The Ayahuasca Lodge & Postcards to the Dead E-Book

Tim Deppe

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Ayahuasca Lodge deals with a river trip in the Peruvian Amazon made by two young Americans on their way to participate in some ayahuasca ceremonies at a lodge owned by another American. On the riverboat journey the two befriend another foreigner, a Canadian ethnologist, who informs them somewhat about ayahuasca and some of the sordid history of exploitation and violence in the Peruvian Amazon against the place and the Native people during the rubber days of the early 20th century. Though warned yet the two had to discover things for themselves and became involved with the results of a murder at the lodge. 
Postcards to the Dead contains several short stories on various topics, including death, philosophy, and war. Each story is independent and presents a unique point of view. Enjoy the journey.

Tim Deppe was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1953, but left rather quickly for the West Coast at age 19, to escape felony charges for growing marijuana. Then he spent most of the next 50 years working around the world, only interrupted by getting a BA from The Evergreen State College in Washington State and an MA in philosophy and theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. For the last three decades he has been the field worker for his tiny 501c3, NGO, Bookseed. Most of his time he spends as a delivery boy bringing books and seeds to impoverished schools, orphanages, refugee camps, jails and subsistence farmers in needy places around the world. He has one prior book titled “Little Gardens of Words” about the work he did in Latin America mostly with indigenous people. If you see him on the road give him a ride.

Leseprobe

BUILD

UNIVERSES

Tim Deppe

The Ayahuasca Lodge

&

Postcards to the Dead

© 2024 Europe Books| London

www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220149839

First edition: May 2024

Edited by Edward Andrea Sheldon

The Ayahuasca Lodge

&

Postcards to the Dead

I would like to dedicate this small book and say a big thank-you to Paul McAuley, a true unsung hero and martyr. As a De La Salle lay brother, his two decades of amazing activist educational and radio work helped so many indigenous people in Peru’s Amazon. He fought fearlessly to protect Matses and various tribal lands from illegal oil, mining, and timber extraction. Not since Walter Hardenburg in 1908, has anyone helped the indigenous around Iquitos, as much as Paul McCauley. His 2019 murder and brutal burning remains conveniently unsolved and is considered a closed case, but Paul's legacy lives on.

The Ayahuasca Lodge

A slight breeze gave the only sign of relief from Peru’s torrid Amazonian sun, which caused the metal ceilings and walls of the 1,200-ton launch, Eduardo II, to bake like an oven. The massive blue and white flat-bottomed river boat had just begun its route, a three-day voyage down the Huallaga, Maranon, and the Amazon Rivers to Iquitos. With over two-hundred passengers on board it slowly motored out of Yurimaguas, Peru’s oldest river port. Among them was a middle-aged Canadian man named Ken Ezinga, or Ezi, as he liked to be called. He was an ethnologist, who occupied one of the launch’s dozen cabins; and was returning to do some work with the Huitoto Indians along Peru’s border with Colombia. Though his tiny steel cabin with starched white sheets on a padded metal bunk was satisfactory, yet the heat inside was intolerable. So, while departing the port Ezi sat brooding outside on a bench along the aisle, pensively peering out above the turbid Huallaga waters.

Nearly all the passengers were with their belongings and hammocks, which lined the second and third decks, as thick as cobwebs. Sleeping there though put in jeopardy anyone’s things, especially a foreigner traveling alone. The only foreigners sleeping in hammocks were two younger American men named Walter Harden and his friend John Perkins. Like most passengers they were also traveling to Iquitos. As the launch departed, they walked along the starboard aisle of the upper deck and stopped beside to Ezi. With Yurimaguas disappearing around the bend he never noticed them, as he stared lost in thought into the deceptively endless expanse of jungle.

      Pausing, Perkins politely said, “Hello Sir! How are you? We saw you sitting here and wondered if you would like a beer?”

      Surprised to hear English, Ezi suddenly turned and looked up; and with a seraphic smile answered, “Hi! Oh, that’s nice of you. Actually, I’m on the abstemious wagon, but sure why not?” And with a smirk he added,“As Barleaus, the dolorous Dutch theologian, once said in his terse aphorism, “Away from the equator I’ve never sinned.” So, seeing we’re still a few degrees away, sure, thanks. Then popping open the bottle he said, “Cheers! But if you want to smoke some good green bud, then we better go to the roof.”

“Now that sounds better than a beer,” Perkins responded.

“Yeah, I was just about to go up there, so come join me. I have a little indoor herb from Lima. And I haven’t spoken English for some time. So, let me just lock my door here and let’s go drink these beers, have a smoke, and tell some lies,” he joked. “But though we’re in the middle of nowhere we still have to be discreet. For you know how the nature of man is. They say it’s okay to consume alcohol, which man makes and dies from, but to smoke an herb made by God is frowned upon. Go figure! And like life this launch is full of all kinds of people floating down life’s muddy river together. So, better to take care, eh? You know, I always find it quite amazing that in Peru one can openly buy ayahuasca, chacruna, San Pedro cactus, and other highly psychoactive plants right in markets, but marijuana, huh! Get caught with it and you’ll pay through the nose to the crooked cop, who busted you.”

After ascending the steep metal stairs to the launch’s long flat roof, they came to a sheltered area in front. The roof stretched out four stories above the muddy river and was nearly full of cargo of various boxes and dozens of frames of three-wheel moto-taxis. While sitting in the shade the three drank, smoked, and talked. Soon the ophidian-like Huallaga River formed a perfect parabolic curve, as it turned back in upon itself like the coil of a giant snake. Before them the Amazon jungle stretched out like a green arboreal ocean. All roads had finished and there would be no more cars for three days, until reaching Nauta village, just one-hundred kilometers before Iquitos, the world’s largest city with no road access. Only the noisy thudding drone of the launch’s diesel motor would disturb the serene silence of the vast jungle.

During those days when the Eduardo II slowly motored downriver towards Iquitos, little thatched villages would occasionally appear poking out of the jungle like orphaned children. Being July and the dry season, the river was some eight meters lower than it was a few months before. On one side the vertical cut-bank rose to a closed green curtain of tangled vegetation. And on the other, lithesome white sand beaches exposed their nakedness at each bend. It is here the local farmers would plant rice, beans, melons, and other crops; and harvest them before the waters rose again. But all life there gravitated down river towards Iquitos, just as it has done since the Jesuits built it in the 1770s, and then especially during the rapacious rubber era.

“Quite amazing here! Seems like we entered a network of liquid roads passing through an endless forest,” Harden commented.

      “Well, if you could see things from the air in a small plane you wouldn’t say endless,” Ezi interjected. “Liquid roads yes, but endless forests no. For from the air you would get a very different perspective of both the river and the land. Only from a distant height can you actually see the widespread clear-cut destruction of the forest; and also, the history of the rivers, of how they changed courses over time. All the oxbow lakes are a testimony to that. They are like the serpentine river’s shedded snakeskin. And from the air the different color changes of vegetation reveal where the old riverbeds once flowed.”

Pointing out across the river toward the jungle’s tightly wrapped veil, Ezi told them, “Whether they’re cut legally or illegally makes little difference to the trees. For both ways line the profligate pockets of perfidious politicians all the way up to the president. But the Amazon is the largest green stock exchange in the world. Now some cowboy-like carbon credit banks are investing in raw nature. But who can put a price tag on that? And it’s just so that the rich and so-called developed countries can maintain their unsustainable systems of greed and careless exploitation of the planet. Too bad that nature is considered just a commodity and a piece of cake for greedy exploiters and banks to gobble up.”

“Yeah!” Harden commented, “And it seems the poor always pay for the rich in one way or the other.”

“Got that right! But here the people seem to want to cut down every last tree. Go figure! And what do they want? They want to raise cattle, rainforest beef. I call it the curse of the cult of the holy hamburger,” Ezi said with mocking derision. “Such is the result of mankind’s worship of the golden calf and shiny metal objects. Soon we won’t be able to see the forest for the cows. And there are already more cow pastures than forests. If it’s not cows, then it’s endless rows of polluting oil palms. I don’t know which is worse. Yet, cows are worse,” he said answering his own question.

“Though not here in the Amazon, but guess who is responsible for deforesting most of Central America?” Ezi asked.

“You got me. Who?” Perkins questioned.

“USAID.”

“Oh, really! How so?”

“By destroying the co-op systems of land redistribution, which those little isthmian Central American countries had once set up to benefit the poor. Some decades ago, USAID claimed that the co-ops were too socialistic. Just amazing! So, they strangle held the governments of Honduras and others to make it so that the co-ops’ land could be bought and sold. Well, that defeated the whole point and purpose of the co-ops; and allowed them to become like real estate companies. They made it so that after a few years the co-op members could sell the land they cleared for farming. Then they could go apply and get more forested land and clear it too and sell it too. And who would they sell it to except to the rich? Often times they were actually working for them. Then little by little the forest disappeared. Most of that land is now grazing land for the holy hamburger, so that Americans can have cheap Whoppers and Big Macs, all thanks to USAID.”

Taking a sip from his beer Ezi inquisitively asked, “So, I guess you guys must have come here by bus from the coast, eh? “

“Yeah, but we first stopped to see the ruins at Chachapoyas and also the Gacta waterfall. They say it’s the fifth highest in the world.”

“Nice one! That’s a long journey, but worth it. And it’s a beautiful road to Tarapoto and Yurimaguas, eh?”

Having already noticed that Ezi’s legs were all scratched up Perkins pointed and asked, “Well, what happened to your legs, man? Some nasty scratches you got there.”

“Oh, they’re just some souvenirs I got from a landslide along the highway last week. Just before the Jaen junction on Highway 4 our bus was suddenly trapped on the road behind several huge slides. After waiting for a while, but with no hope of passing, many people started walking. We had to cross various slides, to a place where we could get a ride to Jaen. I was walking alone and was separated from everyone. Sometimes it was impossible to tell where things were solid and safe to walk over the slides. Better to follow footprints, but I wavered and paid for it. For at one place, after taking a long step onto the smooth and seemingly solid sand and gravel, my foot sank, as if I had stepped onto water. Right away I sank up to my waste and got stuck. Wow, I’ll tell ya’, for a few seconds I thought I was going to sink more and be swallowed up, eh. The gritty sand pulled my sandals right off my feet when I tried to get out. I was covered in mud from head to toe and lost my eyeglasses too. But I just felt lucky to have survived. I’ll tell ya, the people certainly had a good laugh, when they saw me arrive in Jaen barefoot, tattered and covered in mud.”

“Wow! That’s amazing.” Harden told him. “But to lose your glasses must have been a real drag. We certainly didn’t have any close calls like that, thank God. And you’re right, that is quite a road. Going from desert to lush jungle in so short a distance is remarkable. But not far before Tarapoto, when an old bus traveling at breakneck speed passed ours, all of a sudden it hit a pothole and a luggage door popped opened. We watched as it started vomiting out people’s luggage onto the highway. When hitting the road some pieces broke open and left a trail of everything from clothes, shoes, and what-not scattered along the pavement. We just laughed, but I am sure some bus passengers were later quite pissed-off.”

“Yeah!” Perkins added. “And this was just a few days after we sat in another bus on the coast highway for thirty hours, because the road was closed by a strike.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about it, but passed just a couple days before. There certainly are a lot of strikes closing roads in Peru,” Ezi acknowledged. “And being so corrupt, there’s always something here to protest.”

“For sure the bus company in Lima knew that there was a strike before we left, but the bus left anyways.

They never tell the passengers,” Perkins complained.

“After about four hours we joined some hundreds of buses, trucks, and cars all lined in both directions for miles. On one side of the road was stark desert and on the other irrigated farmland. But having no food the thousands of hungry passengers soon completely denuded the roadside farms of everything they could eat. Even old ladies were walking back to their buses with watermelons, bags of cucumbers, passion fruit, mangoes and whatever they could find. But we refused and went hungry instead. For we felt sorry for those farmers because they lost all their crops in one day to this. They must have felt devastated. But no one seemed to care or think a thing about it. That is what was shocking. They could have taken up a collection and paid the farmer. But no! Seems that the Peruvians have another standard. Yet, I guess they are no different than anyone else. The law of the stomach, I guess. That’s what rules. But all this might not surprise you, as it seems you have been here before.”

Feeling the beer and smoke and happy to speak in his native English, Ezi answered, ”Oh, yeah, I’ve come to Peru and the Amazon many times for decades, but in this part just a few times. I know the area quite well though.”

“Must be different now, I imagine,” Perkins noted.

Oh yeah, it’s tamer here now, but there are still dangers. Pointing upriver, Ezi said professor-like, “Further up the Huallaga Valley are the world’s largest area of coca plantations. Take my advice, if you go there, then you will either be considered a cocaine buyer, a DEA agent, or both. Cocaine has ruined Peru and Colombia even more. I have absolutely nothing against coca, as it is beneficial; but when hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, acetone and lots of other poison chemicals get mixed in, then it is a recipe for disaster. Like they say about crack: “One hit is too much and a thousand is not enough.”

“But not far up the Huallaga past Yurimaguas is the Pongo de Aguirre, the Rapids of Aguirre, named after the misanthropic Lope de Aguirre. Perhaps you’ve seen the old Werner Herzog’s movie ‘Aguirre the Wrath of God.’ Well, that is where Lope, ‘the wrath of God’, as he referred to himself, started his murderous journey and mutinied and took control of the second Spanish expedition by river into the Amazon. That was almost twenty years after Gonzalo Pizarro’s ‘Cinnamon expedition,’ when Francisco Orellana unwittingly was the first to journey down the Coco and Amazon Rivers to the ocean. But the ‘Wrath of God,’ left an indelible footprint of terror. Despite his insanity, he was the first Spaniard in the New World to revolt against King Felipe of Spain. Aguirre’s lese majesty audaciously claimed that the king had no authority to reign over the New World, seeing that he had never even set foot there. He even sent the king an upbraiding letter telling him such. Then he audaciously signed it, ‘The Traitor.’ His few dozen men army called themselves ‘the Maranones’ and had a black flag dotted with red daggers. Imagine! How would you like to pledge allegiance to that?”

“Sounds like a precursor to ISIL,” Perkins jokingly commented.