A Toast to Inefficiency

Today I’m making a toast to unplanned events, unhappy accidents, bad luck and everything that doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. I raise my glass with a wince trying to be a smile, lest this blog devolve into a catalogue of frustrations… as I find myself whinging and kvetching more and more about the problems of living at the edge of the developed world—the corruption, dysfunction, the petty theft and con artistry, the whole brokedown, coulda-been, day-late, dollar-short, not-quite-right nature of the place– out here on the frontier where the amenities of modern life and more ancient ways of living glance at each other like strangers from across a wide river.

Iquitos is the kind of place where an internet café sits two blocks from a slum of patchwork houses lucky to have walls, whose outhouses empty straight into the river. Where a 12-ounce bottle of water in a bodega costs more than the five gallon jug next door. Where organic, all-natural foods from the jungle are cheap and plentiful, and processed foods of minimal quality are twice the price.

The kind of place where there’s rarely a safety net in place when things break down. And brother, so they ever break down. If it’s going to go wrong, it’s going to go disastrously, exquisitely, explosively wrong in a way that never even occurred to you as a possibility. Things fall apart here, by design; a slow continuous trickle of creative destruction that saturates everything. The law of the jungle is entropy.

I have learned this the hard way, over and over again. I’ve been humbled by my many failed attempts to try and make my environment conform to western standards of efficiency. These days, when I am running a simple errand or attempting to the navigate bureaucratic back-channels or just trying to keep one simple task from consuming an entire day, I have to stop and ask myself, “ok, how could this scenario possible get screwed up? What is the factor that will make this all go pear-shaped, which I can’t anticipate?” And of course, I never anticipate it, and then it happens, and it’s always something that you just couldn’t predict.

The more important the task at hand, the bigger and more grandiose will be the system failure. After my epic, months-long saga of bitterness and acrimony trying to get an Amazon Kindle shipped to (ahem) the Amazon, my skin got a bit thicker.  By the time it was over, I was worn down to a jaded, quivering nub of a consumer by the whole ordeal, and I vowed never to take system failure personally, ever again… for that way lies madness!

By system failure, I mean simply that you expect any given system, say any government institution, the Post Office for example, or the whole supply chain of international shipping for that matter, to function properly.  In the Western world, these things work correctly because if they don’t, there are consequences. Here, not so much.  So I’ve learned to appreciate when things actually work as they are supposed to, and be grateful for my luck. This, more than any other factor, is what is going to keep a place like Iquitos from ever being invaded by the expat hordes whose colonies are well-established elsewhere in Peru. It’s been said that the upper Amazon was never conquered, not by the invading Incas, or the Spanish conquistadors. It’s certainly not about to be conquered by modern standards of efficiency and productivity either. Even now, the community is expatriates here is very small, for a city of nearly half a million. I just don’t see most people having the patience to willingly accept this level of systemic dysfunction. Hell, I can barely tolerate it myself.

So, on to some examples.

A guest at the hostel wanted a beer from the hostel’s bar at lunchtime. I had no beer in stock; the Brahma distributor had come the day before to explain that they had none in their warehouse. Some problem with the launcha bringing it upriver from Brazil, a supply chain breakdown leaving them with no sodas or water or any other beverages for weeks now. To be fair, most businesses depend on the boats arriving on time. Last year, when the water was near a record low, the big launchas couldn’t even make it that far into port, and there was a run on all kinds of goods, from beer to vegetables to gasoline.

Anyway. The store next to the hostel sells Brahma, so I walk over and order a case, already cold, for 35 soles. But it isn’t cold. The beer was in the Brahma fridge provided by the distributor, but the fridge broke down the previous day. Well, she says, it’s still a little cold. It still has some coolness left. That’s what she tells me, by way of explaining why it was OK for her to charge more. No deal, I say. She laughs, because she doesn’t care either way, she’s just trying to get an extra few coins out of me. So she charges me 33 instead, and I pay her, and she goes into the back to look for change. She is gone a long time. I make idle smalltalk with her 5 year old grand-daughter. Soon we run out of things to talk about, and we just stare at each other. The lady comes back and says she doesn’t have change, she has to go across the street. Nobody ever has change for anything in Iquitos. I wait for her to come back. She is gone a long time. Finally I go back to the hostel to tell the guest why his beer is taking so long. We talk a for a few minutes and then I go back next door. The lady has closed her store for siesta. And she has gone out, because no one answers the door. I go back and explain to the guest that the beer is not forthcoming. He has already finished lunch, it is too late. I go across the street to the other bodega and buy a proper cold beer, a Pilsen. I would have bought Pilsen in the first place except Brahma was the one who sponsored the hostel and gave us the fridge and glasses. The Pilsen is not for the guest, it’s for me. I need to cool down. My neighbor has wasted my time and when I call her out on it later she just laughs and says, what’s the big deal?

Chillum, early in his own learning curve for doing business in Peru, bought some land and wanted to install a well. He hired a guy who talked such a good game that Chillum planned to employ him as foreman for all his future construction plans. He should have been tipped off, for one thing, that the guy’s name was Mata. That means Kill. If you have a foreman named Kill, that’s a sign something might go wrong. And indeed things went sideways in a hurry. Mata quoted Chillum a price of 2,000 soles to drill a well. They hire a crew, and when work commenced, Mata starts bragging to his crew how much money he is going to milk out of the gringo. Just wait, he said, this is only the beginning. The drilling crew knew very well that Mata was charging more than double the actual price. Mata had already taken eight hundred soles from Chillum to buy supplies and then pocketed it, presenting no receipts. When the worker (to his great credit) pointed out that it would be easy for Chillum to discover how much he was being overcharged, Mata’s response was to threaten them and their families if they said anything to the gringo. His name, after all, is Mata. Later, this same worker went to Chillum and told him the whole story (to his great and lasting credit). Chillum went to Mata’s house, confronted him until he admitted guilt, and then fired him. Then he hired, you know, actual professionals to drill the well, for the actual price, and they did.  He never got the eight hundred soles back from Mata. So it cost him twice as much and took twice as long, but he got it done.

Just this past week one of my guests was robbed on her way to the airport. Opportunity makes the thief, and there’s little question of the opportunity here. My motorcar driver was taking two guests to the airport when one of the bags fell off the back. The other got stuck in the wheel. This is the most basic mistake a motorcar driver can make, not to secure the luggage correctly, and in this case it had a disastrous consequence. He had to stop at a busy intersection and run back to recover the bad from the middle of the road. There was the accidental distraction; the moment of opportunity. No one saw anything. But by the time the other bag was removed from where it was stuck, the iphone inside was missing. Either my motorcar driver is a thief, or he is incompetent. Either way, it does not reflect well on the hostel… the woman came back in a panic, rifled through her bags (again) and the room where she had been staying. She was in that stage of denial where you lose something and you compulsively check your bags over and over, even though you know it’s not there. The scent of it was still that fresh.

And that’s when I watched this woman come totally unglued. She just completely lost it. I know how it feels to be robbed of one’s iphone, it’s happened to me too. It’s very unsettling, to be so reliant on a device to connect you to the world, and then have it taken from you. But again, like Slim Jack, it’s the universe giving you a little nudge as a warning, before it shoves you over a cliff. It’s a way of telling you not to be too dependent on technology, that life will go on with or without Apple products. I watched her go through the early stages of withdrawal, like a junkie strapped to a gurney. She just couldn’t deal. But in time maybe this too will turn out to be a useful lesson.

She left again for the airport, in tears. I felt terrible for her. But on that particular day I had terrible food poisoning, and I was managing a full hostel, and I had just gotten a call from the guide at Tapiche lodge asking for replacement parts for their chainsaw, and could I send them tomorrow. I had my own problems to deal with.

I dragged my ass out of bed and went down to the Husqvarna store. It was closed. I went back later, after siesta, and they didn’t have the parts. Try our main warehouse, they said. So I went over there, they had two of the three parts I needed. For the third, they said, try the repair houses by the Mercado de Productores. As I left, the kickstand on the motorbike broke and was dragging in the street. They supervisor said, bring it back in, we’ll fix it, you just have to go and buy these replacement parts. I do that, and I return quickly only to wait around and eventually they repair it. Finally I get to the off-brand repair shops, and the guy there pulls out the Husqvarna manual, and I help him paw through all the boxes in the storage room, until we find the part, and compare it to the one in the manual. Not compatible. All for nothing. I have just enough time left to run down to the offices of the boat and deliver the package before they close.

And so this simple errand consumed most of my afternoon, as I watched circumstances beyond my control lay waste to yet another passal of hours in my life that I’ll never get back, and I never even got to know them.  It’s then that I realize the true nature of freedom. Freedom is when you have control over your own schedule. And not just control, but the means to overcome any boundaries that fall in your path. When you can plan out your day and then live it, like you planned it, despite the constant external chaos that is always mucking up the works, you have transcended the chains of ordinary life. How few can say that about their lives. And yet this kind of transcendence seems to be, more than anything, a state of mind.

Maybe I’ll get there someday. In the meantime I suppose I will have to make my peace with all the unnecessary nonsense that is surely laying in wait around the next corner.

Salud!

The Dog-gone Parade

People ask my why I moved to Iquitos. The answer is simple. It’s because Iquitos, for all its headaches and hassles, is never boring. It’s vivid. Too-goddam-vivid, as Tom Robbins would say, and there’s something about this city in particular, this place, that is completely unique. I chose it because I always wanted to live as an expatriate for one chapter of my life, in a wild, edgy, liminal kind of place. A place where life would feel like an adventure again, where a person could limn the edges of each living day with exquisite crispness.

After spending years in an office, I used to joke with people that I wanted to be released back into the wild. That really is why I moved here, so that I could lead a more interesting life, and indeed I have been released, into horrible, horrible freedom!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnPGDWD_oLE

I mean freedom in the most grand and expansive sense, true freedom in which a person understands that they are ultimately sufficient to stand or free to fall, as Milton put it in Paradise Lost.

I was going to use that observation to launch into a profound and witty examination of organized religion, and how it fills an existential and universal void in the human psyche that relieves us of the burden of not needing to have answers for everything, and gives people the comfort of knowing that we are not, collectively, alone in the universe; how the heaviness of that knowledge would be just too much for many people to bear. But it turns out that I don’t have that kind of pontificating in me anymore, if I ever did.

I have, however, been often impressed with the more aggressively proselytizing and pontificating churches that have gained footholds in rural Amazonia, because if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere! The logistics of the upper Amazon have historically foiled all but the most dedicated God squads: I’m talking about the Mormons, the Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You all get gold stars!

Because your churches are everywhere here. And, by most accounts, your presence here is largely a good thing, a civilizing impulse, a sense of structure and order for people who (arguably, and I would argue so) need some structure and some rules to improve their lot in life.

All of these successfully prospecting/interloping religions, by the way, got their start in the Burned Over District of upstate New York in the early 19^th century, during a period called the Second Great Awakening, for those of you who know the history, and for those who don’t, here’s ye some wiki-knowledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_Over_District

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have some 7 million members worldwide today, owe their existence to Charles Taze Russell, who led an Adventist-oriented church in the 1870’s and openly acknowledged his church’s debt to the Adventists and the Millerite movement, especially in the early days.

And strange it is, to contemplate how very far indeed these movements have come, the improbable arc they trace from their origins in early 19^th century rural American farming communities to the rural Amazonian farming communities of the 21st century. Made in America, but exported all over the world. Who would have imagined that the residue of all that religious fervor from two centuries ago would still be playing itself out in the hinterlands of civilization, all these years later. Reminds me of a joke my college Buddhism professor once told me. What’s the difference between a cult and a religion? About a million members.

The Mormons churches here, appropriately, are all exactly identical. It’s like they use the same architect’s plans, over and over. and I am told they are modeled on identical versions in the States as well. They are all neatly gated compounds with brick meeting halls, outbuildings, and a recreational space consisting of a paved basketball court and, if space permits, a grassy area for playing soccer. These basketball courts are really nice, incidentally, and no one ever uses them. These places are always empty, whenever I see them. Which is often. There’s a Mormon compound just down the road from my house, and I’ve frequently been tempted to present myself as a potential convert to be added to the roll-call, just so I can go shoot some hoops on a quality asphalt court from time to time. Oy, do the Mormons know from detail! Their basketball hoops all have shiny white nets. Try finding that in a public park, heathens!

Because the thing is, the Mormons have Money. They have it in gigantic tithing heaps, and they spend it happily in places like this, to establish a presence, and it shows; they have the nicest churches in town, short of the Catholics of course, who enjoy a tremendous historical/cultural advantage. They have the resources to offer something for everyone. The Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have such nice churches, but there seem to be many more of them. You’ll find these humble little churches even in the deepest wilderness, in the most rural and poverty-stricken places you can imagine. You have to have some pretty dedicated missionaries to do that kind of work.

I can’t even count the number of times I have traveled up and down the isolated rivers and tributaries of the Amazon, to places so remote I was sure no gringo had been there for years, only to find an Adventist church right in the heart of the community. This ‘church’ is often just a wooden platform on stilts, with wood slats you can see right through. But it’s there, and there’s someone in every community to lead the flock.

That’s kind of a beautiful thing, I think. I mean, personally, for me, I believe in God, but not so much in religion. I think that all who kneel and pray do so imperfectly, because we are imperfect beings, all praying to the same God. In a more perfect world, we might be able to admit to our ideological enemies that there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Geez… the point of all this was not to get quagmired in some kind of discourse on religious dogma, and all that, I just wanted to observe how much the evangelicals have had an impact on the culture here. Last Saturday, for example, there was a huge Jehovah’s Witness parade organized to march right down the main street of the city. I was trying to run errands at the time, and I saw them in the distance down the street. The floats, the chanting, the balloons and motivational posters and banners and drums . . . effectively shutting down all traffic downtown. I tried to race along the Malecon, by the river, to beat the parade before it crossed the Plaza, but I was too late. I would have to wait. So I parked my bike and got off to watch.

This parade numbered in the thousands and thousands. There was song and dance and chanting and rejoicing, and though it literally rained on their parade, the people were all smiles and it was hard not to smile along with them.

As I watched these steaming masses of Jehovah’s Witnesses stream by, in a parade that lasted a good half hour or more, I could not help but think of the Great Disappointment of 1844. That was when William Miller encouraged all his Millerites, as they were known then, to sell their houses and possessions, and go up onto a hill in upstate New York on October 22, 1844, to await the literal return of Christ in the night skies. They waited all night. I suppose you can guess how that one turned out.

But the amazing this is, that wasn’t the end of the religion. For my money, that would have been a deal-killer. But while many people left the fold after that, not all of them did, and the movement eventually recovered and continued to grow, even outlasting its founder, which is a key difference between cults and religions, for people who study this sort of thing.

So I was standing there in the doorway of the mini-mart, looking at all the smiling faces of these locals, simple jungle folk for the most part, illuminated with the Spirit and so happy to be representing it in public, when that misanthropic skeptic within me (which so often is also the voice of reason in these situations,) said, “how many of these people would have been so happy, had they been there on that hilltop the next morning in 1844, and having sold everything they owned? How much faith would they have then?”

But I said to that inner skeptic, let the Latter-Day-Millerites have their parade. Who cares if it’s basically a cult made good. Look how happy they are. There’s nothing wrong with it.

And my little bitter inner skeptic voice replied, that’s true enough. But anyone who bothers to read the actual history can plainly see it for what it is: a man-made phenomena, entirely.

Having read the actual history, I can’t argue with my little voice. He’s right.

A new report shows that “One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.”  That really made me stop and think. A third of all adults under thirty, that’s . . . trending on its way to become a majority in the not too distant future. Maybe that’s for the best as well. Who can say?

All who pray, do so imperfectly, as we cannot know fully until we are fully known. Those who do not, probably do not spend much time worrying about what’s on the other side of life as we know it. But in the meantime, which is apparently all of human history to date, I won’t be among those who say that bowing to pray is a waste of time. I don’t believe it is. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, said Ovid. Everything changes, but nothing is wasted.

Go ahead and have your parades in the rain; go ahead and sell all your stuff and go up on the hillside at night on the advice of an overzealous preacher and wait for a man-god to come flying out of the starry sky to save humanity, if you think that will serve you well.

Whatever gets you through the night, eh?

Ah, one more thing. I remember why I started writing this post in the first place. It wasn’t about religion at all. It was because there were in fact two parades planned that day, and the other parade was in support of an NGO here which uses donations to run a subsidized veterinary clinic and services for abandoned animals in Iquitos, mainly dogs and cats. They’re a great organization and they do a lot of good. And they had planned a dog parade (because a cat parade would be logistically challenging, I imagine) and all the dogs gathered in the Plaza and they started out and lo and behold, here comes the other parade, with too much momentum to stop either one, and they cut right into the middle of the dog parade and dogs scatter everywhere and it’s total canine chaos in the streets of Iquitos!

I just love that image, it sums up so much of the character of this place. By contrast, in modern cities you have to apply for parade permits months in advance, and everything is controlled and choreographed, whereas in Iquitos, there are two parades planned on the same day and, so of course, they collide.

Because it’s Iquitos, and there’s no plan for when this kind of simple and preventable mistake happens, which it inevitably will, when you live in the developing world. Got a parade? Enjoy the rain. What, a God parade and a dog parade on the same day? Well then, tough palindromes for you buddy, they’re inevitably going to collide head on. It’s like a law of jungle physics or something. That’s just how things go here, God bless ‘em.

Memory, Trauma, and the Burden of Freedom

There’s this incident that happened recently, and for days I’ve been kicking around how to write about it. It involved a guest at the hostel, and his efforts to get right in the head, doing so in a forthright way that I found admirable. I tried to help him. In the end, it all fell apart . . . I can map it both as comedy and tragedy, particularly the latter, but I’ve struggled with how to get a handle on it. So the best way may be just to spit it out like it happened, without a lot of editorializing. Here goes.

We had a guest here at the hostel a few weeks ago. He had been staying in the jungle at a medicinal plant retreat center, the kind that are so popular here, but it hadn’t worked out. When I answered the door at the hostel, I found before me a very large, bald, heavily bearded dude. He was probably mid-forties and graying. He wore leather gloves and combat boots, unusual in this hot climate. He looked like an outlaw biker type. Except that he had kind eyes and a big smile on his face.

I’ll call him Edgar. He was an Aussie, ex-military, a traveler.  Expertly trained in a particularly esoteric strain of Egyptology. My first encounter with him made a big impression on me. He was a talker, to be sure, but also a listener.  I rented him a private room, and five minutes later he came downstairs and said he had a feeling that if he didn’t book it for two weeks right then, another group would come along and he would lose it, so he paid two weeks in advance on the spot.

We sat out under the maloca and had a chat. He was ex-military in the Australian army, released on full medical pension for life. He never did say what for. He told me about his time in Thailand, where he had a long-distance girlfriend he was still in touch with. And he told me about his life as a teacher. He had two disciplines–the strain of Egyptology, taught to him by a Russian master, and for which he worked as a private tutor online for paying students; and also with a mode of psychological inquiry that he referred to as reverse thinking, in which you rewind your own short-term thought patterns as they unfold in order to reveal the hidden undercurrents of subconscious meaning beneath. I didn’t really get a firm grasp of either modalities from his descriptions, but they sounded interesting.

He said a little about his experiences before Peru. He had been in Thailand, pursuing life and love, and one day he had gone into a temple. He had been sitting there paying his respects to the powers that be, when he saw an animal transform into another thing. Before his waking eyes, in full sobriety, in complete comprehension of the moment. He said a presence came into the temple then. “Something happened in that temple in Thailand,” he said, “and I haven’t been the same since then. And I came to Peru, to work with the plant medicine, because I am still trying to find out what happened.”

He also showed me the pills he was taking to mitigate his condition, which was frontal lobe epilepsy. We split a beer, and he said he had to be careful because the pills greatly amplified the effects of alcohol, and man he wasn’t kidding. After half a beer, I had to show him to his room. His short-term memory capacity was showing itself to be pretty limited. But he seemed to know it, and acknowledge it, and I respected the openness and honesty with which he revealed it.

Over the next few days, Edgar and I had many interesting conversations. He was clearly a very intelligent guy. One thing that amused me about him was that he was adamantly pro-meat. In a city where legions of fussy, skinny hippies and trustafarians go on and on about their diets, abstaining from this and that in some effort aimed at spiritual self-improvement, Edgar was delightfully old-school. He needed his red meat, every day, served with cheese or some other form of dairy, ideally for breakfast.  I took him to the market and showed him the best places to buy the raw cow he craved, fresh from the butcher’s knife. I showed him the spot in the shadow of the justice palace where the señoras gathered in the early evening, in the plaza just a block from the hostel, to sell fresh cheese and raw cow’s milk brought in from farms along the carretera.

When our other guests were having fruit and tea for breakfast, Edgar would be in the kitchen frying up a huge slab of beef and eggs and cheese, and he would bring this heaping, steaming mass of protein out to the dining table and devour the whole thing with great relish. It was hilarious. The whole place smelled of meat when he was done, and he was totally unapologetic. He pretty much openly mocked the delicate fancy pants of the frugivores. I loved that about him. He was like a modern-day Viking.

Of course, he stank pretty bad with body odor, from eating all that red meat, but he seemed ok with it, and none of the other guests complained.  Edgar was utterly convinced that the red meat diet was integral to keeping his mental state in balance, and I wasn’t about to argue. I loves me some raw red steak too, from time to time.

Just for kicks, I made a point to introduce him to Chillum, and to be present for the conversation. Chillum, as readers of this blog may know, runs a diet and nutrition-focused retreat center out in the jungle, and is rightly regarded as an expert in healing through Ayurvedic principles of observing a rigid and restrained diet.  He is a champion of superfoods and regularly does extended diets where he eats only raw foods. He is, in short, Edgar’s polar opposite.

I introduced them at Captain Bill’s café, and the resulting exchange was classic. Edgar made an eloquent and medically specific case for why he needed to consume large amounts of red meat on a regular basis. Chillum countered by proferring that new, unexplored levels of awareness and psychic development might be waiting for him around the corner, if he cut out the red meat and tried a different approach. Edgar rose to the defense of cow protein’s many virtues. Chillum attempted to dissuade. Rinse and repeat.

Later, back at the hostel, Edgar says, “Man, I was being respectful because I knew that guy was your friend. But really, if not for that I’d have told him to fuck off. There are different diets for different genetic types, and mine thrives on steak, there’s just no question about it. No reason to try and change it.”

Eventually he told me the details of his arrival in the jungle. He had signed up for a plant medicine retreat, aiming to phase himself off his medication and start using incrementally larger doses, as a way to get himself to a place of progress. He didn’t want to be on the medication, but after three days off it, he could tell that he was not stable. And so he went back on the pills. He left the retreat center, having never taken any plant medicine at all, and with no hard feelings from the owners, who refunded his money.

After two weeks at the hostel, Edgar wanted to find someplace more private, where he could try his plant medicine experiment again. He believed he could correct his brain chemistry without pharmaceuticals, if only he had the time and space to allow it. I saw his predicament, and so I rented him the private cabin at the back of our property, set like a gem in the middle of a tropical garden. We moved him in there, and gave him the space to work with natural plant medicine in a safe, quiet, peaceful place where he would have no distractions or worries whatsoever.

I made these plans with Edgar, thinking I would be present to observe. But as it happened, there were guests at the hostel who wanted to book a trip to the Tapiche lodge, and Tucan could not go that week. So at the last minute I filled in as translator, and off we went for a week in the deep jungle.

I assumed everything would be fine. It wasn’t. How many times have I said those words here in Peru?!?

When I got back from the jungle a week later, I went straight to the hostel to drop off the tourists. Tucan said, oh man, have you talked to Corrina? Uh, no, my phone is dead, I said. Why?

The police brought Edgar here a few days ago, he said. He had been down on the Boulevard, getting into fights. I made him stay here at the hostel until we could figure out what to do with him. But he was talking crazy and freaking out the guests. After two days he disappeared. That was yesterday.

I went home, checked in with Corrina. She told me that Edgar had been fine until the night he decided to actually take the notoriously potent plant medicine brewed by the trailer park shaman known here as Wayne Creel. Edgar then proceeded to freak the fuck out. Basically, he lost his mind. Corrina could hear him puking and raving and hootin’ and a hollerin’, as we would say in the South, and that is not a good thing. At all. Corrina went back to talk him down in the middle of the night, and then again in the morning when he was back in his mind, but he wasn’t entirely back. Corrina has good insight and perspective when it comes to these things, and she felt secure that the guy was no threat to her safety. Neither was he OK.

I hesitate to report these details here, as my parents are regular readers of the blog, and I do not want them to worry. But as it is a compelling story, I am compelled to tell it as it happened; I hope my parents will trust my judgment on this one.

Edgar left the following day, unannounced. On balance, the ledger favored our side: he took with him our sheets for the double bed, but he left behind a kilo of fresh ground hamburger meat, a half-liter of extra-strength plant medicine, and his iconic zip-up combat boots. I was shocked that he left his boots. They’re size eleven, same as me, and the same style that I wore twenty years ago in my more militant salad days. I must say they look pretty good, even now.  I plan to get a lot of mileage out of them.

What would compel a man to break camp so fast he leaves his boots behind? The question gnawed at me as I lay in my bed that night. I wondered what had happened to him, to make him the person that he was. The next morning, I made the rounds of all the other hostels in Iquitos, looking for him. No one had seen him. Tucan and my friends who knew what had happened all said to forget about it. But Edgar had also paid for the cabin two weeks in advance, and then stayed only a few days.  I felt I owed him something. And now he had disappeared, apparently half-crazy and in dubious circumstances, and I was the only person in town who really knew his story.

I decided to forget all about it. Then the next morning, I got a call on my cell from the Australian embassy in Lima.  They had found my business card among the packet containing Edgar’s passport and credit cards in their possession, which he had misplaced. The Lima police had put in a call to the embassy, two days after Edgar was last seen in Iquitos, requesting assistance. He had been out in the streets in Lima, getting into fights. The embassy sent a car, but when it arrived, he refused to go along. He didn’t think he needed an intervention.

I told the embassy everything I knew, including, fortuitously, the name and dosage of the medication he was taking, as he had left a few pills behind in the cabin. The embassy was well aware that one of their citizens (who spoke no Spanish) was out on the streets of Lima, getting into fights, with no ID or money. And to their great credit, they acted with an appropriate sense of urgency, and they found him the next day. They never told me how they found him, but in an email they told me that the information I had given them provided key clues to tracking him down, and he was now getting treatment in a private clinic.

I googled Edgar’s medication. It’s well-known for epilepsy treatment, but it is also used a general mood stabilizer, and effective against bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well. It’s a pretty heavy drug. And I’ll probably never know Edgar’s exact diagnosis, although I strongly suspect that epilepsy is not the end of the story.  He mentioned once in passing, to Corrina, that it was the military that did something to him, an experience there left him permanently altered and on full disability for life. But he never said what happened.

I told this story to a friend of mine, and when I got to that last part, he said, “ yeah, I know that experience. It’s called war.”

Lots of soldiers come home and make the adjustment and move on with their lives. But not all of them. I wish I knew his full story, I wish I had asked for specifics. I imagine he would have told me. He was an open book. That’s why I liked him, why I tried to help him—he wasn’t hiding anything at all. He told you exactly where he was coming from, and what his situation was. I realize that, if that was my predicament, I’d try to handle it that way too, with transparency and integrity. Edgar had both. He just didn’t find the answers he was looking for in the jungle, answers desperately sought, to find a way back to normal.

___

I know a lot of ex-servicemen who have made their home here. Most of them were in Vietnam. Some of them, like Captain Bill, don’t talk about it hardly at all. Others, like Chupo, the bad-ass bronze-star-laden Army Ranger, have the experience imprinted into them so deeply that they will identify with it forever, and if anything they talk about it too much. Still, I have the deepest respect for the guys of this generation, who answered the call, and I never ask about it unless they bring it up first.

Pete Davidson, who was also in Vietnam, only traveled abroad for the first time when he went to war. And I don’t think he would mind my telling the following true story here on the blog, which made such an impression on me when he shared it.

Years after the war, when he had made the successful transition to civilian life as an accountant and corporate attorney, Pete found himself still haunted by nightmares, in which he was visited by the young Vietnamese soldier whom he had killed in an ambush at close range during the war.

He saw the kid’s face clearly, then. They were about the same age, they were both just kids. The way it had happened, looking him in the eye, seeing him up close, going through with it in the way he had been trained . . . it was a visceral and excruciating thing to do. And it had followed him, in his dreams. It wouldn’t go away.

Finally, having come to Peru to seek out spiritual healing with the great maestro of Tamshiyacu, he sought a way to put the thing to rest. The maestro said, when you go back to America, make a doll, like a voodoo doll, but this doll represents nothing evil. It merely represents the man you killed.  Take this doll to a cemetery in the middle of the night, and give it to the first person that you see. Often, the person that appears in a cemetery late at night is a spirit in human form. Give this doll to the person you encounter, and ask them to carry the pain away, so that the soul of the dead solder can finally sleep in peace. Do this, and you will be able to sleep peacefully too.

So Pete goes back to America. He makes the doll. He takes it to a cemetery in the middle of the night, and he waits. He wanders around. He waits some more. Finally, a figure appears. Pete approaches. The moment predicted by the shaman has arrived.

It’s only the night watchman, who has come wondering what Pete is doing wandering around in a graveyard in the middle of the night. The guard is paid to protect the place from God knows what order of freaks out there inclined to visit cemetaries at night. Pete patiently explains the shaman’s request, and then offers the doll. At first the guard refuses. Wants nothing to do with it. But Pete persists. Tells him the reason for him being there, straight up. Asks him to reconsider. Finally, the guard takes the doll. They part on good terms. And Pete goes home to a peaceful sleep, and it turns out that nevermore is he haunted by visions of the dead soldier. Call it the placebo effect, call it what you will. The shaman’s prescription worked.

So to all of you soldiers out there still hauling a heavy load from the things you carried, I hope that in your book of days you find your night watchman, so you can hand over that burdensome doll and sleep in well-earned peace.