part0052

I continue to be astonished by how readily the mind confabulates, creating its own story to fill in the holes in memory, to the point where I can imagine looking back at the end of life and wondering if any of it really happened. This point was driven home recently when I ran across a daily journal I’d kept on my expedition to Peru. My prolific notes now provide me with a record of many events I’d largely forgotten. This is a blessing, of course, but also a curse, in that it poses an obligation to reconcile what I remember with what I wrote at the time.

Among the recovered details are those that suggest my state of mind in late 1980 as my departure neared. I had mixed feelings about leaving Vancouver for six months, because, having just turned thirty, I realized I’d found in Sheila the love I had been longing for. Even as I was admitting that to myself, I had a strong sense that a major epoch in my life had ended, and that a better chapter was about to begin. That explained my reluctance to leave her for so long. But once again the siren call of the quest was strong. My destiny seemed to be taking me back to the Amazon.

I’d be traveling to Peru with a fellow graduate student named Don, a soft-spoken guy from Victoria, British Columbia. Don intended to focus his collecting on the Euphorbiaceae family, which is notorious for its many toxic members. The plants often contain what are called “phorbol esters,” after the family name, a class of diterpenes that are known to affect cellular processes in many ways; some are considered carcinogens, co-carcinogens, and protein kinase inhibitors. Phorbol esters were important tools for investigating such processes, and newly found ones were always valued. While a few “euphorbs” were used in Amazonian ethnomedicine, a far greater number were recognized as simply toxic. Don’s project was to collect specimens of ethnomedical interest, characterize their chemistry, and devise methods to investigate their activity and mechanisms of action.

While Don and I had been getting ready to depart, Terence and Kat, then living in northern California, had been awaiting the arrival of their second child, Klea, born in December 1980. I was pleasantly surprised when Terence told me he was hoping to join us at some point during the six months we planned to be in Peru. I wasn’t sure how practical his decision was, but he was clearly determined to go.

Don and I left Vancouver in mid-January and drove to California, where I left my car with Terence and Kat. We then took a bus to the Los Angeles area, staying briefly with a professor friend of Neil’s. We were there just along enough to watch the televised spectacle of Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration and the simultaneous release of the Iranian hostages after 15 months of captivity in the American embassy in Tehran. The next day, January 21, we caught our flight to Lima.

The Amazon and Orinoco watersheds, with their teeming diversity of life, had been drawing Western scientists for more than two centuries. Among the earliest were Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, who arrived around 1800. One could argue the modern era began in the 1840s with the Amazon journeys of the British evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce, perhaps the greatest botanist of his day. A century later, a young Schultes modeled his career after Spruce’s and then went on to inspire a new generation of plant hunters, to which I belonged.

No sooner had I signed on for my voyage than I began encountering some of my illustrious contemporaries. The first was Timothy Plowman, Schultes’s protégé, who was working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, home to an impressive collection of Peruvian plants. Our consultations with Plowman primed us on what to expect in Peru. Tim had spent a lot of time in South America and was happy to share his experience with us. By then the world’s leading expert on the coca plant, he was widely regarded as the heir apparent to Schultes. Many ethnobotanists, myself included, were saddened when Tim died of AIDS in 1989. The field had lost a talented scientist and a good man.

In Lima, we visited the herbarium at the Museo de Historia Natural and the government offices that issued collection permits (which were easy to get back then). A few days later, we flew on to Pucallpa, a rough, tough, Amazonian frontier town on the Río Ucayali. The place was a pit, literally. A mud-caked bulldozer, half sunk into the mire of the unpaved main street, looked like it had been there for months. We checked into a nearby flophouse. If it’s possible to give a hotel a negative five star rating, this place qualified. Our room had no air conditioning, no hot water, and a single fluorescent light in the ceiling. There were two filthy mattresses without sheets, and it looked like someone had bled to death on one of them. From what we could see, the favorite forms of recreation were drinking, fighting, and playing loud music until three a.m., all of which we could watch through a grimy window above the street.

Breakfast in the dining room at another hotel on the corner consisted of an egg sandwich and Inka Kola, the fluorescent, greenish-yellow soft drink loved by many, apparently, but which tasted to me as ghastly as it looked. As usual in Peru, coffee was a syrupy concentrate made from Nescafe that one diluted to taste with hot water. We’d encounter this preparation everywhere and grew to loathe it. While the country appeared slow to embrace the concept of freshly brewed coffee, despite growing some of the best in the world, Pucallpa at least was ahead of its time when it came to the drive-thru window. Some of the locals enjoyed bursting through the swinging, saloon-style doors on their motorcycles to order breakfast. It was all very entertaining and a bit shocking for two mild-mannered Canadian graduate students.

Our first field trip took us out to Puerto Callao, a town on Lago Yarinacocha, an oxbow lake cut off from the Ucayali. There were a few indigenous communities nearby, including a Shipibo village called San Francisco, but we were bound for another enclave, the Peruvian headquarters of a global operation known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Established in the 1930s, the SIL ostensibly sought to promote literacy among indigenous peoples and to translate the Bible into indigenous languages. By then, the SIL had established a far-flung network of outposts as well as ties to many top linguists and anthropologists. Now known as SIL International, the nonprofit organization drew support from evangelic churches, which helped to pay for the planes and boats that gave them access to remote cultures. Though the group denied being a missionary organization, rumor had it otherwise. Later, the journalists Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett would argue that the SIL had been entangled with American oil interests and even the CIA, with dire consequences for both the Amazon region’s native peoples and their land (Colby, 1995).

We were somewhat aware and leery of the group’s reputation, but we had bumped into one of their linguists on the plane to Pucallpa, who told us we’d find a colleague of ours there known to us only by reputation: Nicole Maxwell. Given the name of another SIL linguist who could help us find her, we headed to the compound to track her down.

What we found at the SIL base was a surreal piece of small-town America lifted up from Iowa or Nebraska and plunked down in the Amazon, complete with modest bungalows, white picket fences, sidewalks, and neatly trimmed lawns—not to mention a white church with a steeple. It was like an evangelical theme park designed to make its inhabitants feel at home, or at least feel anywhere but where they were. Even the residents seemed to be playing roles in one of those tourist recreations of an authentic village, Valley Forge or Old Richmond, where the employees wear period dress and pretend to be blacksmiths or chandlers. In this case, the village was a recreation of a 1950s, Mayberry-style town. I got the feeling the people were politely “nice” to us in a way that let us know they really viewed us as degenerate hippie scum. Our inquiries eventually led us to Nicole having Sunday dinner with one of the local families.

Nicole, when she came to the door, was a refreshing dose of reality. Tall, rail-thin, and ancient, she was already a legend in the small world of ethnobotany, partly because of her book Witch Doctor’s Apprentice , first published in 1961 (and reprinted in 1990 by Citadel Press with an introduction by Terence). The book is her account, most likely embellished, of her quest to find medicinal plants in the Amazon, beginning in the late 1940s. Having grown up a wealthy San Francisco debutante, Nicole became a well-known, free-spirited figure in Paris during the twenties, occasionally dancing with the Paris Opera and modeling nude. After the end of her twelve-year marriage to an air-force officer, she moved to South America in 1945 and became a correspondent for the Lima Times , according to her obituary in The New York Times . Her fascination with jungle medicine began on a trip into the rainforest. After she’d been badly cut by a machete, her Indian guide treated the gash with a folk remedy known as Sangre de Grado, or “dragon’s blood,” derived from a reddish sap. We now know the source of this wound-closing sealant was the latex from Croton lechleri, a “euphorb” like those my colleague Don was studying. The gash quickly healed without becoming infected or leaving a scar. Thanks to that experience, Nicole discovered the mission that was to define the rest of her life: ferreting out jungle remedies and trying to interest big drug companies in developing them. Like many other ethnobotanists, she didn’t have much success, but her story was compellingly told, and by the time I met her she’d become a legend. We became fast friends, and I remained in touch with her until she died, impoverished and largely abandoned, in a Florida nursing home in 1998.

When we first met on the porch of the bungalow, she still cut a dashing figure even for a frail lady of seventy-five. The white-bread surroundings made her earthiness stand out all the more. Her profanity would have put a longshoreman to shame. She insisted she owed her long life and good health to smoking at least a pack of unfiltered Peruvian cigarettes a day, washed down with a quart of aguardiente , a popular liquor distilled from sugarcane.

We had a lively conversation when she dropped by our hotel the next afternoon. Nicole had a habit of jumping from topic to topic, rarely focusing on anything for more than a moment, but we did get her to pass on some contacts in the Iquitos area that proved useful in our search for oo-koo-hé . We promptly abandoned the muddy center of Pucallpa for a place called El Pescador, a cheaper, quieter hotel in Puerto Callao, after Nicole said she’d find us a place to store our supplies. In return, we helped her move out of an apartment in Callao and into a house on the SIL base. Over the next few days, we spent a lot of time with Nicole and her circle. Most of them were affiliated with the SIL but weren’t missionaries. Despite my earlier skepticism, they proved genuinely friendly and quite helpful.

Our next task was to locate Don Fidel Mosombite, the ayahuasquero that Terence and Kat had met in 1976 when they’d traveled to Peru in search of the brew. We had no address, only his name and vague assurances that a certain woman herbalist at the market could put us in touch. When we finally connected with her, she arranged for one of her sons to take us to see him.

The man who opened the gate was a stocky, barrel-chested man who could have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty. He lived with his young wife, the baby girl she was nursing, and two boys who looked to be about five and six. Neither Don nor I spoke much Spanish, but I haltingly introduced myself and mentioned Terence and Kat. I said as best I could that we, too, wanted to learn about ayahuasca, the plants it contained, and his methods of preparing it. Don Fidel projected considerable gravitas; it was clear he was an intellectual, or rather a sage, a man who knew many things, though not a scholar as most would think of it. Whether he was actually literate or not, he was a genuinely wise and generous man who was willing to share what he knew.

In conversations we had over the following days, he conveyed some of his knowledge about the plants and their properties, about his understanding of cosmology and the way the sacred world was organized. The world is divided into three realms, he said: the earthly realm, the upper realm of God, and the lower of the devil and demons. When one takes ayahuasca, he said, one sees enchanted cities in the upper realm and lost cities in the diabolical realm. Everything he knew about the healing properties of plants and how to prepare such medicines had been taught to him by ayahuasca in the trance. Surprisingly, he said that he sometimes used mushrooms, but he regarded ayahuasca as very different, and much stronger. Except for his comment about mushroom use, the rest of his statements were consistent with what other ethnographers had said about practitioners of vegetalismo , which is the syncretic mestizo tradition in which Don Fidel was firmly embedded. After a few conversations, I realized Don Fidel, then fifty-six, was a genuine shaman, a practitioner of long experience, and in every respect the real deal. He was as good as any ayahuasquero I’ve ever drunk with, and better than most.

A few days later, I had my first real encounter with ayahuasca. While living in Hawaii, I’d tried a sample that Terence had brought back, but I’d felt no effect other than the expected purging. Here was a chance to drink the real thing, in a traditional setting, freshly made and presumably strong. When we showed up at 7:30 on a beautiful moonlit night, Don Fidel was already seated at a crude table at one end of the one-room hut. He had a plastic bottle filled with an orangey-brown liquid and had removed the wooden cork and was softly whistling into it. He informed us the “la purga, ” was “muy fuerte ” and “bien bueno ’” (very strong and very good). Don and I sat for a while in the gathering dusk as others drifted in: three men, one of whom was apparently Don Fidel’s apprentice; two women, one of whom was pregnant; another woman with swollen legs whom Don Fidel had been treating at the house that afternoon; and Don Fidel’s wife.

We all sat on narrow and uncomfortable wooden benches arrayed along the inner walls of the hut. Another plant substance that figured in the setting was mapacho , a South American tobacco variety known for its strength. We smoked and chatted quietly in the gathering gloom until Don Fidel brought down a small cup fashioned from a gourd. He uncapped the bottle, blew a little more mapacho smoke over it, whistled, and then filled the cup to the brim and handed to me. It was bitter and acrid, but I was prepared for much worse. I tasted it and then knocked it back in a single gulp. Those who are familiar with ayahuasca will say that the first taste is always the best; it only gets worse after that. Having taken it now several hundred times over the last thirty years, I can attest to the truth of this. And yet somehow I always get it down.

I retired to my place on the bench while Don went forward to receive his portion, and then sat back down beside me. One by one, all of the men received their allotment, taking less than we did; Don Fidel took about a cup and a half. The women did not drink. We settled in to wait. Conversation ceased; presently there was only the gentle creaking of Don Fidel’s wife rocking in the hammock, the ever-present trill of insects, and the distant barking of dogs. After a little while Don Fidel reached up and extinguished the single candle on the shelf above my head, and then began to sing his beautiful icaros . Some of his songs were in Spanish; others were in a language I didn’t recognize then but I now know was Quechua. His apprentice, Don Miguel, softly joined in.

After each song Don Fidel would invoke a brief benediction in Spanish that always ended with the same refrain: “In the name of the father, son, and holy spirit.” He then blew sharply on his pipe several times. We sat quietly in the darkness and waited for something to happen. I could feel the ayahuasca in my gut but beyond that only the extreme discomfort in my posterior from sitting on the hard bench. There were occasional hints of images when I closed my eyes, and the glow from a lit cigarette left a persistent trail in the darkness. Otherwise, nothing.

While I was waiting, hoping for an effect, others in the group were retching loudly over the sideboard of the house. It would have been unspeakably rude under any other circumstances, but here it was just part of the scene. During the singing, I had fleeting suggestions of imagery in muted, earthy tones, but nothing as overt or clear-cut as I’d had on mushrooms. Most of the effect was somatic. I felt paralyzed and dissociated from my body, but I think this was more from the discomfort of prolonged sitting than the ayahuasca. It was clear that I had taken a sub-threshold dose; next time, I thought, I’d need a bit more. After a while Don Fidel asked me, in Spanish, if I was feeling borracho (drunk), and I replied “Un poco ,” a little. He offered me more, but I declined, saying this was fine for the first time, then complimented him on the beauty of his icaros .

A curing session followed. One by one, the men approached the table and sat on a stool while Don Fidel blew mapacho smoke into their eyes, ears, noses, and faces in short, staccato breaths. Each then returned to his spot as another stood up. The pregnant woman and the woman with leg trouble did not approach the table, but got their treatment lying down. Don Miguel, the apprentice, was loudly sucking on their affected areas making a smacking, popping sound while Don Fidel sang. I knew this process was supposed to remove the virotes, or magical darts, that were believed to be cause of many illnesses. These darts, projected through a curse, were the work of unscrupulous shamans or brujos who were willing to use their powers to harm a victim, often for pay. In the darkness, the sucking noises were startling and unsettling.

Another young man came forward, someone who had apparently entered the hut at some point without me realizing it. His treatment involved smoking a pipe of mapacho . He took several huge inhalations and coughed and retched violently but did not purge.

After the last treatment, Don Fidel lit a candle, and we sat around talking for another half-hour before people started shuffling out into the night. I asked Don Fidel if I could take a small sample of la purga , and he obliged, filling a small plastic bottle I’d brought. I gave him a 1000 soles note, worth about a dollar at the time, and we departed. It felt so good to stand up! The moon had set by then, and the night sky was star-studded and crystal-clear. There was a cool breeze, and the phrase “enchanted evening” popped into my head. That it was. We reached our room at about three.

In the next two or three sessions at Don Fidel’s, I experienced the same sub-threshold effects. It couldn’t have been poor-quality brew; others in the group, including Don, were clearly affected. It was something wrong with me. For some reason, I wasn’t “getting” it. Reflecting on those first experiences, I think that ayahuasca is in ways a learned experience. If you don’t know what to expect, nothing may happen. Also, my uptight hyper-vigilance may have prevented me from relaxing enough to allow the experience to manifest. I was a stranger in a strange land; though there was nothing overtly threatening, and certainly nothing threatening about Don Fidel, I was too invested in maintaining control to let it flow. This may have been partly due to the fact that this was the first time I was back in South America and taking a psychedelic since my misadventures in Colombia ten years earlier. I was highly invested in making sure that that didn’t happen again—I didn’t want to trigger any kind of psychotic break. I had taken psychedelics quite a few times over the previous ten years, but not in South America. I was keeping myself on a tight leash.

During our stay in Pucallpa, Don Fidel and his uncle, Don José, were very kind. They understood the science of what we were there for. They obligingly prepared several batches of ayahuasca, pointing out the differences between the varieties they knew, offering me specimens of all the plants in each preparation and samples of the final products. I carefully preserved them in small plastic bottles of methanol I’d brought with me for this purpose; later, these collections served as the basis for my lab work at the university. Over the next few months, I collected a number of additional samples from different practitioners in other parts of Peru, and eventually, back in Vancouver, I compared their alkaloid profiles. Based on my analyses, the samples provided by Don Fidel and Don José were the gold standard, as strong or stronger than any other samples I collected. This was further proof that my failure to respond was not due to deficiency in the brews. It was a deficiency in the apprentice.