[Pig oinking] [Pig oinking] [Pig oinking] [Music] Born into a highly intellectual community With a highly intellectual school With highly intellectual looks according to a highly intellectual rule Don't you know what I used to know? Disappeared on the river like falling snow Lord of all, when I came to love I was a highly intellectual fool [Music] I found a highly respectable job Which paid a highly respectable loan Some of my highly respectable friends And I lived in a highly respectable bunk Don't you see what I used to be? Disappeared on the river just floating free Lord of strife, when I came to life I was a highly respectable chump [Music] Go down to the river, finally understood Go down to the river, you can only do evil Good for nothing good You can only do evil, good for nothing good [Music] Stepped into a highly sensational society In my highly sensational shoes I sang highly sensational songs Along with highly sensational youth Just to prove that we still can move Me and the river let's row That blue love line Are you here tonight? I'm in a highly sensational mood [Music] Go down to the river, finally understood Go down to the river, you can only do evil Good for nothing good You can only do evil, good for nothing good [Music] You can only do evil, good for nothing good You can only do evil, good for nothing good Chapter 3 Along a Ghostly Trail Shortly after dawn the next day Our vessel left the broad course of the Putumayo And turned into the real Karaparanaw For the last few miles of the journey To San Rafael where the boat would leave us The Karaparanaw more correctly fitted my conception of a jungle river It being only several hundred feet across at its widest point With lush vegetation overgrowing the banks and trailing in the water Its flow was so sinuous and unpredictable That we could seldom see more than a half mile or so ahead of us At mid-morning we arrived at a low bluff Surmounted by a white flagpole and a few corrugated buildings Appearing lavish in a land of thatched huts on stilts This was mission San Rafael We were correctly if unenthusiastically received by Padre Miguel He was thin, Castilian, with deep set eyes and a barely noticeable palsy That was the result of malaria contracted years before He had been in the Amazon over thirty years It was not possible to read from his face what he thought of us He had seen many anthropologists, botanists and adventurers pass through But I sensed that our longer hair and loose manner made him uneasy His uneasiness increased when I asked about Dr. Guzman It was clear then by the stiffening of the old priest's face That my question had hit a sore point Nevertheless we were offered a ride to a point upriver Near a trail inland to San Jose del Encanto Yes, Dr. Guzman is doubtless there He passed through on his way to return to his language studies Only three weeks before, and his wife was with him The priest's gaze hardened You may be assured of finding him We were given lunch by the nun in charge La Madre being the form of address to the number one nun at these missions While we ate, Ev questioned the priest more carefully concerning La Charrera Yes, the trail took five days for a fully loaded expedition to traverse We anticipated the need for porters to help carry our equipment Padre Miguel said that we would get some help in San Jose But that now was the time of hunting And men would be reluctant to leave the hunt to hire into an expedition going to La Charrera We were determined not to be overburdened with equipment on the last leg of the push to reach La Charrera So after lunch we sorted all of our equipment once again Books were relentlessly left behind Our plant and drug file was thinned down to only the essential articles Excess camera and insect collecting equipment was stored It all went into a trunk to be left in the priest's keeping until we should return The chore finished, we stowed our lightened supplies in the priest's powerful speedboat An immense luxury in a world where the paddled canoe is the standard 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 cassock beating furiously in the wind His long beard trembling in the spray of the sunlight After forty minutes of this furious travel we had gone a day's distance by canoe Suddenly the priest turned the small boat at right angles to the flow of the river We were making directly toward a long low spit of white sand The engine cut off at what seemed the last instant And in a shattering silence we slid lightly aground on the sandbar It was a spot seeming no less desolate than any other place we had passed in our wild ride But the priest clambered up the bank and pointed out a broad trail much overgrown with vines It was a 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'll 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 to bend in the river and the sound of his departure faded The glassy surface of the river moved and sucked against the banks As a last reflection of this unusual commotion Silence Then a shrill wave of insect sounds swept like a drawn curtain through the area Then again silence There was jungle, river, and sky There was not else For the first time we were not being conveyed through the jungle-river world with a seasoned expert in control Now we were on our own And we all became aware of it in that moment on that spit of sand on the shore of a jungle river One of hundreds of such rivers The mood could not last We had to find the village and make whatever arrangements we could to move our supplies there from the river We had to act before dark There would be time later to contemplate our situation No one wanted to stay with a mound of supplies So we hid them in the bushes away from the shore and then started down the trail Vanessa brought her box of cameras I carried my telescoping fiberglass Lepidoptera net Bought in a collector's supply shop in Shinjuku As a present to myself for surviving a stint teaching English in two Tokyo English mills simultaneously The trail was broad and easy to follow Obviously cared for As we moved away from the riverbank the vegetation was less lush We were walking through an eroded scrubby brushland The soil was lateritic and where it was exposed to the sun it baked and shattered into sharp-edged cubical fragments At length we talked a long slow rise and looked down on an assemblage of huts on sandy soil under a scattering of palms Striking immediately was the fact that all of the houses were of the stilted thatched variety Except for one near the center of the village As we surveyed the scene below us we were ourselves surveyed 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 It was made of leaves woven expertly 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 maloca The traditional type of house peculiar to the Witoto people Inside resting on a hammock which hung between two smoke-darkened supporting posts was Dr. Guzman The immediate impression was of an unnatural gauntness, deep-set dark eyes and skeletal nervous hands He did not get up but gestured as an Indian would for us to sit on the ground Only then in seating myself did I see beyond the hammock to the shadowed rear of the maloca A woman sat cleaning pebbles from beans in a stone-polished Witoto pot Only after we were all seated did she look up She was plump, wearing khaki pants, 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 face the issue directly "Doctor, our apologies for disturbing your solitude in the local social environment here" "We are anxious to push on to La Charrera and we hope that you will help us to arrange bearers here to go with us" "Also, we are here with a special purpose" "I refer to the varroa hallucinogens that you reported to Schultes" "I am telescoping my account of course" It all took longer and moved less directly toward revealing its meaning We talked for perhaps twenty minutes At the end of that time we had learned that Doctor Guzman would help us find bearers and depart But that this would take some days We learned that Guzman was an ardent structuralist, Marxist and male chauvinist That his involvement with the Huitoto approached being a mania That he was regarded by his colleagues back in Bogota as slightly bonkers He gave us no encouragement that we would find the Ucuhe Which he said was a secret of the man 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 with us and helped us carry our gear To a run-down unused hut on the edge of the village As we set up camp Annabel Guzman approached us with several cups of steaming coffee And chatted with us as we worked She seemed more relieved than dismayed by our presence, unlike her husband As she talked a picture emerged She had gone to the London School of Economics, studied anthropology Graduate work in Colombia, meeting impassioned older men in similar profession 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 tribe he was a coca enthusiast He was quite paranoid from chewing it When one saw him in the morning he always had coca staining his lower chin The tribe was very hard on women So Annabel had been told by Horacio that in order to integrate into this society She had to take the women's role upon herself This had to do with pounding yucca root with stones And also making 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 And the men live 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 all retire into the longhouse for storytelling and coca chewing Until four thirty in the morning We lived with these people elbow to elbow The fart is the most highly appreciated form of humor There are ten thousand variations on the fart And all are riotously funny We stayed in that uncomfortable setting until the morning of the thirteenth of February It took that long, nearly a week, to arrange two young boys willing to leave the hunting And help us carry our supplies over the trail to La Charrera We were grateful for the pause in travel as the voyage on the Faviolita had left us rather worn I spent part of each day collecting insects or writing or thinking in my hammock 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 hui toto of all ages intently watching whoever of us was most active at any given moment In one of his oddest moves, Dr. Guzman had asked us to answer any of the people's questions Concerning the relationships prevailing within our group by saying that we were all brothers and sisters This assertion brought the expression of amazement that any reasoning being would expect And so I think that 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 sibs 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 Dr. Guzman who was standing absolutely still Poised above a small ditch with a fish spear in his hand We walked back to the village together and as we walked he told me his view of the world "Never swim alone on the river" "Danger lurks everywhere" "Never swim alone in the river" "Huge forms move beneath its surface" "There is the anaconda" "The river is abounding" "Snakes are everywhere" "Be aware of this as you make your way to La Charrera" "The forest is unforgiving of error" I had spent many months in the jungles of Indonesia And had been collecting insects every day in these Amazonian forests As we had made our way to San Jose del Encanto I had my own idea of the risks of the forest Not nearly so dark as the thoughts of the wildly gesticulating small man Who strode raving at my side He had apparently been ruling his wife with an iron hand When we had just happened in on what was a very peculiar scene He lived in a nightmare world of hallucination brought on by extreme coca addiction His wife had not had any Anglos to talk to since arriving there Naturally she was wondering what was going on She wasn't allowed to chew coca And he was behaving like a male Witoto member of the tribe I saw him freak out one afternoon He was talking to some people "It is a very macho culture and your woman is always expected to be right there" There was a small group talking And it developed that they needed a machete And he stood up and said "Annabelle!" "Annabelle!" She didn't come And he yelled again "Annabelle!" "Annabelle!" He wouldn't go look for her "Annabelle!" He was just standing there And all the people were standing looking at each other He kept calling and finally she came "Annabelle!" He was by that time white with rage And he was shaking "Annabelle!" "Get the machete!" He roared in exasperation After about five days or so Sia developed an abscessed tooth His teeth were rotting out of his head And we gave him all the codeine we had It was intended to last us three months There were incidents A bush master, 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 have 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 hastened our plans for departure We could not continue on without bearers And only when the men came back from the hunting party Would we get bearers Guzman would tell us almost nothing About the ucuje he said Ridiculous, you're not going to get it These people don't even speak Spanish They speak only Huitoto There were 40,000 of them killed here 50 years ago They have no reason to like you And the drug is super secret What are you doing here? I urge you to leave the jungle While that is still possible Finally on the 15th we departed The six of us in the company of two Huitoto 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 trocha I felt my spirits rise At last we had put all the encumbering obstacles behind us Only Sia remained to plague me I decided, milk toast or not I was going to have to break the bubble Because it was becoming too odd He was doing things He insisted on going first He was sharpening sticks and putting them into the ground Fetishes When we were going down the river before we got to El Encanto We were smoking weed all the time He would just sit staring for hours and hours I finally understood that he was probably going to kill me And that he was completely deranged That, strange as it may seem It was my fate that I was going to be bumped off By somebody's old boyfriend who was psychotic Who had somehow sneaked into this Amazon expedition At this realization I stopped on the trail And observed something to the effect that he was the world's most outrageous jackass In other words, I just pitched the shit into the fan We were going to punch each other out right there Vanessa was yelling and shoving We Toto bearers were standing around open mouthed It was a standoff But as the day wore on Sia decided to turn back Actually he had no money He was also in terrific pain There was no reason for him to be there He was really disturbed and was capable of anything The stress of isolation and bad food can push a healthy person to the edge He did chew coca but that didn't cut the pain He needed medical attention Around us the jungle Ahead of us the secret After Sia's departure I hefted my butterfly net And felt very van Vienish as we wended our way toward La Charrera Under the liana tangled canopy of the climaxed Amazonian forest Iridescent morphos would occasionally be surprised Lounging languidly on broad leaves overhanging the trail They would start upwards suddenly An amazing show of watery splendorous sapphire Quickly lost in the gloomy heights We set a brisk pace as we moved along I turned over in my mind the seemingly prophetic lines Of 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 form 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 that indicated we had come 25 kilometers during the day We ate well that night 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 It was quite a physical feat I think that we were already feeling the effects of the phenomenon But it is impossible to say We didn't eat The women announced that we would eliminate breakfast and lunch It was their decision since they were doing the cooking And it was impossible to make a fire because the Amazon jungle is so damp It was too much of a chore We would get up at 4.30 in the morning Have coffee and walk 25 kilometers until about 3.30 in the afternoon It was an ass-buster, absolutely It was up and down, up and down We would arrive at a river to find no bridge We would have to figure out how to cross We had to be aware of the possibility of the bears stealing something or deserting us In spite of the exertion, it was a day of exquisite immersion In the sense of the truly immense and vibrant forest through which we were passing All day long 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 rude bridge arcing a small river After dark, around the fire, we anticipated a total eclipse of the moon Said to be due that night The Huitoto bears ate their own food apart from us Friendly but distant I wondered if they too were aware of the impending eclipse Sometime in the dead of the night, I awoke in my hammock And after listening to the seething night Pulled on my boots and silently made my way to the bluff of the little hill overlooking the bridge The river and the way along which we had toiled in the fading light of the late afternoon Now all was transformed The jungle eerily silent very suddenly The moon washed orange-red, the eclipse in progress and near totality The scene and the feeling was profoundly other Alone in an immensity of jungle, we seemed the witness to the emergence of strange dimensions The clash of unearthly geometries Lords of places unseen and undreamed of by man A few miles away, rain was falling from a cloud standing still in the sky Nearby foliage glistened black with orange highlights Unknown to me in that moment was that the eclipse that had drawn me as a lone observer from my hammock to this eerie scene Was at that same rough instant triggering a groaning shift of billions of tons of impacted rock Along the San Andreas Fault in Southern California Chaos was breaking out in the hell city of Los Angeles In a pitiless cartoon, we may imagine the Popeye denizens in beehive hairdos Pouring out under incandescent lights into choking pollution to wail their hysteria to mobile news teams I knew nothing of it, and so returned to my hammock, oddly cheered and exalted It had seemed a portent of great things Toward the afternoon of the fourth day, the bearers were visibly in anticipation of arrival at La Charrera 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 land The mission buildings could be seen at the opposite side of this expanse As we started across the open space, an Indian came to meet us He and we spoke haltingly in Spanish He spoke to our bearers rapidly in Huitoto And then started off with us in the direction from which he had come We passed through a wood enclosure and across a semi-enclosed courtyard On the wall were paintings in tempera of absurd elves with pointed ears We saw no children, and a sense of it being school vacation hung over the empty rooms and playing fields around us We were led finally to the back porch of what was obviously the priest's house A huge man, bearded and bearish, emerged in his shirt sleeves A bastion cabot could have played him to perfection A basically merry person, he nevertheless did not seem happy to see us Why are these people always so withdrawn? Something about not liking anthropologists But we are basically botanists, how can we put that across? Our reception was hospitable and correct We asked no more, and as we hung our hammocks in the empty guesthouse to which we were shown There was a sense of relief among us all at having reached our destination [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.67 sec Transcribe: 1893.06 sec Total Time: 1896.37 sec