The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (59 page)

For both of us, the mushroom trip at Nuevo Brillo seemed to have awakened what I called “the ‘brother’ business” at La Chorrera. At issue was our conceit about being parts of a single mind. In a long passage, I found myself exploring this idea, wondering if something in our ancestry or genetic makeup might have accounted for the close connection between us. That led me to wonder what effects, if any, embryogenesis might leave on the mother, a biochemical imprint of some sort that might later influence the development of a subsequent child. My thoughts were mostly a form of escape or play—a chance to speculate about the mysterious complexity of life. I sensed a glimmer of insight hidden in those musings, one that would never be articulated until Terence and I had “explored the potentially traumatic and hair-raising psychological back-alleys of what it means for us to be brothers.” A few words later, my thought broke off, never to be resumed.

Reading that passage thirty years later, I found it puzzling and yet somehow important. If nothing else, I could see that even ten years after La Chorrera I was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened there.

Easter Sunday in Iquitos dawned wet and dreary. We spent it as we had the days before, preparing for Terence’s departure, organizing our specimens, securing the necessary permits to export live plants, and packing them for shipment. The drizzle continued the next morning as our taxi threaded its way through the rain-slick streets of Iquitos to the airport.

As I watched his plane disappear into the lowering overcast, I was overcome with a feeling of sadness and loss. I somehow knew we’d never again be in South America together. I could sense that his departure marked the close of a chapter in our relationship, a chapter that had opened ten years previously, at another airport in another country, when my plane touched down in Bogotá prior to our trip to La Chorrera. That event was many twists back in the helical spiral that bound our lives. I had no idea what the next turn of the spiral would bring. The confusion and conflict that I’d had felt toward my brother during our most recent adventure had brought little clarity or resolution. All I knew for certain was that the currents of fate and destiny that had brought us together were now, inevitably, causing us to drift apart. We were still in touch, but we would never be as close as we had been during the decade just past. At least not until the end, an end that neither of us imagined or wanted, and one that was still nearly twenty years in the future.

Don had already departed by the time we returned to Iquitos. He’d left a message saying that he was heading to the Sierra for more collecting and probably would not meet me in Lima for the flight out in a week or so. This was probably the last time he was going to be in Peru for a long time, his message said, maybe ever. He wanted to stay a few weeks longer, and use the time to see what the highlands had to offer. I’m sure part of his motivation was to escape us and our peculiar preoccupations.

I was ready to leave. My funds were running low, and I felt that I had accomplished what I had come for. I missed North American food, and I wanted a bit of old-fashioned, first-world comfort. First, however, I decided to stop in Pucallpa. I wanted to see Don Fidel again and have another ceremony with him, and if possible collect some additional samples of ayahuasca and
chacruna
, the
Psychotria
admixture. I also wanted to track down samples of
chicorro
, a purportedly hallucinogenic sedge that was important in Shipibo medicine. I also thought I might be able to secure a few more
Psilocybe
spore prints, to augment those I had collected at Brillo Nuevo. My journal entry for April 30 reflects my less than sanguine mood:

Another rainy day in Pucallpa. The place is beginning to pall on me, the filth, the mud and squalor seem depressing and almost too much to tolerate. I have had enough of Peru for a while, and find my thoughts increasingly turning over the mechanics of how to engineer a satisfactory exit out of here.

Pablo Amaringo (on guitar) and friends.

It took me another four days to catch a flight out to Lima. Once again, the delay proved fortunate. I decided to use the extra time to look for Pablo Amaringo Shuña, the cousin of Francisco Montes, the man I’d met in Tarapoto. The address Francisco gave me for Pablo led me to the same village where Don Fidel lived. At Pablo’s house, an old woman said he was out but due back later. I decided to stop in at a local cantina and return in an hour or so.

I was nursing my second beer through a drowsy afternoon when a small, sharp-faced man approached me at the bar. Introducing himself in Spanish as Pablo Amaringo, he said his mother had mentioned I’d been looking for him. I explained what I’d been doing in Peru and how that led me to meet his cousin. We had a nice conversation in Spanish and English over a couple of beers. It turned out he taught English in the local high school, in addition to his amateur work as a painter and a musician. After we’d returned to his house, he introduced me to his mother, who turned out to be the woman I’d met earlier, and showed me his battered guitar.

Opening a dresser in his bedroom, he pulled out a bunch of paintings on what appeared to be fiberboard. They were representations of various jungle scenes—pretty, I thought, but unremarkable. When I told him that I was due to leave Pucallpa for Lima the next evening, he insisted that I come back out to the village the next afternoon so he and his friends could perform a concert for me. I was not particularly into it, but I wanted to be polite, and so I accepted, promising to bring some beer.

When I got there the next day, he and three or four of his companions, each playing a different instrument, regaled me with a performance that was memorable more for its exuberance than its polish. We had a wonderful time. I eventually left in a taxi for the hotel and collected my luggage for the flight out later that evening. I departed Pucallpa with music still echoing in my memory, pleasantly buzzed, and suffused with the warm glow of new friendship. My gloom had dissipated; it was the right way to leave Peru. Whatever its faults, the warmth and kindness of its people more than make up for them. I still cherish many of the friendships I made on that first trip, and many others I’ve made there since then. Pablo would become one of my closest Peruvian friends, our fates intertwined in ways we could not have imagined.

Midnight on May 10 found me on a direct flight from Lima to Vancouver. As the jet taxied out before takeoff, my thoughts were heavy with reflection. I had gotten a letter from Sheila a couple of days earlier, and it had stirred up much of the confusion and resentment I’d been struggling to suppress. She’d broken up with her new boyfriend, who was headed to Ontario to continue his studies. Her note was not an apology or a plea to get back together; but it hinted, perhaps, at a modicum of regret that our relationship had ended as it had. Which only made me angry. For God’s sake, I thought, can’t these things ever just be over? Why did we have to stir all this up again, why drag it out? I’d done too much of that already in my life. It seemed just better to be done with it, to make a clean break. Here’s what I wrote:

12:00 a.m. 10 May – aboard CP Air 423

Waiting aboard the 747 warming up to scream me out of here, I find much opportunity for reflection on the trip and the return—what awaits me (or does not await me) in North America. In many ways I am sad to leave Peru—the experiences we have had, the people we have encountered, the sights we have seen will be with me always. It is definitely a country I must return to someday; it is far too complex to be understood in one visit…funny that I have come to feel more at home in Peru than in Vancouver. All the different scenes, good and bad, that await me there leave me with mixed feelings. Much of this revolves around Sheila. Her most recent letter has stirred everything up again. The thing that I have to realize is that the affair is
over
; no matter what is said, nothing can restore it. But I suppose at this stage to rant and rave will have little effect; it is probably better just to say as little, and see her as little, as possible. There are many other things to keep me busy, and to take my mind off it; it is these that I must concentrate on. Only time will tell what other possibilities exist on the social/emotional horizon. But one thing is certain: there is nothing to further misguided efforts to resurrect a relationship that is dead. It’s dead, and that’s it.

In a few minutes now I will be torn from Peruvian soil, perhaps never to return…very strange to think about, how fast these past four months have gone, when one thinks about it. What new discoveries and adventures lie ahead? This is the thing to think of; the future is alive with undreamed of possibilities.

And later:

Dawn…somewhere over North America…beautiful, bright and clear day here in the stratosphere…I would guess we are somewhere over the Southwest. A few hours sleep, comfortable cozy sleep here in the tender cares of CP Air, and Peru becomes like a dream…did it ever happen? Or was it merely a brief flash during a momentary snooze? Yet the physical evidence, the metal airplane, my bags and bottles and beads, &c., is testimony that indeed I was in Peru, traveled and worked there, saw its sights and met its people. Odd then how thoroughly obviated the experience becomes by the simple act of
leaving
. Not even arrived in Vancouver yet and already it seems a fading memory.

At Canadian customs in the early morning light, I figured the one sleepy-eyed officer would thoroughly inspect everything. I had a shitload of specimen bottles, pressed herbarium specimens, dried barks, baskets, woven chambira bags, Shipibo textiles, blowguns, bark paintings, and live plants—in short, all the things one might accumulate over four months of collecting in the jungle. I also had my plant import permits and phytosanitary certificates at the ready, as well as Neil Towers’s phone number in case things got sticky. I was prepared for a shakedown lasting two or three hours. The customs agent looked at me and then at my stuff spread out on the table. Looking back at me with a shake of her head, she said, “You’re the person my supervisor warned me about. Get out of here.”

And I did! I was home.

Inspired by my good luck in the field, I lost no time in plunging back into my work. I found another skanky basement apartment and settled in. I had plenty to do. I first saw Sheila a few weeks after returning. Our encounter wasn’t at all what I’d expected. These things never are. I was prepared to denounce her and move on. Instead, we fell into each other’s arms. All the hurtful things I was prepared to say, I could not say. All the bitterness and anger I had nursed for months just melted away. She was sorry for what had happened. She wanted to be with me again, and I wanted to be with her. What had happened in my absence was forgiven and forgotten as a bad misunderstanding.

Over that summer, we realized we were meant to be together. By the time the fall semester started, we were sharing an apartment. My heart was full. I felt I’d finally moved beyond emotional upheavals of my twenties. I had exciting work ahead of me, and a good woman, a woman I loved, at my side. Life was good.

Chapter 43 - Adulthood and its Victims

Dennis working in the lab in Vancouver.

The three years between my return from Peru and the completion of my graduate degree in 1984 was a time of work and study. While I continued my lab investigations, Sheila pursued a degree in nursing. Shortly before we’d moved in together, she’d decided that estuarine seaweed ecology, the focus of her master’s project, was not really her passion. She was more interested in the health sciences, and nursing in particular. She had worked as a nurse’s aid in Kelowna in previous summers, so she had some knowledge of what that life involved. Her decision was also a practical one. Nursing is a portable profession that allows one to get a job almost anywhere, unlike algal ecology—or ethnopharmacology, for that matter. Her employability would benefit both of us over my years ahead as an itinerant scientist.