Free Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis Page B

for three days listened as he outlined with quiet intensity a totally new paradigm for ethnobotanical research, a way of thinking about plants, people and landscapes that would allow a true understanding of the relationship between a society and the soil from whence it came, between the cult of the seed and the power of the hunt, the poetry of the shaman and the prose of the priesthood. I left those sessions exhausted yet dazzled.
    Reichel-Dolmatoff and Wilbert were good friends, and Reichel-Dolmatoff often came to visit him. Together, they would walk in the botanical garden at UCLA, sometimes joined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would fly over from Paris. The thought is beguiling: these three eminent scholars, veterans of a thousand strange cultural encounters, sitting together on a park bench, their imaginations sweeping over the Americas, comparing notes, sharing insights, making plans.
    I had met Reichel-Dolmatoff once, but it was a fleeting encounter in the early days of the coca research, and I knew him only through his writings. Each of his many publications is a celebration of wonder. As travellers turn to guidebooks to negotiate the labyrinth of a new city or region, I depended on Reichel-Dolmatoff to reveal the deeper rhythms of a culture, the ebb and flow of nuance and gesture, the actual pulse and essence of the invisible
forces encountered while moving through new lands and across unknown frontiers of the spirit. His monograph on the Kogi had been our lens in the Sierra Nevada, but the book I best remember is Desana: Simbolismo de los Indios Tukano del Vaupés (published in English as Amazonian Cosmos ). In the spring of 1975 , on the eve of my first visit to the forests of the Vaupés, I was given the book by an old colleague of Richard Evans Schultes’s, who put me up in Villavicencio, the lowland Colombian town that serves as a gateway to the Northwest Amazon.
    Within days of reading about spiritual battles fought by shaman perched on hexagonal shields, all encased in quartz crystals which were themselves the generative organs of Father Sun, I found myself in comparatively mundane circumstances, lost in the Amazon forest not a mile from the Barasana longhouse where I was staying on the banks of the Río Piraparaná near the old Catholic mission of San Miguel. With me, and equally disoriented, was the headman of the village, Rufino Vendaño, who was my guide. Rufino had lived in the immediate vicinity of the longhouse, or maloca , all of his life, and to watch him for even a few hours struggle to find his bearings was a revelation. Though there was no panic, his eyes revealed true concern, and when late in the day we stumbled upon a game trail that led us back to the river, he was visibly
relieved. He clearly had no more desire to spend a night in the forest than I did.
    That evening, at the men’s circle, he recounted our misadventure in a charming, self-deprecating manner, which prompted a flurry of similar tales from the Tatuyo and other Barasana living in the maloca. Beneath the easy laughter, however, there was an edge of fear. The forest rose on all sides, the light of a half moon filtered through the thatch, and from the darkness came the sounds of cicadas and tree frogs, the piercing note of a screech owl, the caw-caw-caw of bamboo rats. The clearing around the maloca was the size of a village square, but beyond was a river that flowed to the Amazon, and a forest that stretched to the Atlantic. To reach this place, I had crossed the Andes by truck to Villavicencio, flown three hours in a military transport, and then hired a missionary plane, which had soared into the clouds and burst over the canopy like a wasp, minuscule and insignificant. The forest below was endless, and there was nothing on a human scale. The mission of San Miguel, broken down and long abandoned, was but a minor tear in a formidable tapestry of life. The sense of isolation could not have been more complete.
    The