It was my birthday.  I was in Putumayo, in the Upper Amazon of Colombia, sicker than I’d ever been after taking a shot of ayahuasca at a medicine ceremony, praying to Jesus, and my father who’d passed away seven years earlier, to save me.  I’d seen both of them in a new light after reaching that critical juncture.  Perhaps it was too late for me, however.  After there was nothing left in my stomach to purge, I folded my hands across my chest, and lay down on my back on the jungle floor.  I knew that I was in my grave.  Assistants carrying incense passed by to check on me, and it was like I was six feet below the ground.

Lying there, able to look down on my body, I could suddenly see another side of myself.  My whole life I’d felt like a failure.  The only chance for me, or so I thought, had been to keep traveling and writing relentlessly.  I’d made art my religion, infusing my quest with all the attributes normally associated with a pilgrimage.  My life had been a mess, but I’d always treated my work as sacred. 

Now I saw that all the journeying I’d done, the entire process, had been my real work of art.  The songs and poems were only souvenirs, things that you wake up from a dream and find clutched in the palm of your hand.  I could feel how sad people were that I was gone, not because I’d been so successful, but because I’d struggled so hard to keep it real and kept on fighting the fight.  Tears began to pour down my cheeks.

After a while, the harmonica began to play.  It was calling us back to life.  There was another chance for me, but I couldn’t bring myself to rise.  The taita began to chant, and I knew that he was the only one with the power to break the spell.  It was the same authority my father had earned in the spiritual world.  On this black night, any other ability paled in comparison.

Eventually, I made my way to a sitting position.  When I walked back through the camp, everyone was cocooned away in their hammocks.  The guitar music had begun, and I wondered over to the corner where the musicians were and found an empty seat.  It felt like I’d stumbled across a juke-joint in Mississippi, and that the taita was demonstrating the hoodoo power of a true bluesman.  The apprentices sat around him, waiting their turn.  They would be there, week in and week out, practicing their chops, no matter who was there to witness them.  I would have to do the same.

Around dusk I finally made it to my hammock.  John got up and puked, which seemed like a late reaction to the medicine.  I later learned he’d drank three glasses of it, which was hard to imagine.   Miguel was up and wanting to talk.  It seemed the yage had had no effect on him.  One of the assistants came over and they got into a lengthy discourse.  I went to use the bathroom, grateful just to have survived the night, and saw that the clouds had parted and there was a small pod of stars in the sky.

Just as the day was breaking, a small storm broke through.  Wind, from out of nowhere, rushed through the camp, sending loose objects flying and empty hammocks spinning.  Rain hammered down on the roof like machine gun fire.  It seemed like something out of the New Testament, a moving of the spirit across the land.  John was awake in the next hammock and we just looked at each other and shook our heads.  It only went on for a few minutes before the calm returned, leaving just a light drizzle of rain.

It was my last day in Mocoa and final chance to make it to the End of the World waterfall.  When we got back to the hostel, I set out right away.  It was still sprinkling, but the attendant said it would be possible to make it to the top.  He showed me a map that was nothing like what I ended up encountering.  It was all uphill, a steep, muddy trail, sometimes traversing through shallow streams that were raging torrents just the day before.  As sweat began to pour from me, the stench of ayahuasca filled my nose, and it started to feel like I was being pulled back into the bad trip.  I stumbled up the trail like the survivor of a plane wreck.

At the entrance to the falls, there was still a long way to go.  There were two river crossings that required me to take off my shoes.  At the second one, I left them there along with my phone, suspecting I was about to get very wet.  A guard appeared and tried helping me across.  The stink of my T-shirt nearly knocked him off his feet.

Finally, I arrived at the End of the World, from the backside of it.  The river plummeted two hundred feet, straight over the edge.  I was warned not to get too close, but couldn’t resist hanging from the branch of a tree to get a view.  When I returned, I jumped into one of the rock pools with all my clothes on.  The smell of my own sweat was making me sick.

On the way back down, I was approached by two blonde dogs I’d seen at the entrance.  My father had always loved dogs in the same way he’d loved men, indiscriminately.  Some of the dogs that he’d brought home over the years had purely been charity cases.  They would never respond to training, and only be loved by him.

The dogs seemed to be waiting for me, and began to accompany me down the trail, walking a few feet ahead, periodically glancing back to see that I was still there.  For a moment I wondered if this wasn’t the work of my father, asking God to send down two angels to see me out of the jungle and safely on my way.  If I was writing magic realism, perhaps the two dogs would’ve seen me all the way to the road.  Instead, as soon as we met a couple on the trail, they turned and started following them, back in the direction of the falls.

My plan was to make it to Sibundoy the next day.  Sibundoy is a small village a few hours from Mocoa.   A German traveler had told me about it.  He said that the population is mostly Indigenous, and that there are many famous taitas living in the area.   It is supposed to be a good place to attend a yage ceremony, but I was through with that, at least for the foreseeable future.  I’d gotten everything out of the two ceremonies I needed, and a change in perspective that was perhaps the best birthday gift I could’ve received.

Angelica was up making breakfast when I went down to the kitchen.  Her second experience with ayahuasca had not been so eventful, which was a good thing.  We got to talking and she brought up a series of books for children she’d begun writing that dealt with world religions.  That led me to suggest that a website might be a good start.  It gives you the chance to develop your format and put some feelers out there. 

Why I was telling her this, after all the frustration I’d just gone through with my own website, I don’t really know.  I gave her one of my cards, so she could check out my site for reference, and she looked it up right away on her phone.  For once, everything seemed to be in working order.  The small sample galleries I’d recently put up looked pretty good.  The pictures were eye-catching and the words meant something, not posts to just scroll through, but to spend a few minutes on and absorb, if you could make the time.

There was a bus to town that periodically stopped by the hostel.  When I was all packed, I went down and stood beside the road.  At the last minute, Angelica decided to join me, as there were a few things she needed to take care of in town.  Along the way, we passed a funeral procession, a black hearse, followed by at least fifty motorcycles and scooters.  I thought the driver wasn’t passing them out of respect, but when enough space finally opened up, he blasted around.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the road from Mocoa to Sibundoy is one of the most dangerous in South America, and is referred to as The Trampoline of Death.  At the bus station I was approached by a woman who sold me a ticket to ride in the back of a pickup.  Just behind the cab, a bench seat had been bolted down in front of the luggage space.  A tarp covered the top.  The side I was sitting on was wide open.

It didn’t take long to discover how the road had earned its name.  It was straight uphill, around a series of deadly curves and devastating potholes.  There was a man and woman next to me.  We were getting tossed all over the place.  I was afraid to take pictures.  Every time I got out the phone, the screen settings would jump all around.  Instead of pictures of the spectacular mountain scenery, I wound up with a dozen blurry selfies, all grimaces, and gritted teeth.

When we got to Sibundoy, the truck stopped just outside of town.  I walked down the road towards a cluster of buildings, and booked a room at the first hotel I came to.  There was a poster above the reception desk of some colorful statues, and the guy working there told me the pictures were taken at a park only two blocks away.  As soon as I put my things away, I went to check it out.

I was back to taking pictures of street art, which was fine by me.  All around the park were paintings and statues of medicine men and women, hummingbirds, jaguars, magical animals, musicians.  Now I understood where the artists had gotten their inspiration.  At the peak of my trip, the green forest demons had wanted to take me to see their art, and I’d resisted.  When I was finally laying down on the jungle floor to die, I’d seen a giant beetle on a wall, like a big screen TV.  His body turned electric blue and then began to pulsate into a million blinding colors.  It was way more than that, but as hard to describe as a dream.  All we can do as artists, is make clumsy replicas of things that can never be fully conveyed.  Still, they sometimes end up possessing a rare beauty of their own.

I next went into the cathedral.  Here was Jesus clutching his sacred heart.  Mary holding her infant son.  Behind the church there was a cemetery.  A cement path in the middle of it led uphill to an altar.  On either side, the tombs were stacked four high, some with painted inscriptions, others with flowers and photos.  A few were given headstones.  Some had crosses and angels.  I thought about what it would be like to be lying in one of them.  Given my experience the previous night, I could picture it very clearly.  Beyond the altar was a set of older tombs.  Some of these had either been broken into or were falling apart.  There were wildflowers and ferns growing out of them.

You might have heard of me, the traveler who didn’t know that the war was over, and went on fighting for the rest of his life.  You won’t see me on television, or on the cover of magazines, but if you ever fall through the cracks, or reach the end of your rope, you might meet me, and perhaps I can be of some assistance.  I’m not trying to save the world, or even change it, but I’ve written a few songs and poems, and of course, there’s the stories.  If your heart is broken, or things didn’t work out quite as planned, we just might have something to talk about.

When I got back to the hostel, Angelica had written, saying my website was awesome and I should definitely keep it up.  Keeping it up is all I do, but it was nice to hear from someone, besides my mother, who really cared.