All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [67]
Evan, too, is a capable companion, and I feel safe traveling with him. We take a boat trip farther up the river, camp out, and wake at dawn to cross the river with a machete-wielding guide, then wait for a skittish gathering of birds at a clay wall, finally peering out from behind a blind at the brilliant sight of thousands of bright green and red macaws. It is the best adventure you could wish to have with any partner.
That night, on our return, the people who run the jungle center offer us another journey, with a local shaman, taking ayahuasca, a sacred plant that induces visions, used in local healing ceremonies. I have an anthropologist friend who has done quite a bit of research on the hallucinogenic vine, bringing scientists down to see how the ancient drug reveals the very structure of DNA in visions, so naturally I am curious. Since one isn’t often in the Amazon jungle with the opportunity to join an ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman, I decide to participate. Evan isn’t interested; he tried a few psychedelics when he was younger and says he knows all he wants to know about that particular path to those territories of his brain. He goes off to have a few reliable beers with an Englishman who is likewise staying at our camp.
Undeterred, I sign up for the ceremony alone. The shaman, an elderly Indian man in sharply creased jeans, arrives on a little boat around sunset. We gather in one of the huts—a few of the employees, a couple other guests, and the shaman—and scatter ourselves on mattresses on the floor. I dimly realize that I haven’t followed the first rule of taking psychedelics, which is set and setting, meaning a positive frame of mind, a comfortable place, people you trust. I don’t know these people, much less anything about the shaman or his ayahuasca, and though my mind is calm and untroubled, my body is still recovering from one of the low-grade bugs that gnaw on your GI tract for much of the time you spend in Peru, no matter what you do. Still, when the shaman offers me a cup of vile brown liquid, I down it, fast.
I know that ayahuasca, like peyote or mescaline, acts as an emetic, but I figure it will just make me burp, tidily empty the contents of my tummy, and then I’ll be ready for the visions the shaman is conducting, open to whatever revelations about self, nature, the universe, and the oneness of them all that the vine is willing to offer. What I don’t expect is four hours of psychedelic barfing. My skin becomes clammy, I have a tweaky sensation around my jaw, someone hands me a bag, and I begin my first round. It isn’t disgusting, exactly, but curious; I intently notice everything, as if vomiting in slow motion, the sound of the crinkling bag heightened, the expulsions colorful, my physical sensations coming from afar. The shaman, who is whistling, makes soothing sounds every time I retch. At some point, when I can close my eyes long enough not to have to aim into the bag again, I have visions, like a rolling, writhing picture of the jungle, which I could have seen had I just stepped outside the door and twirled around until I was dizzy. Given my recent gastrointestinal distress, I am distracted from these transcendent visions by an immanent need to use the bathroom, which, though only a few steps away, might as well be across the piranha-infested river for all I am able to move.
Finally, when I cough up the last bilious drops from my stomach, dry heaving for good measure, the visions stop, my intestines settle down, and I take a nap on the mattress. I am chilly, and all I can think about is how I want someone next to