Summer 2004
Eugene, Oregon

Ramsey listened to the phone message a second time. “Jonathan, I’m flying into Portland this morning. Don’t bother coming up to get me. I’ll rent a car and drive down. I have something important to tell you.” He’d tried calling her back but she didn’t pick up.

This is probably not good, he thought. Both of them always looked forward to the reunion that occurred during the hundred-mile trip from Portland to Eugene. It was sort of their thing. Besides, he had something important to tell her too. He was disappointed he would have to wait.

Paige and Ramsey had met at UCLA, while he was working on his doctorate. She was getting a Masters in psychology. A mutual friend introduced them at a Christmas party. They were perfect for each other. Neither had had any real serious romantic relationships before so everything was experimental and exciting. Paige was bumptious and playful in strong contrast to Ramsey who often displayed a serious and often dour demeanor. Paige was Southern California through and through. She talked and he listened. She described her parents as late baby boomer hippies living in the hills above Los Angeles.

Like many such children, she went in a different direction than her parents. She was open and liberal on social issues while at the same time being ultra-conservative in many of her religious beliefs, in contrast to Ramsey’s agnosticism. Yet the glue that held them together was that they shared a strong sense of justice and basic goodness. Their relationship grew stronger and closer when Ramsey supported Paige through a dark period. Her beloved sister had suffered a surfing accident that left her paralyzed. An infection had led to a slow death. Where the couple disagreed was over children. She wanted children, but he wasn’t so sure. And they argued about religion. Ramsey had no respect for those who took religious dogma on blind faith. As he told her, “I plan on becoming the world’s greatest human geographer of religion and I’ll do it while never stepping inside a church.”

Paige countered his argument with, “I can’t become a complete psychologist knowing that people’s problems are always in part problems of spiritual growth. I have looked everywhere for the best way of bringing spirituality into my practice and I found it in the words of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. They said, ‘Jesus spoke about God, Jesus spoke to God, and Jesus spoke as God.’ I have tried to practice that everyday since.”

At that time Ramsey gave her a little smirk as if to say if you say so.

Now after six months of travel around the world he was eager to tell her he understood, or at least he was on his way to understanding what she meant.

There was a knock on his office door. She looked more beautiful to him than ever. Her splendor was not in her physical appearance but in a radiant spirit Ramsey felt as love for him. The smile she gave him when they saw each other melted his heart afresh each time. He stood to hug her but she held up an umbrella. “I bought this in the airport. Let’s walk. Coming from sunny southern California I love Eugene’s gray mist.”

They walked across the campus until they came upon the arboretum. It was Paige’s favorite spot in Eugene. Ramsey said, “I know you have something important to tell me, but I have something important also.”

“I do, but you first.”

Ramsey recounted his mystical experiences at a number of the sacred sites he studied and how this unusual man in England had directed him to a shaman practitioner in Santa Fe. “Here’s the best part. I signed up to travel with a group to Peru to participate in a weeklong ceremony with his teacher Don Julio Davila. He is a master of visionary medicine.”

“I’m surprised and a little worried,” she said.

Ramsey shook his head in confusion. “Why? I thought you’d be excited. I’m starting down a spiritual path. Isn’t that what you wanted me to do?

Turning away so their eyes didn’t meet, she said, “It just doesn’t feel right. You have the money to do this?”

Ramsey looked around as if he was fearful somebody might be listening. “I talked Myriam into having the grant pay for it. I told her I needed to go to Machu Picchu. Which is sort of true. Some of the people in the group are going there after the ceremonies.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Remember you told me that one day the divine would call me and if I answered our relationship would move on to a whole another place. It’s happening.”

“Shit.”

“What do you mean, shit?”

“What I came to tell you is I’ve fallen in love with somebody else, an older Christian man who shares my values. He asked me to marry him and I said ‘yes.’ We set a date in August.”

Ramsey had spent the next week before his departure for Peru in a state of endless anger at himself. For the first time in his life the fire and drive that had moved him forward was gone. Yet he had to go. The flights, the accommodations were all paid for and nonrefundable.

José Luis the Santa Fe shaman practitioner led the group of about 20 men and women of all ages. Ramsey kept to himself on the plane and during the bus ride to the camp where they met up with guides and llamas that would take them into the rain forests. It wasn’t until they entered the jungle that Ramsey suddenly came alive. There was something about the light, the beautiful butterflies, and the monkeys in the canopy that transformed his experience into a world where everything held magical potential. This was so much unlike the mystical experience he associated with the sacred sites, and more like returning to the simple joys of childhood.

Eventually the party reached a small village. Everybody was excited and happy to see Don Julio the great Peruvian shaman. José Luis introduced Don Julio to the group. The two men couldn’t have been more different in appearance. José Luis was a small bulldog like man. His Hispanic features were like those of an itinerant farm worker. Yet he spoke fluent English and held a PhD from San Diego State. Don Julio was tall. He had a perfectly symmetrical long face with an aquiline nose and flawless smooth skin. The facial grooves paralleling his mouth projected a perpetual welcoming smile. Ramsey sensed he was like a force of nature shifting the state of everyone in the group to a higher level of awareness.

For Ramsey the shaman seemed to glow with a bluish luminosity. He noticed that José Luis spoke to Don Julio while pointing at Ramsey. Almost instantaneously and without a word everyone began an elaborate purification ritual centering on Ramsey. They smoked mapacho, jungle tobacco, profusely while he prepared a brown liquid. There was great laughter and happiness. Ramsey took a giant puff from what appeared to him like a stubble of burning straw. He coughed so deeply that he thought he was going to lose consciousness. But the tobacco had done its job. The world became like a dream for Ramsey. He felt radiant love emanating from everyone and everything. When they were done, Don Julio took Ramsey by the hand and led him to a large Palo Santo tree outside of the village. There he handed Ramsey the sacred Ayahuasca liquid.

As he swallowed, Ramsey’s perception of the world changed even more dramatically. He saw himself with a resplendent golden body. He felt invincible. Peering around him, Don Julio and the others had disappeared. The verdant rain forest was whisked away and before him appeared a swirling multi-faceted gateway. At first it seemed impossible to pass through the razor sharp edges of the doors whirling in the entryway. It seemed they were rotating so fast they would slice his skin to ribbons in seconds. But as he watched, an unknown force entered his body, coursed through him, and shot straight for the gateway. Each door it touched slowed and then stopped twirling until all of them hung like a beaded curtain in front of him. He easily strode past the jeweled-doors and walked out onto a precipice. A westering sun shone down upon a lush valley where palaces of pulsating light waited. Each one beckoned with whispers of untold knowledge awaiting within. Ramsey found a wide stair zig-zagging down the cliff face. He climbed down, his heart and mind overjoyed to enter the first golden palace at the bottom. Suddenly the furious beat of many wings filled the air. He looked up and saw circling above him the strangest people he’d ever seen. They were beautiful, voluptuous women, their hair streaming golden behind them. Wings sprouted from their well-muscled backs. They seemed to be escorting him down the steps. He took these angelic beings as a good sign that he was on the right track and that the Ayahuasca liquid was indeed opening a new dimension for him.

He continued downward happily. But as he descended, the sky blackened. The wind turned cold. The sound of his winged escort slashed through the air. He looked at the bird-like women again. Their cherub-like faces were gone. Their full lips were pulled back over fangs and their eyes gleamed with the rapacious look of hawk predators. Long-tipped claws sprouted from their hands. They swirled around him more and more tightly. Too late, he knew he had been fooled. These weren’t angels but harpies, female monsters from ancient Greek myth.

Plummeting down the stairs, he tried to reach the palace before the bird-women attacked. The palace gate slammed shut moments before he reached it. The harpies tore at his golden body. The pain was unbearable. Terror gripped him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t scream. In a terrifying moment just as he disappeared, the harpies flew away and a strange, gray, swirling cloud dove out of the trees and swallowed him whole. That was the last thing he remembered until waking up in a Lima hospital.

In the days following his recovery, Ramsey discovered that during the ceremony he had physically disappeared. Nobody from the group could say exactly how it happened, but within two days elaborate search parties had been sent out to scour the jungle for him. His disappearance became an international story. Finally on the seventh day a party of leopard poachers found him barely alive sitting by a small stream. Unable to speak he was rushed to the hospital. By the time he got there he had fallen into a coma that lasted for two weeks.

When he finally woke up, Ramsey had no memory of what had happened. However, the first thing he said was, “Tell Paige I entered the temple.”