Tripping hard is like war.
Most of your time is spent in the minutia of attending to your physical/astral chariot's movement through international time and geography. There's the issues of transportation, lodging and meals.
Then there's the times when 'normal' time is punctuated with times of sheer terror, of being thrown into life/death struggle where all bets are off and you are naked in the face of great, dark mystery.
From under the volcano I returned to Quito, Ecuador to again be reunited with my bruddah - the Chief Rollin' Rock, returned to South America from his niece's wedding.
And then we were tripping hard, returning to Colombia.
We returned to the beautiful, white city of Popayan. And then we were going down a long, bumpy, unpaved road in a crowded bus to San Agostin - one of the most important archeological places in South America.
San Agostin is the place where a great urban civilization flourished from 200 A.D. to 800 A.D. And then this technologically sophisticated culture/civilization mysteriously disappears, leaving one of the world's greatest cities of the dead. The homes of the living were simple, unadorned. The tombs of the dead are elaborately, extravagantly engineered and decorated with monumental statues. The tombs celebrate a joyous, phallic, sun-worshipping fertility cult that reveled in all the permeations in the union/integration of Human/God, Goddess, Human/Animal, Life/Death.
The image of the dead in the great tombs is that of a newly born, upside down infant beginning their new upside down after-life in the joyous rebirth of death.Most of this lost civilization's energy went into the construction of this great city of the dead, that existed side by side with the city of the living. Now only the city of the dead remains. It dominates the landscape, the geography of the present city of the living, and extends far beyond it.
There were far more people living in this place during this lost civilization's classic age, then there are now. The most constant employment in this place is grave robbing.The Chief and myself did what you're suppose to do when you visit this place. We went horse-back riding to the archeological sites. We visited the most monumental of the monumental places.
It was good exercise. Afterwards was one of the rare times when the Chief had appetite for food.
We are recognized as a flacco/gordo, skinny man/fat man, Laurel and Hardy, Quixote and Pancho kind of comic team. The Chief is a skinny dude. He is very consciencious about suppressing all appetite for food with super-human quantities of cigarettes and strong coffee. I remain a man of appetite. I still have a paunch. Therefore I am a gordo. This was one of the rare moments when we both had appetite.
We went to a cheap, good restaurant The Fogon (The Hearth). We both ordered the plate of the day, an ample dish with rice, beans, plantains, potatoes, and good, but tough, chewy beef. We both hungrily engaged our food.
Suddenly the Chief grabbed my arm. He grabbed my arm like a man who was drowning. And when I looked into his eyes I saw that he was drowning. I knew immediately that a big clot of tough, chewy beef had lodged in his throat. I knew immediately that he was suffocating - dying.
I didn't have to think about it. I just did it. I did the Heimlich. But it was a far from perfect application of the maneuver. I could feel how lodged the clot of food was in the Chief's throat. I knew I hadn't moved it.
I squeezed a second time. The clot stayed lodged in the Chief's throat. I began to panic.
Then I squeezed a third time and the tough, chewy clot of beef flew from the Chief's mouth, across the restaurant.He began to breathe.
When I knew the Chief was alright I began laughing, then howling with laughter. Then the Chief joined me in the laughter to the consternation of all the other diners in the crowded restaurant.
When I returned to the restaurant, alone, for breakfast, the beautiful duena, the owner of the restaurant was really concerned about the Chief. She was very relieved to know that all is well with him.
She then related her narrative, her memory of what happened.She said that she knew my first attempts to save the Chief failed. She said a woman, whom she had never seen before suddenly appeared behind the Chief and smacked him really hard in the back. (As she was giving me her narrative I vaguely remembered that there could have been another presence, a female presence, with the Chief and myself in that terror-laden moment. I could vaguely remember someone hitting the Chief in the back.) The Duena swore that it was the woman, who she had never seen before, and her hard blow to the Chief's back, that dislodged the clot of beef from the Chief's throat.
But the Chief doesn't remember anyone else being in the Heimlich moment. He says that he's certain that my third Heimlich maneuver did the trick.
Afterwards I spoke to a new friend from San Agostin. He is a shaman and a grave robber. He spends a lot of time with the dead.
I asked him what the ancient dead of San Agostin are like.
He said they're good people. They still walk the earth in a sacred way.
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