Chapter 5. A Brush with the Other. Returning to our friends, we learned that
 in the few hours that we had been gone, some teachers expected to arrive to
 teach in the mission school had finally appeared. They had been ferried in by a
 bush pilot, the notorious George Salekas, who served as La Charrera's emergency
 link to the outside world, and who brought the mail once a month. We were
 out of lodging, for it had been the professore's quarters that we had been
 staying in. Not precisely out of lodging, the priest having offered us the
 temporary use of a run-down hut that stood on stilts on a small rise below
 the mission, but well above the broad lake that is caused by the choro which
 gave La Charrera its name. The word means narrow channel or chute. It was in this
 small hut, instantly christened the Knoll House, that we proposed to live while we
 arranged to move further into the nearby jungle and away from the somewhat
 confining atmosphere of the mission. We rested past a joint around and planned
 our next move. In conversations with the brother, Dave and Vanessa had learned
 that there was a quite sturdy Wetoto house unused and lying down the trail
 toward the village where our hopes for Ukuhe centered. It normally stood empty,
 but was now occupied by the people who had brought their children to the
 mission for the beginning of the school year. It is the practice of the Wetoto to
 leave their children in the keeping of the padres for six or more months out of
 the year, the effect of which on the social self-image of the children is
 easily imagined. Children were coming from all directions, being brought by
 their parents who would then return to their own villages until time to reclaim
 the children. These times of gathering at the mission at the beginning and end of
 the school year are high points of the Wetoto social swirl and an excuse for
 soccer games and night ballets for the Wetoto, our inveterate dancers. We were in
 the midst of such a gathering time, but in a few days all the families would
 leave and there would be ample empty housing in the jungle. Dave, Dennis and
 Vanessa had already inspected one place and determined it to be ideal, close to
 good insect and plant collecting and definitely in the jungle itself. We
 transferred our equipment to the Knoll house and reslung our hammocks. It was
 cramped but would do until we could move into the forest. Then almost in a
 collective motion we set out in the early afternoon to the pasture behind
 the mission, find the mushrooms. That was the thought on everyone's mind. We
 returned at evening to the house, each with six or eight carefully chosen
 specimens. These we ate and then as the evening's trip deepened we smoked joints
 rolled out of shavings of the freshly gathered Banisteriopsis copy. The copy
 smoke was delicious. It smelled like light incense and each
 toque synergized beautiful slow-motion volleys of delicate hallucinations which
 we immediately dubbed vegetable television. Each burst of imagery would
 last about 15 minutes and subside. Then it was time to take another hit of the
 copy smoke. The effects persisted a couple of hours. We triggered it
 repeatedly and excitedly discussed it as an example of the sort of things that
 sophisticated shamanic technicians have been whipping up for each other's
 amazement since the late Paleolithic. Our conversation drifted toward and around
 the possibilities of violations of normal physics and the psychological
 versus naive realist views of shamanic phenomena, especially the obsidian
 liquids that ayahuasqueros are said to produce on the surface of their skins
 and use to look into time. The question of whether or not such things are
 possible is actually a more gut issue in disguise. The issue of whether what we
 moderns have remaining to learn about the nature of reality is really not very
 much and will require only light fine-tuning of our way of looking at
 things versus the idea that we know very little and our understanding is very
 crude, missing the point entirely about the nature of our situation in being.
 Conversation waxed hot and heavy. Ev, Dennis, and I, passionate defenders of the
 latter view, Vanessa and Dave insisting on a psychological reductionist approach
 to the unusual events. Ideology forgotten, they then denounced the
 passion of our commitment as obsession and we responded by saying that they
 repressed the real power of the unconscious and that if they were with
 us trying to vindicate some behaviorist materialist view of man then they would
 be in for a surprise and so on. Tension had simmered under the surface for weeks
 and the life of an expedition is full of stress and aggravated difference but I
 believe that the real point of tension even then was the sense of something in
 the mushroom experience that was pulling everyone toward it or at least
 precipitating a situation where one had to decide whether to go deeper into a
 dimension whose outline ahead of us could not be seen. Each trip was a
 learning experience with an unexpected conclusion. The three of us were delighted,
 psychedelic, ready to strip down and climb into the alchemical fountain and
 take the measure of the thing from the inside. Call it Faustian, call it obsessed,
 that was our position. I called it continuing the program of
 investigations that brought us to La Charrera in the first place. For Vanessa
 and Dave the reality of the dimension we were exploring or rather our growing
 insistence that somehow it was a dimension with elements more than
 psychological was operating like a threat. There we were a group sharing a
 common set of symbols completely isolated in the jungle struggling with
 an epistemological problem upon whose solution our sanity would eventually
 seem to depend. And so and in short Dave and Vanessa withdrew from us, withdrew
 from the excited speculative conversations with their intimations of
 the possibility of being overwhelmed from the unseen. There were no arguments
 or scenes but a tacit and mutual understanding that a fork in the road
 had been reached and that some of us were committed to going deeper into the
 idea systems of the mushroom trance and some were disturbed by the sudden depth
 of things and preferred to pass on this occasion. The cramped Knoll house and the
 polarizing of two approaches toward further tripping combined to inspire
 Vanessa to expand her checker playing contacts with the police garrison of
 three very displaced young Colombians. After several closely fought games she
 had a full-fledged invitation to relieve our crowded conditions by moving with
 Dave into an unused Riverside house nominally in the care of the police.
 Later this house which was at the river landing of La Charrera would be the site
 of my own UFO encounter but that was in a future long days away from the
 afternoon of our vegetable television trip when Vanessa and Dave took down
 their hammocks and moved down the hill to the promptly named Riverside house.
 It was a beautiful day and their departure was friendly. They would spend more time
 in the water now, Vanessa laughed. It was the sixth day of our residence at La
 Charrera. We had taken the mushrooms three times. We were healthy, relaxed and
 delighted with ourselves for having come so far in such good shape. There were
 insects and plants to collect and the lake beneath the Chorro to swim in. My
 new relationship with Ev seemed promising and well launched by then. We
 were being lulled by the warm tropical sun in the depthless blue sky. Something
 was about to happen. After the departure of our two friends we each lay in our
 own hammock lost in thought as the heat and insect shrill built toward midday. My
 journal entries had already ceased. My busy writing now replaced by long
 flights of reverie, dizzying and beautiful. The faint traces of the
 deepening of the contact, though I did not then recognize it for that. Another
 warm night was upon us and we slept long and well. When the morning ground fogs
 had burned away this new day was revealed to be as pristine and as
 flawless as the days always seemed to be in this marvelously beautiful jungle
 isolated settlement. Each day seemed like a pearl born from the warm and starry
 night preceding.
 [birds chirping]
 [music]
 We used that day to explore the lake edge in the direction of the Chorro. It is an
 extraordinary landform. The Chorro, with its abrupt narrowing of the Agaraparana
 and sudden terrible increase of power and speed, is impressive enough. But the
 lake into which the Chorro empties its waters is no mere catch basin for the
 rapids. Rather it is the site of some ancient geological catastrophe that
 shattered the basaltic layer deep beneath the earth's surface, peeling back
 a great hole and laying thousands of house-sized rock fragments on the
 cliff-edged northern side of the lake. The mission is perched on the top of
 this basaltic knoll and is the highest point in the immediate vicinity. We made
 our way along the bluffs leading to the Chorro, their steepness increasing
 finally to the point that we could go no further, but at that distance the ground
 was shuddering with throbbing reverberations of the millions of tons of
 water cascading through the rock walls of the Chorro nearby. Unusual
 ground-clinging plants seemed endemic there in that turbulent atmosphere of
 mist-whipped sand and thundering noise. The feeling of being so small among such
 sharply shattered stone and close to such energy was eerie and somewhat
 disturbing. I felt a very considerable amount of relief as we climbed hand
 over hand up the bluffs and made our way back through the meadows and pastures
 that the mission had cleared over the years with the free labor of the Huitoto
 children. Once back on level ground and still well within the aura of sound made
 by the Chorro, we rested. There on the point of land overlooking the entire
 surrounding area the mission had established a small cemetery. Within the
 rudely fenced hexagonal area perhaps two dozen graves, many of them obviously of
 children, were eroding away. The shocking red of the lateritic soil was laid bare
 here. It was a place touched with sad loneliness even on a perfect sunny day.
 Our respite finished we hurried away from the odd combination of emptiness,
 solitude, and the distant roar of moving water. Our walk and the exposure to so
 much sun and stone sent us as if by instinct toward the unbroken green wall
 of the jungle across the pastures behind the mission. Broad sandy trails led to the
 system of Huitoto, Bora, and Muinane villages that are the indigenous
 component of Commissaria Amazonis, the rest being a few missions, police, and
 unclassifiables, traders mostly, and ourselves. We wandered down the trail,
 checked on our home-to-be and found it still occupied. Returning through the
 pastures under a spectacular sunset we gathered more mushrooms, enough for Ev,
 Dennis, and me to each take more than we ever had before. How much? Perhaps 20
 mushrooms apiece. It was during that walk through the pasture that I noticed for
 the first time, or at least mentioned for the first time, that everything was very
 beautiful and I felt so good that there was a strange sense of being in a movie
 or somehow larger than life. Even the sky seemed to have a slight fisheye lens
 effect as though everything was slightly cinematic. What was this? Was it a slight
 distortion of space brought on by accumulating levels of psilocybin?
 Psilocybin can induce similar kinds of perceptual distortions. I felt 10 feet
 high, just a touch of the superhuman. It was odd but very pleasing.
 [Music]
 Back at the Knoll house we kindled a fire and boiled rice for a light supper.
 Rain was falling intermittently. After dinner we smoked and waited long,
 thinking that Vanessa and Dave might visit. Finally it began to drizzle a bit
 harder and so we drew ourselves forward and each ate a large pile of mushrooms.
 The onset of the stropharia was rapid and the hallucinations very vivid. But
 after an hour or so the experience did not seem to be particularly different
 from the earlier trips in spite of the larger dose. We had come out of our
 reveries and were conversing softly about our reactions. Dennis complained
 that he felt blocked from a deep connection by concern for our father in
 Colorado, whether or not our last messages to him before setting off down
 the Rio Putumayo had reached him before he went on his vacation. Dennis seemed
 melancholy, a state of homesickness in combination with a hallucinogen, I
 supposed. I tried to reassure him and we talked softly in the darkness for
 several minutes. He said that his trip consisted of many things, a suffusing
 inner heat and a strange audial buzzing that gave him, so he said, insight into
 audio and linguistic phenomena that I had experienced on DMT and described to
 him before. I asked him to imitate the sounds that he was hearing, but he seemed
 to think it not possible. While we talked, the drizzle had lifted somewhat and we
 could faintly hear the sound of a transistor radio being carried by someone
 who had chosen the letup in the storm to make their way up the hill on a small
 path that passed a few feet from our hut. Our conversation stopped and we listened
 as the small radio sound drew near and then began to fade. At that moment, Dennis
 gave forth with a very machine-like loud dry buzz. His body became stiff for a few seconds in which this occurred.
 After a moment's silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions.
 "What happened?" and most memorably, "I don't want to become a giant insect."
 He was very disturbed by what had happened and Ev and I both talked to him
 and attempted to calm him. It was obvious that what to us had seemed only a
 strange sound had had far different effects on the person who made it. I
 understood his predicament because it was familiar to me from DMT experiences
 where a kind of glossolalia of thought that seemed to me the very embodiment of
 meaning seemed mere gibberish when verbalized and heard by other people.
 Dennis spoke of tremendous energy in the sound and said that he had felt it like
 a physical force of some kind. We discussed it for several minutes and
 finally Dennis decided that he wished to attempt the effect again. This he did but
 for a much shorter time. He again reported that the subjective experience
 was of great energy being unleashed. He said that he felt as though he might
 leave the ground if he directed his voice downward. We discussed the effect
 in terms of sound possibly having a synergistic effect on metabolizing drugs.
 Dennis vowed that from the inside it felt like the acquisition of a shamanic
 power of some sort. He began pacing around and wishing that Vanessa would
 appear out of the gloom with her skepticism which he felt would crumble
 when confronted with his testimony of the reality of a strange effect. I told
 him that she would only think of it as a strange sound in combination with a drug,
 a drug she was growing uncertain of. At one point he became so excited that we
 all three left the hut and stood looking out into the pitch darkness. Dennis was
 contemplating going immediately to find Vanessa and Dave to discuss with them
 what had happened. Finally a bewildered Dave and I convinced him to return to
 the hut and leave it all for the morning. Once back in the hut there was more talk
 and attempts to figure out what was going on. I felt Dennis' amazement was
 perfectly reasonable. My own encounter with the audio and linguistic powers of
 the tryptamine drugs had been what had originally sent me looking into
 hallucinogens and their place in nature. It is an incredible experience to see
 all that you believe about reality changed around by these compounds. It is
 edifying and excitement is a reasonable reaction. My brother and I had been close
 over the years and especially close since our mother's death, yet there were
 experiences that I had had while traveling in Asia that we had not yet
 shared. To calm us all and to argue for the universality of the kind of
 experience he had just had, I told the following story.
 [Music]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.66 sec
Decoding  : 1.80 sec
Transcribe: 1234.37 sec
Total Time: 1236.83 sec