Chapter 4, Camped by a Doorway
 Most of the Amazon basin is alluvial deposit from the Andes.
 La Charrera is different.
 The river narrows and flows into a crack.
 It begins to flow very rapidly.
 Then it flows over an edge, a lip, and there is a waterfall full of power.
 Not exactly a waterfall, but a chute, not a direct drop.
 This violent flume has made a sizable lake a very unusual situation for the Amazon.
 Very rarely can one rise above the treetops, but at La Charrera there are actually hills
 and one can get up some altitude.
 There were no stinging or biting insects.
 It is a paradisical place.
 You push very hard and suddenly you are there, and it is beautiful.
 The mist drifting across the pastures.
 There are white cattle, the mission, the huge lake, the jungle, but white cattle, and therein
 lies a peculiar twist of the story.
 The afternoon following our arrival, at the edge of a large pasture cleared at the order
 of the succession of Spanish priests who had managed Mission La Charrera since its establishment
 in the 1920s, I held and turned over in my hand perfect specimens of the same species
 of mushrooms whose lone representative I had eaten near Florencia.
 In the pasture before me were dozens of these mushrooms.
 After examining several, my brother pronounced them Strepharycubensis, one of the largest,
 strongest, and certainly the most widely distributed of any of the known psilocybin-containing
 mushrooms.
 What to do?
 Our expedition's thinned-down drug and plant file was concerned with flowering plants,
 not with fungi.
 We had no data on the proper dosage of psilocybin, but collectively seemed to remember that in
 the Oaxacan mushroom rituals described by Gordon Wasson, the mushrooms are eaten in
 pairs, and several pairs are consumed.
 We determined to eat six mushrooms each that same evening.
 My journal entry for the next day spoke clearly.
 23 February 1971.
 Are we indeed now in some way camped on the edge of another dimension?
 Yesterday afternoon Dave discovered Strepharycubensis in the damp pastures behind the house where
 we had hung our hammocks.
 He and I gathered 30 delicious psilocybin-saturated specimens in about half an hour.
 We all each ate approximately seven and spent last night on an enormously rich and alive,
 yet gentle and elusive trip.
 In between strange lights in the pasture and discussion of our project, I am left with
 the sense that by penetrating the local psychedelic flora this way, we have taken a giant step
 toward deeper understanding.
 Multifaceted and benevolent, as complex as mescaline, as intense as LSD, the mushroom,
 as is said of peyote, teaches the right way to live.
 This particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people
 anywhere, and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring.
 Through this unclaimed vegetable teacher, one can gain entry into the world of the elf
 chemists.
 The experience of the mushroom is subtle, but can reach out to the depth and breadth
 of a truly intense psychedelic experience.
 It is, however, extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work.
 Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions, noticed a similarity of content
 that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon, or some sort of simultaneous perception of
 the same invisible landscape.
 A tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages, but this was quick to
 fade, and body strain and exhaustion often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs is
 not present.
 This mushroom is a transdimensional doorway, which sly fairies have left slightly ajar
 for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power, the
 power of vision, to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex.
 We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter, the
 emergence of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.
 Such were my impressions after only one exposure to the realm of vision over which the mushroom
 holds sway.
 The reference to strange lights in the pasture should be explained, since perhaps it has
 some bearing on some of what followed.
 After we had eaten the mushroom and an hour had passed and everyone had become comfortable
 with the pleasant plateau of hypnagogic imagery, someone initiated a discussion.
 It was Dave or Dennis, Dennis I believe.
 He said that we were now loaded in the home territory of the secret, and so should not
 remain in the confined space of our dwelling, but move out into the foggy night, the warm
 enfolding fog over the pasture.
 Discussion.
 Not all should go.
 A delegation.
 Who should it be?
 Dennis nominated Dave and myself, calling Dave, the least skeptical, me the most.
 Vanessa objected to me as most skeptical, suggesting instead that Dave and Dennis should
 go.
 I heartily agreed, not actually wishing to visit the dark and dewy pasture myself, and
 having no faith, so skeptical was I, in the transcendental potential of the errand.
 Off they went, first loudly proclaiming the total enveloping power of the ground fog,
 and then, in a theatrically absurd short time, and from offstage, they hollered out that
 they saw a hovering diffuse light in the pasture nearby.
 Investigation pursued.
 Hollering continues, but fades.
 Light persists.
 Diffuseness persists.
 I decided it was time for cooler heads to intervene.
 Off into the enfolding, wet-ish night I went.
 I crossed carefully through the barbed wire, wet to my fingers, but warm-seeming, even
 at night, so steamy as alizonus.
 Once united with Dave and Dennis, I found the situation far closer to their description
 than I expected.
 There was a dim light on the ground a few yards away.
 It seemed to retreat slightly as one walked toward it.
 We moved in its direction for several dozen meters in a series of short advances.
 At that distance we felt far from our companions back at the house, an enveloped and dense
 drifting fog.
 We can follow this light, but we better not get too far away, or we will get lost, because
 we don't know the area at all.
 It was Dave pleading for a retreat, but we continued to follow it.
 Sometimes it would seem as though it was just twenty feet ahead of us.
 It seemed as though it was hovering in the air, but then it seemed as if it had fallen
 into the grass.
 The light would come filtering back through the grass.
 We would run forward, and then it would be ahead again in the air.
 Finally we decided to go no farther.
 As we turned to depart I seemed to see a flickering in front of the diffuse light that to my mind
 suggested someone dancing before a fire.
 Thoughts of UFOs left me, and I recalled instead the ominous incidents preceding our departure
 from San Jose del Encanto.
 Was this a shaman dancing around a small fire?
 Was it something to do with us?
 No understanding was ever shed on this incident, but the general eeriness of it anticipated
 all that was to follow.
 But the words of my journal entry are revealing.
 I speak matter-of-factly of gaining entry into the world of elf chemists.
 I call the mushroom a transdimensional doorway, and link it to a transformation of life on
 the planet.
 A younger, more naive, more poetic self is revealed, a more intuitive self at ease with
 proclaiming wild unlikelihoods as hallucinogenically derived gnosis.
 Very little has changed.
 Then I was eager to be convinced by demonstration, and demonstration was given.
 I was changed, and was obviously eager to be changed.
 Now, years later and with years of reflection on these things, I can still discern in that
 earliest experience many of the motifs that have persisted through the years and remained
 mysterious.
 At one point during the evening, Dennis and I both seemed to be able to see and describe
 the same hallucination.
 Off and on over the years this has happened, several times with psilocybin, and the wonder
 of it does not change.
 Even in those early mushroom experiences at La Charrera there was an aura of the animate
 and the strange that focused in the idea that the mushroom was somehow more than a plant
 hallucinogen or even a shamanic ally of the classical sort, that it was in fact a kind
 of intelligent entity, not of earth, alien, and able to present itself during the trance
 as a presence in the inward-turned perceptions of its beholder.
 In the days following our lives, the lives of my brother and myself underwent a tremendous
 and bizarre transformation.
 It was not until Jacques Vallée had written of the absurd element that is invariably a
 part of the situation in which contact with a UFO occurs that I found the courage to again
 examine the events at La Charrera, to try to fit them into some general pattern.
 I have told various parts of our story over the years, never revealing the entire incredible
 structure to any one listener because of what I knew it seemed to imply about our mental
 condition during the time of the experience.
 Any story of UFO contact is going to be incredible enough by itself, but central to our story
 are the hallucinogenic drugs that we had been experimenting with.
 The very fact that we were involved with such drugs as a method of triggering UFO contacts
 would make any story we might eventually have to tell seem highly dubious to anyone not
 sympathetic to the use of hallucinogens.
 There were other difficulties with telling this story.
 The events at La Charrera generated a great deal of controversy and subsequent bitterness
 among the participants because several ideas of what was taking place were represented,
 each basing itself on data unavailable or deemed ipso facto irrelevant by the competing
 interpretations.
 We were poorly prepared for the events that overwhelmed us.
 We began as naive observers of something we knew not what, and because our involvement
 with this phenomenon went on for many days, we were able to observe many aspects of it,
 and I was able to satisfy myself that generally the method of approach which is told of here
 is effective for triggering whatever it is that we call the UFO contact experience.
 It may also be dangerous.
 The journal entry above refers to our first Strafaria trip at La Charrera.
 It occurred on the 22nd of February, '71, only a little more than 24 hours after our
 arrival at La Charrera, following the four-day walk through the jungle from San Jose del
 Encanto on the Rio Caraparaná.
 That entry makes it clear that I was spellbound.
 It was the last thing that I could bring myself to write for several weeks, though I did not
 realize it as I sat writing in the sunlight that morning.
 I was suffused with contentment.
 I knew only that the mushroom was the best hallucinogen I had ever had, that it had a
 quality of aliveness that I had never known before.
 It seemed to open doorways into places that I had assumed would always be closed to me
 because of my insistence on analysis and realism.
 I had never had psilocybin before and was amazed at the difference from LSD, which seemed
 more abrasively psychoanalytic and personality-oriented.
 In contrast, the mushroom seemed so full of merry elfin energy that casting off into the
 drug trance was made more enticing.
 Nothing of the magnitude of the forces even then gathering around our small expedition
 was sensed by me.
 I was thinking in terms like, "It's great that these mushrooms are here, even if we
 don't find Ukuhei or Yahei, we will always have them to fall back on, and certainly they
 are interesting."
 Our plan was to spend about three months slowly getting to know the botanical and social situation
 among the Witoto, living traditionally in a village about 14 kilometers down a trail
 from the mission on the Agaraparana at La Charrera.
 We knew Ukuhei was secret, and we were in no hurry, so the day after our first mushroom
 experience was spent checking our equipment after the rigors of the overland walk and
 generally relaxing in the casita to which Father Jose Maria, the capuchin in charge,
 had kindly shown us.
 We gathered more mushrooms that afternoon and dried them near the cooking fire.
 That evening I pulverized them and made them into a snuff.
 It was delicious, like some chocolate-related essence.
 We all snuffed it, and it was generally thought a success.
 I felt elated, very pleased with everything, and impressed with what an extraordinarily
 beautiful place we had come to be in.
 We decided that we would take mushrooms again that night.
 It was a different sort of experience.
 As we sat around waiting to get stoned, there was a lot of nitpicking going on between Vanessa
 and Dennis.
 Up to this point, Dennis had not come forward as a personality at all.
 Finally, he had apparently had enough of Vanessa and said, "You know, you're pretty weird,
 and I'm going to tell you why."
 I was amazed, because as he talked, he gave perfect expression to my own thoughts on Vanessa.
 There was no tension in the situation for me.
 Someone else was wrapping it down to her how she was out of line.
 But then, after a few minutes, I felt very odd, because I felt like Sia.
 Weird.
 I feel like this other person.
 I don't know what this guy feels like, but I feel the way I imagine he must feel.
 We were trying to smoke some grass, and then I said, "Smoking makes it easier to hallucinate.
 Smoke to get higher."
 Dennis was having trouble with the matches, fumbling and fumbling.
 "What's the problem?
 Just light the match.
 Would you light the match?"
 We were all crossed up, and so we came down.
 It was disappointing.
 The next day was spent relaxing, catching up on insect and plant collecting, washing
 clothes and chatting with the priest and brother in residence.
 Through them, we put out the word that we were interested in people who knew things
 about medicinal plants.
 That afternoon, a young Witoto named Basilio came to the casita, and having heard of our
 interest from the priest, offered to take us to see his father, a shaman with a local
 reputation.
 Basilio assumed that we were interested in Yahé—it is the better-known hallucinogen
 in the area.
 It is generally available for the asking.
 The Ukuhé was a much more sensitive subject.
 At La Charrera, a month or two before we had arrived, there had been a murder—actually,
 several murders and attempted murder.
 It all had to do with Ukuhé.
 Supposedly, a shaman had murdered one of two shaman brothers by painting the top rung of
 a ladder with the DMT resin.
 When the victim had grabbed the rung, the resin had absorbed through his fingers, and
 he had gotten vertigo and had fallen, breaking his neck.
 The shaman whose brother had been killed struck back by causing an accident.
 The alleged murderer's wife, daughter, and grandchild had been in a canoe above the Choro,
 and unaccountably unable to reach the shore, they had been swept over it.
 It was said they were victims of magic.
 Only the wife had lived through it.
 It was not the time to be asking about Ukuhé.
 Basilio insisted that the Yahé was a day upriver at his father's maloca.
 He had a small canoe, so only two of us could go with him.
 After consultation, it was decided that Ev and I should go.
 We left at once for the river, and I took my film canister of snuff with us.
 Calm was the day and blue the sky.
 An extraordinary peace and depthless serenity seemed to touch everything.
 It was as if the whole earth was softly exhaling its exhilaration.
 Had such a mood developed no further, it would have passed into being but a pleasant memory.
 In the light of later events, I now look back on that afternoon of deepening contentment
 and almost bucolic relaxation as the first faint stirring of the current that was shortly
 to sweep me toward unimaginably titanic emotions.
 Our new Witoto acquaintances were very kind, a different sort from the Witoto of San Jose
 del Encanto.
 We were shown their cultivated Yahé plants and given cuttings and a bundle of the vines
 so that we could make our own ayahuasca.
 Basilio described to us his own single experience with Yahé when, several years before, after
 days of fever from an unknown cause, he had taken it with his father.
 He described the Yahé as a cold water infusion, rare for that area where vigorous boiling
 usually plays a part in the preparation.
 After soaking the shredded Yahé for a day and a night, the unboiled water had become
 hallucinogenically potent.
 There had been many fences to cross in the visions, a sense of flying.
 The father had seen the bad air from the mission that had weakened his son.
 The mission was recognized as a place of ill omen.
 After this experience, Basilio recovered his health and was less often at the mission,
 he told us.
 It was all very interesting, our first exposure to field conditions, and it accorded well
 with our data on Yahé usage and beliefs in the area.
 We hung our hammocks in a small hut near the main maloca that night.
 I dreamed of fences and the pasture back at the mission.
 The next morning early we were rowed back to the mission by Basilio.
 Our collections of Banisteriopsis were reason for pride, but again I felt the elation whose
 death could not be found.
 "Peculiar," I muttered to myself as we swung inside of the mission, overlooking its
 lake and placed on a sunny hill with a row of date palms sweeping up from the boat landing.
 "Very peculiar."
 [chatter]
 [chanting]
 [chanting]
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


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