true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
Chorrera.
Arriving at the riverside campfire we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission with Father Jose Maria talking on the radio to the bush
pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst. The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency. He
promised to return in a few days to fly us out. I was unhappy with these arrangements. I knew that we, the gringo strangers, would lose face
with the local people when our need for this airlift became known. Also, I did not have Vanessa's faith that all Dennis needed to return to
normal was to check into the world of modern psychiatry. But there was nothing to be done for it, and so we dined in silence, each lost in
unshared thoughts.
The next day we were to pack all our equipment and move it to the river in preparation for a flight that could come unannounced at any time.
Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex at La Chorrera.
The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis evading Vanessa's wardenship and slipping away
from the river house sometime during the previous night to go and sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas, who awoke to find
him there as unassuming as a piece of furniture. As the story died away, the unspoken dimensions of it returned to move in each of our minds.
The next day was March 13. The camp in the forest, the hallowed-seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred, was
dismantled. All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Witoto huts were tucked away, and it was returned to its native anonymity.
Outside, in a pile, we left quite a cargo trove behind us, for our forced evacuation by airplane left precious little room for any gear; some
insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras, the notebooks on the experiment—that was it. The things that we left would be
swiftly assimilated by the tolerant Witotos who owned the site of our attempted probe of hyper-space.
We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear. Everything seemed to be moving forward of
its own accord. We swam in the river and sat on the rocks, scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian. Thus the
afternoon passed, with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room
out the window to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else.
Around four o'clock, I was lying on the river bank about twenty feet back from the river's edge. I was thinking about a walk to the river I had
taken two days before, when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts. From out of nowhere I
remembered an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses: "Poetry is made at the edge of running water." My recent experience at water's
edge had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it. Vanessa and Ev were washing in front of me at the river bank. Directly
across the river from us was the southeastern sky in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with the shaft of light just twenty-four hours earlier.
I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow, a place low in the sky near the horizon
where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum. After a few seconds, I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow
across the river. They glanced across the river for only a moment and said that they saw nothing. I did not persist, but instead watched the sky
in that spot. By this time, I had stopped forcing my opinions on people. I was already
regarded as nuts, not incoherent exactly, but not to be trusted or relied upon because I believed such odd things. That was my
flaw.
I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify. I became extraordinarily interested. In this pastoral setting, it seemed to me that
a great revelation was brewing. I watched and I saw the colors deepen; the bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in
one spot was very definite. Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river. Again the light glance. And? Wonderful!
"Yes, we see it. Not much of one is it?"
The clue-scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant. Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light; now a spot of
spectrogrammatic color in the same spot in the sky. I had the strong sense of the eye-in-the-sky drawing close to my thoughts and watching
with satisfaction as I understood the importance of the southeast, and of watching and focusing my attention on that spot. In my mind, the
teacher said, "This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here."
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