true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
EPILOGUE
In which I return to the present, Introduce my fellow explorers as they are today, and genuflect before the weirdness of it all.
So WHERE DOES THIS all leave us today? Did the cosmic giggle move on? Am I like an archaeologist, condemned now to work diligently
with toothbrush and nut-pick, attempting to exhume and reassemble the broken shards of dreams and visions obtained in long forgotten times
and places? It was easy to look back and to tell this story as if it were a completed cycle, something finished and resplendent in its completion.
The problem with that approach is that this story is true, its actors real people, their lives ongoing. The major mysteries of the experiment at
La Chorrera remain just that, mysteries even to this date.
My colleagues, my friends and lovers, have changed and moved on. Different fates have claimed each of us. Dave remained in South
America, having returned to the United States only once in the last twenty years, for the briefest of visits. I have not seen him since 1971.1
know that he has lived in most of the countries of Andean South America. For years he remained true to his itinerant hippie roots, traveling
from one high altitude village to the next teaching the local women to crochet. By now I should imagine that this minor art form is well
established in places where before his
visits it must have been utterly unknown. He didn't make it to the West Coast during his short visit to the States, but he called me and we
talked at length. Same old Dave as far as I could tell.
Ev married the friend for whom she left me in 1975, and they are still married, with a son soon old enough to be sent off to college. I have not
seen Ev or her husband since her departure in 1975. We talked once on the phone years ago. I muttered something about how it might be nice
to have dinner sometime, but it was up to me to follow through, and I never did. This avoidance has not been casual or unconsidered. There is
still a reluctance on my part and a lingering pain that goes deep and puzzles me—but it is not to be lightly gone against.
Vanessa returned to the States from the Amazon and followed in the tradition of her father and sister by obtaining a medical degree. Today
she lives in Berkeley, as does Ev, and is a psychiatrist with a thriving practice. We see each other too rarely, and when we do get together I am
reluctant to raise the issue of La Chorrera for two reasons. The first is that we were at opposite ends of the spectrum in our judgments
concerning those events. And the second is that I don't wish to have our friendship turn, as it easily could, into a review of what might be
thought of as my "case." Vanessa is smart and fair and has no motivation to judge me harshly. Our original differences arose out of her belief
that, at the time, my unwillingness to treat Dennis's condition at La Chorrera as a medical crisis was the result of my own callousness,
selfishness, lack of character, or just plain nuttiness.
The only person who was part of the original team to whom I feel I can still rave at full bore with concerning the experiment at La Chorrera is
Dennis. He obtained his degrees in botany, molecular biology, and neurochemistry years ago. He is now the scientist that at La Chorrera he
could only aspire to be. He is married, has a precocious child, and works as a research pharmacologist for a Silicon Valley outfit called
Shaman Pharmaceuticals. He tolerates my raving but is careful never to encourage me. I think that his attitude is still much as it was only a
few months after the experiment, that whatever happened the toll on him was too great. He likes to rest with the facile argument that what
happened was only a folie a deux, a delusion of two brothers grieving for their recently deceased
mother and obsessed with conquering hyperspace. When I marshal my case against this and argue the evidence that something much more
was going on, he reluctantly agrees, then shakes his head and turns away. To this day he remembers very little of what actually went on
between the fourth and the twentieth of March 1971, and he prefers to keep it that way.
So without rancor or surprise I can say that the matter is pretty much in my keeping. The morning that we all flew out of La Cho-rrera in
Tsalikas's small plane, I was twenty-four years old, penniless, without plans, considered mad by my closest friends, and with a price on my
head. In the intervening years, I have done what I could to keep the issues surrounding the experiment at La Cho-rrera from being forgotten.
Together, during the mid-seventies, Dennis and I developed and promulgated the techniques for growing the mushrooms. Though others
followed us into the field, we were the first and loudest to preach the home cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms. This technology brought to
tens of thousands of dedicated and curious seekers the option of exploring what would otherwise have been an obscure and unobtainable
tryptamine hallucinogen. Psilocybin-taking in the seventies was the major factor creating and sustaining a small but dedicated public
following for ideas such as those developed at La Chorrera. Over the years, the story of La Chorrera and the ideas spawned there have slowly
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