The next morning, we took our salty bikes to a local shop and got them cleaned and lubed. Then we said our goodbyes to our boat family with lots of hugs and Facebook friending and promises of trips to Europe, and we headed south out of town.
Our next goal: Medellín.
I had heard that it was a beautiful city located in a narrow valley between mountains. That it was at 8,000 feet elevation, and because of its proximity to the equator, this altitude gave it almost perfect weather year-round.
I was happy to be on the bike, though my legs felt heavy and my tailbone was sensitive again. The towns weren’t so different from what we’d seen in Panama and Costa Rica. The small towns in Latin America were starting to look the same. And we were looked at the same—the smaller or more remote the town, the more Weston and I were stared at, the more kids would run alongside us to ask us where we were from and demand photos.
Colombia didn’t feel so different, but I felt different. I could feel myself on a new continent. One giant landmass. Nothing separated me from Patagonia now except dirt and mountains and snow and people and llamas. Machu Picchu and Patagonia were just miles away now. Many miles, but connected. The road I was on, headed up the beginning of the Andes to Medellín, was connected to the roads in Patagonia by an unbroken chain of pavement.
But I also thought, Jed, if you quit now, at least you can say you made it to South America. That’s a big thing. So, if you get really over this, there’s an out. You won’t be too embarrassed to quit now. Just saying. There’s an out.
It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walt Whitman had walked every morning before working on Leaves of Grass, the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it. I had decided South America was the land of Indiana Jones adventure and sacred mountains and my spirit-quest revelations. I expected it, and so, now biking it, I felt it coming, I felt it promising me everything.
On the multiday journey uphill to Medellín, we fell in love with Colombian breakfasts. Beans and rice, eggs, arepas (fried pancakes made of maize dough), chorizo, chicharrón (grilled beef), some kind of delicious salty white cheese, and hot chocolate. It was pure fuel for the day, and we craved it. We’d camp and then wake desperate to find it again.
We biked for days across miles of rolling green hills and farms. We camped in thickets and forests. One night we camped in a woman’s cowshed. As I was falling asleep in my hammock, dangling from beams in the shed, Weston spoke out of the darkness from his hammock.
“I didn’t like that cocaine,” he said.
“Dude, we’re going to sleep, why are you thinking about cocaine?”
“It’s a commercial drug. Henry ended up telling me how street coke is made. The first ingredient after the coca leaf is gasoline. That’s not what I’m about. I’m not doing that again. It didn’t teach me anything, it just made me want more cocaine. And I don’t want to support that supply chain. Well, I guess it taught me what not to do.” He was talking to me and to himself.
“That sounds wise,” I said, drifting off.
I hadn’t really tracked our elevation change, but we were going up. Day after day the land steadily turned from hot and humid to cool, damp, and green. One day in the mountains, we biked to what seemed like the end of the road, a cliff. The land disappeared, just fell away from the highway like it had been stolen. Far below we could see a coiled snake of pavement, dropping two thousand feet to the valley floor and the city of Medellín. At an overlook point, we saw bright colored triangles soaring in the sky. It was a hang-gliding center. People were lined up on a steep grassy slope, taking a few steps, and soaring over Medellín. Weston and I pulled over to watch them take off, then thread effortlessly between misty clouds in the valley.
The downhill ride was wild. Weston sped way ahead of me, going as fast as the cars, hugging the turns and loving the adrenaline. I watched him weave into the oncoming lane to pass a semitruck and squeeze in front of it just in time to miss a car. I was scared and took my time. Beautiful houses dotted the road. I paused at vista points from which I could see Medellín in the distance. Most of the city’s houses appeared to be built of red brick; it looked like God had poured red clay cubes across the valley. Tall apartment towers crawled up the green slopes. After twenty full minutes of coasting downhill, we made it to the bottom and rode toward town.
I saw gondolas going up the hills. Big enclosed ones. But they were not for skiing. They were dangling commuter cars, taking people to their houses up the steep hills.
We tracked down a café with Wi-Fi. Weston was drawn to a specific hostel because it had mushroom murals in the photos. “This one is my style. I bet they’ll take us to find mushrooms. At this altitude, they grow wild in the fields.”
“Wild? Really? That seems dangerous.”
“No, no, if you know what they look like. It’s fine.”
We biked to the mushroom hostel, and the moment we walked in, the people in the lobby knew they had a friend in Weston. They were all barefoot, wearing poofy cloth pants, and smoking weed. The hostel was an old house divided up by a hodgepodge of stucco walls to create bunk rooms. The creekside yard had hammocks strung between trees. Puffs of smoke came from the hammocks, heavy with some chill backpackers enjoying their weightlessness. The hippies who ran the place showed us to our own bunk room and offered us some weed. Weston obliged.
We spent the week in Medellín. We poked around the city and its suburbs, went to cafés and museums. We rode the gondolas. Walking in town, I kept seeing nuns. Tiny women, the size of middle schoolers, but mostly old. I walked beside one old nun for a few blocks. She had dark skin and her face was almost entirely wrinkled, as if her eyes and button nose had been poked into the wrinkles like chocolate chips into dough. I thought of her life, how at some point she had decided to give up sex and romance for the Christian God. She didn’t show a trace of European blood. She looked older than conquest. If so, when the Spanish came, they had destroyed her own people’s gods and their myths, tore down their temples, and built cathedrals to a new god over them. And this woman, centuries later, serves that same destroyer god. She had bound herself to the church that “civilized the savages.” In that god’s name, she quietly serves the poor and prays for the lost.
Of course, I was only walking near her and imagining her story, her life. Still, her small frame, her determined walk and body language, and the commitment she made, inspired me. Was I strong enough to commit to something the way she had? Believe so deeply? I wondered if she ever doubted, if she ever thought about walking away. She turned down a side street and disappeared, but I can still see her tiny, wizened face. I can see her walking with somewhere to go.
We were there long enough that I spent some time apart from Weston. Doing my own thing. Going on side trips. It was nice. A little breather. I came home from exploring one day to find Weston very excited. “We’re going camping! They’ve never done a mushroom excursion, and I talked them into it. The guy who cleans up has an uncle in the mountains outside of town with a big cow field where he’s seen them grow. We’re going,” he said.
Cut to two days later.
* * *
—
HERE WE GO. A mushroom adventure.
We are headed on a camping trip with ten people from the hostel. But really, we’re on an excursion to find wild magic mushrooms.
After six months on the road, Weston has worn me down. I don’t like weed. I’m scared of cocaine, no matter how much I prefer Weston on it. But mushrooms? I’m out of good excuses. Weston’s evangelism has worked. The way he sells me on it is strategic, like he knows which thi
ngs to say to get my guard down. “Mushrooms are natural. There is no hangover. It connects you to nature. You don’t feel like someone else, not like being drunk or high. You’re lucid. You’re still fully yourself. You’ll just see how everything is connected and meaningful more than you ever have before.” With a sales pitch like that, I feel prudish to say no. He wants me to experience it with him. He wants to be my guru, my shaman. I say I’ll do it.
Fernando, the buzzed-headed tattooed man in MC Hammer pants who runs the hostel, knows a farmer with a large mountaintop cattle farm, and the hostel has several big tents we can all stay in. Two of the people staying at the hostel are chefs from Argentina, so we all pitch in for them to buy a smorgasbord of food.
The journey takes two hours by bus, then a two-mile hike. It feels like we’re ascending into a postcard. Steep mountains, neon green with healthy plants. Cattle roam the terraced fields, mists floating through like wispy cotton ghosts. The moisture in the air would be humid, were we not 8,500 feet up. But the air is perfect. Crisp and beautiful.
At the top of our climb, we walk down a dirt road, hop a fence, cut around some barking dogs, hop another fence, and end up in a field that covers the entire hilltop. It’s probably thirty acres, naturally terraced, with dotted clots of trees and a few giant boulders sticking out. We walk to an overlook and begin setting up our tents in the midafternoon.
Once our little oasis is ready, Fernando calls us all to attention. Everyone is grinning and giddy. I seem to be the only one who has never eaten a mushroom.
“Who has never found wild magic mushrooms before?” Fernando asks, his Colombian accent handsome and raspy.
About half of us raise our hands. I raise mine.
“Okay, great. It is special to find them in nature. They grow here all on their own. They are a gift from nature. So it is simple.” He holds up a mushroom in his hands. He had either found it as we walked or brought it. But it looks very much plump and alive. It seems very fresh. It’s about three inches tall, the umbrella top about the size of a Lay’s potato chip. “It looks like this. And the thing that sets these apart is the little collar. Underneath the fan is this, like a turtleneck.” He holds it up for us to see. Underneath the typical mushroom fan, there’s a small fold around the stalk, just as if it’s wearing a little turtleneck sweater. The outside of the turtleneck is white like the stalk, but inside the fold is dark brown. “These also bruise purple. The other mushrooms you find, if they don’t have this turtleneck, or bruise like this, they are not for eating. But the collar is clear to see. Do you see?”
We all say yes like a first-grade class.
“They grow on cow poop, mostly. So find the poop.” He laughs.
We break huddle and spread out across the mountaintop. The field is so large, we hardly see one another as we search. The mushrooms are hard to find at first. Empty cow patty after empty cow patty, the whole thing feels like a scam. Then, twenty minutes in, I find one. Does it have a collar? Yep. Then another. Then another. I curl up my T-shirt like a kangaroo pouch and collect a mountain of them over the next hour. I zone in for my Easter egg hunt, and time begins to pass imperceptibly. By the time I fill my pouch, I’ve wandered far, to the tip of the brow of the hilltop. The light is beautiful and the valley below is blue with haze. Mountains layer away into the distance, turning levels of blue-green and then just blue. I can’t believe the scale of it all. It feels like the scene in The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews running through the field. Except I have magic mushrooms in my shirt.
We return to camp and dump our hauls onto a blue tarp. I’m proud to learn I found the most. Weston found a good amount, too. Some people find only one or two. But all together, there’s plenty to go around.
Even though these are mushrooms, and they grew out of poop, I am enchanted by it all. It feels clean and pure. So different from the cocaine vibes in Cartagena. I had grown up on a farm surrounded by cow patties, and cow poop had a cleanness about it. It’s just grass, really. And these sweet little mushrooms had dressed up, put a turtleneck on for us. Everyone here is so calm, so collected, not fiending for a high, but rather pleasantly waiting to commune with nature.
“Fernando, how many should I eat?” I ask. “This is my first time. And I’m generally very sensitive to stuff.”
“Just eat three little ones for now.”
Weston, proud and protective of me, chimes in. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be all right here. This is the best place in the world to do this. The best. Eat them soon, while the light is still out. You’ll want to look around and enjoy the view.”
I eat them. Chomp. All at once.
“They’ll taste pretty disgusting,” Weston says after I’ve stuffed them into my mouth.
But they don’t. They are gummy, the normal texture of a mushroom. And they don’t have much taste at all. I wash them down with some water.
I wait. I drink some more water. I sit in the grass and chat with the others. I have a few false starts: “Ooh, I’m feeling it…just kidding, no, I’m not.” “Okay, now I am! No, that’s an ant on my ankle.”
Weston floats up to me, maybe feeling it and smiling. “Do you hear the world yet?” He seems cartoonish to me.
“Listen to Weston, trying to make everything so mystical,” I say, mockingly. I get a laugh out of a couple of the other campers. Weston doesn’t laugh.
“But everything is mystical,” he says emphatically. He looks at me like I have hurt him. He slinks away. I don’t really register it. I’m laughing about something with my new friends.
I pull out my journal because I think it would be fun to write down what I’m feeling as it’s happening.
Then—I feel it.
A widening. A tingly slowdown of color and light.
I hear sounds, as if I were a wolf. Sounds are isolated, far-off sounds, and feel very close. I don’t feel drunk or high, this is different. I don’t feel dumb or slow. I feel like myself, just…heightened.
I feel what Weston had told me about: that nature would take on special holiness. I feel an intense love of it all.
I pull out my pen and start to write.
I want to push my face into the mountain.
Not the one I’m on.
The one far across the paradise valley
that I could never reach.
But the birds see it, and every
mountaintop is just another stone
poking out of the stream, hopping
across.
The birds have so much to say…
I put my journal down and look around. The ten of us are sitting around in the grass, near one another. Everything is hilarious. My cheeks hurt from laughter.
Twenty feet away, I hear a ladybug land on a blade of grass. I squint to see. I see it. I think I see it. I hear her wings flap and then stop and the mechanics of her red-and-black shell close over her wings. I hear everything.
In the calmness of one phase of my mushroom trip, I sit and watch Weston from afar. He looks so happy, grinning like the Cheshire cat, inaudibly chatting and using his hands to tell a grand story. I think about his quest for answers, his fluctuations from atheism to Christianity to humanism to nihilism to animism. I think about how badly he wants the world to make sense. How it tears him up, so he tears through ideologies, testing them with all his might. As the mushroom magic courses through my brain, I suddenly understand why he loves experiences like these. For a few hours, the world makes sense. Everything has meaning. Everything is alive, in perfect friendship with everything else. I want, in this moment, for Weston to have peace in his heart. I want him to feel what I feel all the time: total conviction that it all means something, and it all is meant for good. I hear another bug land on a leaf, and my mind goes elsewhere.
The sun goes down, and the Argentines start cooking. The food is an assortment of sausages and purple potatoes and onions a
nd other things. Our headlamps create a little microworld of light in the darkness.
At one point, during a rare lull in the giggling, someone sits up, spooked. “Did you hear that? Something is over there.”
We turn our lights to the field and see a semicircle of eyes. No—a full circle, all the way around us. Fifteen pairs of eyes glowing back from the darkness.
Dogs. Wild dogs have surrounded our camp, waiting for us to make a mistake. Fernando is calm.
“It’s just dogs. We’ll just need to be careful to pack up our food and put it in the tent with us.”
We go back to our food and our laughing. Every few minutes I turn my headlamp behind me, and the eyes are there. Waiting. Weston gets up and scares some away. We find it all very funny. But I have waves of dread, looking behind me at the patient beasts.
We eat, pack up, and go to bed. We are careful to wrap up all the leftover meat and put it in bags and bring it inside the ten-person tent. We make pallets and get in our sleeping bags. One of the guys does a last run-about-screaming session, to get the dogs away. They run into the dark. We zip up and fall asleep.
* * *
—
I WOKE UP to bright morning light and the front door being unzipped. Then a gasp. “They got the meat!”
I sat up. We’d left the meat outside??
No. We’d brought it in with us. But where the meat had been, there was now nothing. In the corner of the tent, a perfect hole. Somehow, the dogs had pulled an Ocean’s 11 heist, chewing through the tent, stealing the meat, and eating every last morsel without one of us waking up. Outside the tent, plastic was strewn all over the hillside. We were so amazed…cleaning up the plastic wasn’t even annoying. We were too impressed.
I expected a hangover or something, but felt nothing. In fact, I felt excellent. Weston was so proud. “You see. There’s no hangover. It’s natural. It’s a gift from nature. You enjoyed it?”
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 20
