizamo. The difference was that we more or less remained in this noetic space all the time. It was as if our group of five had been joined by an extremely erudite, clever, and delightful guest who had come for dinner and decided to stay.

Although we were enthralled by this verbal levity, our exchanges eventually took on a more serious character. Terence recounted the story of a DMT trip he’d shared with an English girl on the rooftops of Kathmandu a year earlier when all hell had broken loose. They ended up locked in an erotic embrace that transcended normal lovemaking; their bodies, seeming to fuse, began exuding a violet, effervescent fluid that evoked a transformation akin to insect metamorphosis. His improbable tale didn’t seem all that far-fetched in the be-mushroomed ambience of our little hut.

Another idea came up, one tied to a 1968 article by the anthropologist Michael Harner in
Natural History
magazine. According to Harner, the Shuar people of Ecuador (also known as the Jivaro) regarded the ayahuasca dimension as the real world and many regularly drank the brew as a way of accessing it. Curiously, upon entering that world they were often greeted by the “sound of rushing water” in their heads. The better practitioners knew this to be the realm where their magical abilities could be manifested. One such skill was the ability to regurgitate a “brilliant substance” containing “magical darts” that could be used either to cure illness or to induce it.

As I’d later learn, the concept of a magical substance produced from the body was an element of ayahuasca shamanism throughout the upper Amazon. In the Mestizo ayahuasca tradition, this material was referred to as “phlegm,” a substance in which
virotes
—the magical darts—are suspended. This amounted to a kind of psychic technology that, like all technology, could be used for both good and evil purposes, depending on the practitioner. A more obscure legend had it that these magical fluids could be vomited and smeared into a kind of screen akin to a scrying mirror or crystal ball. Master practitioners could gaze into the film and envision the future, see distant places, spot game, and diagnose illnesses, among other feats.