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Interviews with Shamans Part One
Interview with Gido, Part One
I've been on vacation so long now that
anything resembling an appointment means I'm sleepless all the night
before; and last night as I lay awake in bed was no exception because
I didn't sleep at all. That's how nervous I was about my up-coming
doctor's appointment. Not a blink. I was too nervous; so I went with
Paula, she being five years older than I, and thus at my age she's
old enough to be my mother. This is not to say, which I mistakenly
did once before, that she is a little old lady. I erazed that from
the public record, for all the good it does me, Paula continuing to
bring it up, often in Spanish, sometimes in French, and when she's
particularly pissed off at me, in her broken English. So, I got her
to take me to the doctor, on the chicken bus across town to the most
run-down dock in the city, the place only peke-peke boats dock at,
canoes with outboard motors on poles and a man at the throttle
swinging the boat around against the current by main strength when he
drags the motor at the end of the pole through the water as
passengers sit on wooden benches along the length of the canoe, their
feet in the water that sloshes inside when a fiberglass and windows
“fast boat” comes by and swamps us, or when it rains and the
water comes through the thatched roof. Or when someone spills a
bucket full of wet stuff. We could see the boats all jammed together
between the petrol station on the water and the barge that sells
supplies for the river trade, the peke-peke boats so tight together
that one must leave for an incoming to unload, unless one walks
across a lot of boats to the mud that is the shoreline. I've done
this before and thus, nervous as I was, I felt I should have some
breakfast to make my day as normal on the surface as I could. It was
a bit overcast as the chicken bus pulled into the roundabout in the
centre of the dockyard and we jumped down to the pavement, missing
the sink hole and the heap of vegetable stuff and meat, and we picked
our way across the slick pavement to the row of stalls streetside
where I decided to grab something tasty but light, something healthy
but yummy to calm my nerves and my growling stomach at 8:00 a.m.
before my big day at the doctor's office.
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| Fried maggots and roasted nuts on a stick |
The first stall I came to had balls of
banana leaves filled with mystery, so I got two and looked for
something more substantial in case whatever inside was totally gross.
Luckily I found a bucket of live qui and a skewer of those giant
maggots already fried on the brazier. Uh. But no. I turned to the
next stall because of the smell of charcoal roasted alligator arms
and fried bananas with dinosaur fish soup. There is this girl I like
a whole lot, and I like her so much that I'm trying to lose weight
and get into some kind of decent shape to impress her. I looked
longingly at the alligator claws and that lovely yellow flesh just
calling out my name, and then I said no again. Paula, like the
motherly type she is, had bought two packets of instant coffee, and
I had a half bottle of diet soda from the night before, so I decided
to leave breakfast for the time being and feast when we arrived at
the village an hour and a half later for my doctor appointment.
There's nothing at all wrong with me, in spite of Paula's constant
claims that I don't take care of myself, but I came close to losing
an arm when I casually draped it around a post on the peke-peke boat
and a wave came and rippled all the boats one after another up and
down and against each other even closer, my arm whipping back around
just in time to slam my knuckles into the sideboard. But not enough
to warrant a trip to any doctor at all. I was faking the unwell and
in need of healing stuff. It's really OK, I know the doctor and he
knows I'm a fine guy who has no need of healing and that I wanted to
talk about plants-- ayahuasca in particular. Even so, an appointment
with a doctor in the jungle who lives in a wooden shack with plastic
wrappers all around, who doesn't have a secretary or a phone, who
doesn't wear a white lab coat, who doesn't look any more like a
doctor than I do, I was still nervous, even though I know him an like
him and wish we could hang out together if his wife would let us,
maybe getting in a round of golf and some cigar smoking after the
links, a bit of time for guys to talk about stuff. I ended up hungry
looking at the banana leaves. Greasy. I resisted. It must be love.
Love-sick don't need no cure.
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| Bananas and gator heads for breakfast |
I'd been to the village with Paula
before, once to go to school and then play hooky when the kids got
bored and wandered off to play, the adults, as it were, going in
search of peace and quiet in the dense jungle, finding there a resort
of sorts where I poured myself a cup of complimentary coffee that, as
a non-guest, I felt I should pay for, causing endless trouble because
no one at the resort had any idea how much to charge, my temper
getting ragged, and finally all of us leaving in a huff, Paula
promising to return a week later to pay whatever the $0.50 tab might
be. Thus it was that my first time in the village had led us all
around the jungle and to a rise by the abandoned church that I wanted
to buy and turn into a jungle fortress to hide out from my enemies
who probably couldn't ever find me if they tried, and then into some
plain wooden building where somehow all of our stuff was piled in a
corner, the building somehow being the very place we had gone to in
the morning when we dropped off our things before going to the
school. It was some kind of miracle, I thought, though Paula told me
I have a bad memory. It was at the collection of wooden houses in the
thick of the trees and the plants all around that I chatted first, or
probably the second time, with the owner of the place, a short and
happy little guy of 42 who has a 20-something wife and two kids, five
and one and a half. That guy is Gido, Paula's landlord in the
village. I like him instantly, his easy smile and calm demeanor, his
happiness and openness and obvious lack of menace. I was that day too
dead tired from lack of sleep the night before. I was forgetting
things badly, but I liked my host and remembered that impression, if
not the actual man, embarrassing when we met at a party a week or so
later and I asked who he is. He is the village doctor, Gido, and cool
guy to hang out with. I even had photos of him showing me his garden.
He was the doctor I decided to consult about the psychic pains of
Modern Man, me being so fine I'm fine.
 |
| From a peke-peke boat on the Amazon |
I am a sentimental guy, I admit,
finding myself wiping away the tears as the credits roll past, “Mirv
Newland. Mirv Newland produced by Mr. and Mrs. Newland” and so on,
thinking of the sheer horror of the final moments of the movie as
Bambie is crushed mercilessly by Godzilla's giant foot. I can't help
myself. I am too emotional sometimes. It's my psychic pain coming
out, Bambie meets Godzilla catching me unawares each terrible
time. I fight it, and when we crossed the foot bridge in the jungle
over the garbage choked ravine on the way back to Gido's place in the
thick of it all I stopped and, in a surge of manliness to restore my
harmonies with the universe and balance my chakras, I took a
piss over the edge, a mere mist sticking to my bare feet. From there
on I walked proudly through the thickets and to the doctor's office,
my nervousness dispelled like a bad charm, my mind clear and at ease.
Paula called and we entered the doctor's office, me feeling better
already, the calm of the place embracing me and the sight of Gido
repairing something of the ceiling made of overlapping meter long
woven palm frond lengths climbed lightly down slight edges of windows
and doors in the room to the floor and came to greet us, making all
my fears of shiny metal cutting instruments and solemn pronouncements
of miserable doom after years of unbearable pain from an incurable
psychic pain gone from my mind. Gido shook my hand, and now, after
some previous warnings, didn't try to kiss me. I like him more all
the time. We went into his office and sat down and Paula explained
why we were there, me to talk to Gido about ayahuasca.
 |
| Gators and taters |
My interest is in public health, when I
care about health at all. Public health, according to me, is the best
one can do, cleaning up the living environment, in a sense, pulling
the ripcord and letting people float where they may, the wind and
gravity of life doing the rest till they land. The hard thump of a
life without sewers and soap is pointlessly cruel and stupid, though
it took all of our time till a hundred years ago to figure that out,
our miraculous life now so different that we come to see it as the
only life anyone has ever lived, our benefits being so obvious we
can't, most of us, comprehend how new and strange it really is. So
long as half the children born don't die before they reach the age of
five, then I think medicine has done its job well, and health is for
the living thereafter. Individuals, of course, are right to pursue
their own interests in living well and without pain, and so it is
that we have doctors who make things wrong right as they can. I don't
expect much. A hundred years ago they worked for chickens and were
overpaid for it. Today, well, they do somewhat better, to what point
I do not know. Or, I do know when I go to the doctor and demand a
cure for my pains, whatever they might be. But for the lives of
others I stand in amazed disbelief that they cannot accept that life
is hard and we all must die. I go to the doctor often because I live
like an idiot and get injured and sick often. But if there were no
doctors I would live or die as well. Maybe I'd go to see a man like
Gido and ask for relief. Maybe Gido is the first man I would consult
to find out about my psychic pains. That would be personal, not an
“interest” at all. But Gido, as a jungle doctor who deals in
jungle medicine in a remote village on the Amazon, is in the public
health business in that he is the one who heals the ills of the
villagers generally, though one at a time. Gido doesn't do so much
with tourists. He'll never get rich as a doctor.
 |
| Doctor's office |
Gido is 42, married to a young woman,
has two young kids, and lives in an unfinished wood-plank house with
mosquito mesh on some of the windows below a grass roof that the
government is going to replace for him and seemingly every other
voter in the Amazon. Gido's place, for what it is, a house in the
jungle, isn't that nice. Because his house is in the jungle all the
wood is from the jungle, rough planks that don't join well, walls
open, floors with gaps, and an enormous open space in the middle of
the floor where somehow no one has gotten around to nailing down more
planks to keep the kids in or the chickens out. Maybe that is the
plan. In a fit of delicacy, I didn't inquire. Gido likes to wear his
hair in an Elvis do, and his pants need a wash, and in all, Gido is
not your average medical man in Manhattan. He is, however, a man of
seriousness that I find attractive in ways missing from the medical
professionals of Modernity. Gido is a medical man and doctor in ways
one might otherwise describe as a medicine man and a witch doctor. If
I were unwell I might consult those more to my own tradition, as if
it were traditional at all to bombard a man with spaceage stuff I
know nothing about; but I might, and I hope I could, consult a man
like Gido to inquire about death instead. That, for the seriously ill
man, is the best healing one can hope for, a peaceful surrender to
the inevitable end of a life, though I would live happily in my
miseries for a thousand years. That's not going to happen, and I
would consider talking to someone like Gido about it if I have such a
chance at the end.
 |
| Doctor Gido |
Gido is a busy man, though one might
not think so to see him sitting with me and Paula for four hours
talking about plants while we sip lemonade and he smokes mapacho
cigrarettes rolled as thick as contraband Cuban cigars, acrid smoke
and black tobacco that Gido uses not to satisfy a nicotine fit but to
dispel bad spirits for the house and the village. Second-hand smoke,
in this world of shamans, is a good thing. He lays his burning
cigarette on the edge of a plain plank table and puts back his head
and thinks about some particularly tough question I stayed up all
night thinking of, and he smiles and grins and tells us about the
universe of living things all round that we don't see because we
don't see. Gido is busy because his life is filled all the time with
beings demanding of him. He spends his time talking to plants and
their spirits. He is a very busy man. He talks to me for hours in the
middle of the day.
Next in this series, what a local shaman has to say about plants and spirits and ayahuasca.
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/ 0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books& ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon. html
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