Crossing the Valley

 

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to experiment once again with the obscure frog poison elixir known here as ‘sapo,’ which means ‘toad’ in Spanish, and which is a neurotoxin produced by phyllomedusa bicolor, the giant leaf frog of the upper Amazon.

Sometimes also known as the monkey frog or even the giant waxy monkey tree frog… there´s got to be an indie rock band name in there somewhere.

Erowid´s page on the frog,

 http://www.erowid.org/archive/sonoran_desert_toad/bicolor.htm

is perfectly succinct:

“Known for skin secretions loaded with biologically active peptides. The Matses and Mayoruna tribes employ Phyllomedusa bicolor secretions applied to self inflicted skin burns to produce an agonizing attack of diarrhea, vomiting, tachycardia and systemic collapse, that is followed by a state of hyper-acuity of the senses attended by abundant energy and stamina without need for food or drink. Among other components, it contains dermorphin and deltorphin, peptides with analgesic properties 2000 times more potent than morphine at the cerebral level.”

Ah, that old systemic collapse. Good times.

The sapo toxin is excreted by the frog to defend against predators, and it has a long traditional usage among the Matses/Mayoruna Indians as an aid to concentration and focus while hunting, as well as an immune system booster and general health tonic.

The definitive story about sapo has already been written long ago by Peter Gorman, a writer whose career is distinguished in part by being the first to introduce sapo to gringos. I mention this because lots of people dream about making some Indiana Jones-style contribution to the canon of western science, but Peter actually did it. No one had heard about sapo before he wrote about it and took some samples back to the States, so all credit where it is due. He’s written about it again just recently:

thegormanblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/sapo-with-marco.html

Peter was here for Alan Shoemaker’s shamanism conference back in July, in fact, handing out free samples of sapo to anyone bold enough to dare, which I thought was awesome and hilarious … he was just handing out the doses, in the middle of the conference, as casually as a street vendor—sapo here, fresh sapo, get your systemic collapse while it´s hot!

Apart from Gorman, the only local source for sapo that I know of comes from a guy I’ll call Chupo, who is familiar to anyone who has read the book “Trail of Feathers.” He’s a half-mad Vietnam vet and premium-quality jungle guide who used to make a pretty good living running tourists up to a Matses village where they could do sapo in an indigenous setting.

Chupo sells sticks of sapo on a retail basis as well, and he says he gives half the profits back to the Matses, which is great. He was a neighbor of mine until recently, and he invited me to drop by and pick up a couple sticks of sapo (it is stored on wooden sticks, where the dried resin is preserved indefinitely until you rehydrate it) in compensation for some sticks he sold me awhile back that turned out to be inactive. I took them back to the States, and burned two of my friends’ arms before we all discovered it was a bad batch… that can happen when you harvest the sapo improperly. I felt bad about this, and so did Chupo, so he gave me two very active sticks he´d gotten from the Matses, and I promptly mailed one back to my friends in the States so they could finally get the full experience.

Chupo’s been in fine spirits lately, when I see him in town. After all these long-suffering years, he finally hooked into his PTSD gubmint money from Nam. Which he totally deserves, I will add, regardless of how many bronze stars he may have. Also, he may or may not have been photographed in the jungle with a heretofore-unknown wild canine: 

http://dawnontheamazon.com/blog/2007/11/16/is-richard-auckoo-fowler-the-iquitos-scoundrel/

Anyhoo, I finally got around to visiting Chupo at home, when he was awake and receiving visitors, and I found him rich with sapo sticks and happy to share. He also showed me his new Glock, which he carries in a shoulder holster, apparently at all times. He boasted about the chemical and biological weapons he keeps in the house, as his teenagers did their math homework in the next room. I was amused to see that Chupo had wrapped the sapo sticks in scrap paper from his kids’ homework assignments—graph paper covered with algebraic equations.

The full algebra of sapo´s chemical interactions with the brain are still being unraveled. All indications suggest it could be the basis for a whole new class of super-immune-boosting pharmaceuticals. What is known for sure is that sapo is completely bioactive, which is pretty cool—it basically means your brain has specific receptor sites for each of sapo´s 140 or so protein compounds.

Administering it is a simple cut-and-paste affair: burn your arm with a cigarette ember, wait a couple minutes, and then peel back the top layer of skin. Paste the rehydrated sapo resin directly into your bloodstream. Then lay back and get froggy.

And how does that feel, exactly? Well, I sampled Chupo’s sticks myself this time, before giving it to anyone else. I dosed myself early Sunday morning before I’d had anything to eat or drink. And what happens is this: you start to sweat profusely, and your limbs get weak. Your mouth tastes like a battery. Adrenaline begins to bubble up like pure crude from the deep. You double over and hold your head in your hands. I was contemplating a full floor collapse at one point, but opted instead to cling to the sink for dear life.

Air raid, sirens, panic. Bombs. Everybody get down. Your skin flushes bright red, and then you feel the greatest adrenaline rush you’ve ever felt in your life, just like that time that you thought you might die, only worse. Your head buzzes with it and then explodes into fireworks. You split your useless skin and find yourself helpless and holy-crap incontinent, flopping on the deck like a gaffed gamefish for ten minutes or so. Then you clean yourself off, stand up and reel it back in, pull it all back together.

And not just together, but super-together! Your thoughts course with the clarity of a mountain spring. You scan the forest as though peering into the inner nature of all living things. You detect every single raindrop of sense impression that falls upon the vast ocean of your new awareness.  The effect can last for days.

But you pay your dues when you deal with sapo, and you pay them all up front. After all the flushed sickening sweat, the world-dissolving queasiness, the imminent flopping collapse and the possible puking and shitting that follows, (for me it is always bright yellow stomach bile that comes up) and watching in despair as your internal compass rolls and pitches under mayday conditions… after all this, your senses recover double to the hardship endured, and you spend the rest of the day with your sight and smell and hearing dialed in as sharp as a jaguar.

This is why the Matses use it for hunting, to hone their concentration and reaction time. Reduced hunger and fatigue make it the perfect companion for extended hunting trips. It gets you in touch with the larger rhythms of the jungle, such that you perceive all things, for a time, on a grander and more interconnected scale.

Armchair psychonauts, take note. Here Nature has produced a most powerful tonic to suit a specific evolutionary purpose. To feel it for yourself requires a fair measure of suffering on your part. Not everyone’s willing to dose themselves with frog poison to experience some next-level mental clarity. In fact, the first time I did it, the shaman who administered it didn´t even tell me what it was about to do to me. That was just as well. Sometimes you have to cross the valley before you get to the mountaintop.

The real purpose of sapo, where the frog is concerned, is to flash-shock a snake with a neurochemical bomb in order to freeze it for the moment or two the frog needs to escape the jaws of certain death. It’s an elegant niche, in which evolution (and by proxy God, The Architect, if yer so inclined, as I am) has designed one of the most peculiar and intriguing concoctions in all the wide world. 

A couple of weeks ago I met a guy here from Raleigh NC, here studying the poison dart frogs of the tropical rainforest. He was obviously curious to try sapo, as was the Gulf oil platform worker on his first vacation in over a decade, who was staying with my friend La Gringa– an old-school firecracker from a place in rural Mississippi far enough back from the tracks that you can’t hear the train.

Among this motley crew, everybody wanted to try sapo, so the stage was set. I went over to La Gringa’s house on a pleasant Sunday after my own harrowing trial, my friend the Frogman in tow, to find that she and the Oilman had been partying pretty hard the night before.

No matter. Frogman went first, I burnt his arm with a cigarette, and pasted the frog sweat on him. Within a minute his skin was flushed. He started sweating profusely, and he doubled over and was very quiet for ten minutes or so before he started to come out of it. The Oilman went next, and he had the same effect, only milder. I could have given him a higher dose, in fact.

Then I gave it to La Gringa. Like the others, she started to sweat, and doubled over as she held her face in her hands. But unlike the others, she didn’t bounce back. She got sicker and sicker, almost puking but not quite, and then she retired to the toilet where she camped out for the next half hour. After that she collapsed in bed and remained immobile for several hours more. I checked on her from time to time to make sure she was still breathing.

Oh dear. I felt terrible about that. Later it emerged that she’d been partying pretty hard, if ya know what I mean, and it’s probably not good to shock the system with such a high-grade cleanser as sapo, until the body has a chance to detox itself in its own time… but by the time we learned this, La Gringa had gotten good and sick. And I mean ugly sick—scary sick. She swears she will never do sapo again, and I can’t hardly blame her. 

Sapo really is a crazy experience. Because it is so bioactive, it’s not dangerous, though it certainly seems so at the time. Here in Iquitos it’s more like some kind of machismo test. Well, not machismo exactly, but more like, if you see those little round burn marks on someone’s upper arm, you can be fairly sure they’re the type of person who is going to be up for just about anything.

The Fine Art of the Jungle Giraffe

It’s a sweltering Thursday, just hotter’n hell. I finally broke down and installed an air conditioner. Most homes here don’t have AC, it’s considered a non-essential indulgence and a luxury for gringos who fret about spoiling in the heat. Although once you buy the unit, the actual cost in electricity to run it is only 1 sole (35 cents) per hour. At least, that’s according to El Lobo’s calculations, and he’s German, so I trust his math.

Yeah, just sitting here thinking back on a funny conversation I had recently with Moe Dean, the godfather of tourism in Iquitos, who has been here for almost fifty years. The first time I met him, I asked him to name the all-time greatest con men in Iquitos, and I actually knew most of the people he mentioned. But there is one guy I’ve never met, who I’ll call Guzman, a Peruvian who belongs on the all-star list in the annals of Amazonian con artistry.

I’m pretty sure this is the same guy who was featured in a book called Trail of Feathers, which includes several local eccentrics in fact. In this book, the author visits Iquitos and hires Guzman to be his personal guide upriver in search of a shaman. The guy buys all the material, and when they get everything loaded on the boat, the author finds that Guzman has brought along his fourteen year old cousin to make the trip with them. The author wonders what the boy is doing there, but since he isn’t paying any extra money, he doesn’t question it too much. But then right before the boat leaves port, the author remembers something and goes to ask Guzman about it—upon opening Guzman’s cabin door, he finds Guzman and his ‘cousin’ naked and fooling around!

Naturally, Guzman and his pegboy both lost their jobs, and the trip was postponed. Anyway, the connection here is that Guzman worked for Moe Dean for several years and learned the tourist trade through him. So when I related this story from the book, and got to the pedophilia-flavored punchline, Moe laughed in a funny way and said something to the effect of, ‘yeah, that sounds like him. That’s Iquitos for you.’

Later, after Moe left, Captain Bob came over and gave me the rest of the story, Leaning in close, he said, “you know, I didn’t want to say anything at the time about that story you told, but Moe, he’s known to enjoy a taste for younger boys as well. Just thought you might appreciate knowing that.”

I did appreciate it. It makes the punchline infinitely funnier when you think of how it must have sounded to him. Granted there is nothing funny about pedophilia, that’s not where I’m going at all with this, it’s just that here in the Amazon it has long been tolerated under certain circumstances, mainly when money is changing hands. And according to Captain Bob, who knows a lot of stories about a lot of people, Moe lived a princely life in Iquitos for a long time. He started several successful tour companies, back before Iquitos was listed on Lonely Planet’s top 10 list of cities to visit, and back before there were hardly any other gringos in Iquitos. He had a big house with a pool, which he stocked with a fleet of under-ripe cabana boys. You’d go to visit him and he’d be lounging in a deck chair under an umbrella, snapping his fingers at the nearest boy to bring him another drink.

It’s not like that anymore– there are rules now, and what’s more, they are enforced. And that’s a good thing. As I said, this has been an issue in Iquitos for quite awhile now, really as long as there have been gringos coming here. May-December romances are still very common here. I’m talking about more like March-December, for those with a taste for the first green buds of spring. For a long time families and authorities turned a blind eye to underage liaisons, in any combination of age and sex, mainly because the kids and especially the families of the kids were getting paid to keep quiet about it. In effect, these families were prostituting out their own sons and daughters, and that is just creepy and sad in so many ways. So now there are big, obvious signs in the most public places, reminding you that sex with children isn’t cool, and you will go to jail if you do it. The fact that they had to put up public service announcements about this issue on the main thoroughfares just shows you what a problem it became over the years.

As recently as a decade ago, on the Malacon, the city’s main promenade overlooking the river, there was a lot more action to be had even among consenting adults. My friends who lived here then told me it was just a crazy scene, man, a scene where bored babymamas and housewives stepped out when their men were away, and sold their goods in public like regular working girls. To me, when you look at the whole dynamic of jungle economics, there’s nothing that shocking about a woman (or a man) making a little extra cash by doing something they were probably going to do anyway. But it’s funny to think that during those times even a lot of the locals couldn’t be sure, on a Saturday night, who was a real prostitute and who was just freelancing for kicks and a little extra cash.

As for Moe, well it hasn’t been all plebian poolside service and umbrella drinks. Iquitos is a boom and bust kind of a town, and he’s been through his ups and downs in almost half a century here. He still owes money to a lot of people who consider him friends, and he’s getting to the age where it looks like it might never be paid back. At one point a few years ago, he owed money to a group of Peruvians, and they got tired of waiting. Moe lives in a house overlooking the river, and one afternoon he looked down to see a group of men stealing his boat. They cut the chain, fired up the motor and ferried her out to the middle of the river, where a group of smaller boats converged from all sides. He watched from his deck as these boats methodically looted his vessel from stem to stern, and after the others had departed from where they came, the thieves moored her to a concrete post and left her there, locked in even stouter chains, so she could not be easily stolen back.

Later, Moe identified these guys, and took them to court, and he won the case. But he still owed them money. If you ask me, that’s almost justice.

But anyway. Back to Guzman. One story Moe told me really puts him in a different class of pendejo, at least for my money. It goes something like this. A gringo tourist came into the office and wanted to sign up for a week’s stay at their jungle lodge.

“I’d like to spend some time in the jungle, but I’ve never done anything like this before,” the tourist said. “I’d especially like to see the giraffes.”

“My dear lady,” Guzman replied without missing a beat, “you are in luck. We are the only tour operators in Iquitos that feature exclusive giraffe tours. The jungle giraffes of the upper Amazon are a sight not to be missed.”

“Oh how wonderful!” the tourist said. “Where do I sign?” After the paperwork was done and money had changed hands, she thanked him again for his time and complimented him on his English. “Enjoy the lodge, and the giraffes,” Guzman said. “Oh, hold on, wait a minute, It’s August, isn’t it! Oh dear. I just remembered. This is mating season for the giraffes. They might be further up from the river, in their mating territory. But no worry. Just ask the lodge manager, when you get there, about the giraffe tour, he’ll know more about it. Have fun!”

I love that anecdote, the way his bullshit effortlessly shifts gears on the fly, and especially the way that he pins the responsibility for dealing with his deception on the poor lodge manager. But Guzman was a brilliant con artist. The kind of guy who got away with scams again and again. I’m told he was a genius with languages, and though he never graduated high school, taught himself English, German, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and Japanese, among other languages. The type of guy that only had to hear something once to remember it forever. That’s a very dangerous quality in a con man. He did quite well for himself in Lima for a time, where he ran a series of successful cons in the sushi joints and karaoke bars of Miraflores as one Mr. Soto, the wealthy Japanese businessman.

And he’s out there somewhere still, helping to keep the population of suckers in check.