The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (55 page)

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.

Chapter 42 - The River of Poisons

Wade Davis and Dennis enroute to Pebas. March 1981.

While we were visiting the realms of ayahuasca with Don Fidel, the various players in our river trip were converging on Iquitos 500 kilometers to the north. The RV
Heraclitus
, on its Amazon cruise, was wending toward Iquitos, and we planned to be on hand when the boat arrived. Terence was due there as well, having set aside a few weeks to spend with us. Don and I were still not sure of the details. We decided to split up. Don wanted to stay in Pucallpa and collect plants with the help of Don Fidel and a few others we’d met through Nicole. Meanwhile, I’d fly to Iquitos and get the lay of the land. Our plan was to meet up again in Pucallpa and then head off to greet our mystery ship together.

I enjoyed being on my own in Iquitos, exploring the streets of a town I was destined to visit many times. I was keenly aware of its importance among modern botanists as a gateway to the upper Amazon. My first chore in Iquitos was to figure out when our foray would begin. Unknown to Don, I’d also be looking into the feasibility of returning to La Chorrera. According to our plan, our search for
oo-koo-hé
would lead us to Brillo Nuevo, a village on the Río Yaguasyacu. Rumor had it that trails led north from there to the town of Arica on the Río Putumayo. A modest boat ride upriver from Arica would take us to El Encanto, the starting point for the four-day hike to La Chorrera. I had serious doubts about this scenario. For one thing, there wasn’t enough time; for another, the area we’d have to traverse was now beset by drug traffickers and best avoided. Or so I learned. The idea had been Terence’s, not mine. He wanted me to investigate whether such a side trip might be possible—which I did, and it was not.

I had thought I’d spend three days in Iquitos. The usual travel delays extended that to a week, but my stay was productive. Both Tim Plowman and Nicole had suggested I look up a woman named Adriana who had worked for years in the local botanical trade. Her assistance proved crucial. Adriana was part Witoto, and her grandfather was the headman at Puco Urquillo, a Witoto village on the Yaguasyacu just downstream from Brillo Nuevo. That would be our first stop in our quest for
oo-koo-hé
. The Witotos were relative newcomers to that area. The rubber boom and its depredations in the early 1900s had left the Witoto, Bora, and Muinane peoples decimated by slavery and disease. Most of the survivors were forced from their ancestral home near La Chorrera to lands south of the Putumayo, along the Yaguasyacu near its confluence with the Río Ampiyacu. Our hope was that the Witotos there had not lost their ancestral knowledge of the fabled hallucinogen and how to prepare it. If anyone could help us find out, it would be Adriana’s grandfather, Don Alfredo.

As for the whereabouts of the RV
Heraclitus
, the news was good, or so it seemed. The boat had left Leticia and was due to dock in Iquitos any day. I got the report from Franklin Ayala Flores, the director of the Herbarium Amazonense at the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana, or UNAP. We’d been in touch with Dr. Ayala, as I called him, before leaving Canada, so he was expecting us.

I found him in his office at the herbarium, which back then was housed in a ramshackle wooden building, a firetrap, not to mention a habitat for the myriad insects that were slowly munching the collections into pulp. There was a room in the back with some gas-fired driers where the pressed specimens were dried prior to mounting; the place looked like it could go up in flames at any time. Ayala greeted me warmly. He had met my supervisor, Neil Towers, in 1977 when both were onboard the RV
Alpha Helix
, the well-appointed research vessel operated at the time by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and funded by the National Science Foundation. Schultes had been part of that cruise as well. Neil’s presence on that expedition had helped me in Iquitos and would do so again later in my career.

Ayala introduced me to his assistant, Juan Ruiz, who was then studying forestry at UNAP. Ayala appointed Juan to act as our field assistant, which in reality meant he’d be the field leader. His job was to accompany us on local collecting forays and, once the
Heraclitus
arrived, travel with us down the Amazon to Pebas and then up the Ampiyacu. I can imagine Ayala privately telling Juan to make sure the foolish gringos didn’t get themselves killed.

Juan didn’t warm to us immediately, and our lack of Spanish didn’t help. Nonetheless, our meeting that day was the start of what has been a thirty-year friendship and scientific collaboration. Juan is an amazing botanist and ethnobotanist. He is extremely knowledgeable about the plants of the Peruvian Amazon, most of which he can recognize and name on sight. I owe him greatly for all his help; I would not have had my career without him. Dr. Ayala, his mentor, has retired but still lives in Iquitos and continues to work on his massive catalogue of the region’s flora. Juan is now the curator of the herbarium, which has moved to a three-story concrete building built largely with funds from the Missouri Botanical Garden. It is a real herbarium with about 100,000 specimens, many of them only known to science from its collections, an important resource for researchers around the world. Dozens of research groups have passed through over the years, each required to deposit duplicates of their collections. Needless to say, this has created a backlog of unmounted, uncatalogued specimens. Kat and I collaborated in launching an effort to scan and digitize the specimens, the first step toward creating a digital herbarium that researchers could access over the Web. Juan, Kat, and others are carrying on the work as a project of Kat’s nonprofit, Botanical Dimensions, whose origins I discuss in a later chapter.

The day after meeting Juan, I returned to the herbarium and examined a few Myristicaceae specimens from the Puco Uquillo area, prepping for our visit. That family includes the
Virola
species used for
oo-koo-h
é, but a better-known member is nutmeg. While at the herbarium, I ran into Al Gentry, a legendary botanist then working in the field for the Missouri Botanical Garden. Gentry frequently collected out of Iquitos. Following his death at age forty-eight in a plane crash near Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1993, the salon of the herbarium was named in his honor. The crash, during a “treetop survey” near the coast, killed five, including two other scientists, American ornithologist Theodore Parker, and Ecuadorian ecologist Eduardo Aspiazu. All were key figures in neotropical conservation biology. Like Juan, Gentry was a plant fanatic who could identify specimens by genus if not by species on sight. Fully half of all the collections at the UNAP herbarium are Gentry’s, and a greater number are catalogued at the Missouri Botanical Garden and available through its massive database, Tropicos (
www.tropicos.org
).

The next day, I accompanied Gentry and a couple of grad students on a short outing near Iquitos. For him, it was hardly more than an afternoon stroll, but I learned a lot—about both Gentry’s field skills and the incredible biodiversity of the Amazonian ecosystem. Even on that brief trip, he collected several specimens that were unknown to science at the time. I got a crash course in field collecting, Gentry-style. He went at it like a crazy man, grabbing specimens and stuffing them into large plastic bags. Occasionally his team would deploy a set of extendable clippers on a long pole to reach flowering branches or epiphytes growing in the tree crotches. He made no effort to separate the specimens or even to treat them carefully. He just stuffed everything into a bag as fast as he could, as if it were a race. He told me the specimens would be sorted out later at the herbarium, which was near enough to eliminate the need to preserve the specimens more carefully. It’s no wonder he collected nearly a million specimens over his tragically shortened career.