No Sad Moment

by Justin Teerlinck

It was hard to miss the signs. They were on hand-painted billboards all over town.

It seemed prophetic, because my screen name for my blogs was Hair-e-Guy. Maybe the phone number on this sign would be my gateway to an untapped world of secret knowledge, enigmatic healing rituals, and mind-altering experiences that no white Minnesotan had ever heard of. I could return home and show off my ritual scarifications to my admiring friends in the New Age community. "Look," I would say. "You only get your wee-wee tattooed with a needle from the Boola Boola tree after you've made it to the tenth level. Then you get your spirit animal. Mine's a jaguar." Except, I would say it the British way, for full emphasis: "jag-u-war." Their jaws would drop as they asked, "What was your vision?" And I would stare past them and say, "I cannot reveal my vision to you because it is so powerful it might kill anyone who has not gained enough jungle power." They would know it was for real by the fact that I no longer used contractions. I was daydreaming.

"You've gotta find this guy," my girlfriend Laura said.

Laura, Darcy and I embarked on our Central American adventure for various reasons. Laura and Darcy wanted to improve their Spanish skills and experience different Latin American cultures. I was game for these aims as well, but unlike them I also nurtured a long-standing desire to hook up with a real Shaman and learn as much as I could about rainforest healing, using medicinal plants...and maybe even hallucinogenic herbs for getting visions. I had already been studying western herbalism for a year and a half and my teacher told me before leaving, "Find out all you can and maybe you can teach a class when you get back."

From my pre-adventure research, I read about a place called San Ignacio, Belize, where a famous medicine woman named Rosita Arvigo lived, taught and healed after spending twenty years as an apprentice to Don Eligio Panti, a local Maya healer. Arvigo healed by using local rainforest plants, Mayan religious rituals and techniques that she brought with her from Chicago that involved externally manipulating women's uteri. When we arrived in San Ignacio, I searched in vain for anyone who knew how to find Arvigo and her jungle school, but no one seemed to know anything. Maybe I hadn't greased enough palms or maybe I was too casual, or didn't have the correct attitude of submission and humility and thus seemed unworthy. It didn't seem that way when I asked people, but who knows? I stopped looking, knowing from a variety of sources that the entire country was teeming with shamans and healers. There were at least ten shamans from Belize with websites, and some of them even gave people advice on tripadvisor.com. There were probably twice as many rainforest healing experts here than ignorant, starry eyed, white midwestern know-nothings like me. Like the ripe mangoes hanging from every tree, sooner or later one would simply fall right into my hands. All I would need to do is sign the papers, buy some notebooks, and stop taking showers. I wasn't worried.

San Ignacio is a wild little town near the western border that Belize shares with Guatemala. Like every other town in Belize, it is nearly 50/50 bilingual: Spanish and English. The crowded, narrow downtown streets combine a jumble of restaurants run by Euro-American expatriates, hotels, tour operators and outfitters and internet cafes. On the outskirts of town sits an outdoor soccer-make that, football-stadium. San Ignacio is the hub for every kind of "eco-tourist" activity for miles around including the Caracol ruins, cave exploration trips, day trips into Guatemala and canoeing and horseback trips. The surrounding communities include homogenous pockets of settlers and ethnic groups from Mayan villages to German Mennonite farming communes. Given the high level of tourist traffic in San Ignacio, there are at least three small-time pot dealers to every tourist and four or five cafes with big-screen TVs that play nothing except Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel for middle-aged Americans with beards, sandals and gray-haired ponytails.

We didn't call him and didn't expect to meet him. It was exactly how you were supposed to meet a shaman. You didn't hook up with him. He hooked up with you. It would look accidental, but really, it was destiny. Sometimes decades earlier, his drug-induced vision told him that you were coming-you-the most important gringo the shaman would ever meet. For years the shaman had been waiting to pass on the knowledge of dark worlds, so he could finally fade into the ether and melt into the mist. And not just any old gringo would do. It was only you, only you that the vision revealed. Only you could bear the sacred knowledge. Only you could possess it. Could there be anything cooler than that?

The three of us were standing on the edge of the market near the soccer stadium. It was the usual midday 150-degree heat, and my Sponge Bob print bandanna could barely absorb the buckets of sweat poring from my sun-beaten brow. We were looking at the Hairy Guy sign and laughing, and Darcy and Laura teased me again.

"So when are you gonna go find him?" asked Darcy.

"I don't know," I said.

"Are you gonna snort some powdered plant dope?" asked Laura. "What if you have to take the medicine up your be-hind?"

"What if you get a fire ant for your spirit animal?" said Darcy.

"What if your spirit animal turns out to be a three legged cat?" said Laura. They were merciless.

"Lay off guys," I said. "You'll see how it is." I knew that I had no defense. They could be cynical if they wanted to. What did they know anyway? All they wanted to do was learn Spanish and save sea turtles. Hell, you could do that back home.

"Good day my friends. Are you looking for someone?" a voice boomed behind us. We turned around and beheld a waif-like, wiry man with thick, rope-like muscles, and a gray beard that hung dreadlocked to his waist. Dreadlocks emanated from his cranium so long, gray and stout you would think someone had planted rainforest vines on his head and they'd been growing there since the time of Christ. They were roughly tied over his head with a piece of colorful, ripped cloth. His eyes were sharp, small and set in his face like ancient stone doors in a moss-covered cliff, guarding the entrance to forbidden caves. His ebony skin was smooth and shiny, reflecting the intense rays of the noonday heat like polished obsidian. He was wearing a shirt with the colors of the Jamaican flag in the background and a picture of Brett Favre in the foreground. He laughed and held out a bony hand. "I am Ras-Far-I."

We introduced ourselves and it wasn't long before I expressed my desire to go into the forest and learn about plants. "I've been looking for...a person...who knows about these things." It spilled out of me like juice from a smashed coconut. Somehow I managed to avoid using the word "shaman."

Ras-Far-I pretended to consider my request, but I could tell all along that this was destiny and I was destined to know whatever he knew and he knew it too. But we still had to go through these formalities. And I knew there was much more to come. There would be intense physical tests. In Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck describes how the Congolese tribes people made him get naked in front of the entire, jeering tribe while he puked his guts out and writhed in pain. And Rosita Arvigo was forced to carry thousands of pounds of herbs thirty miles a day after being bitten by poisonous insects, while her shaman mentor Don Eligio Panti laughed hysterically. Perhaps I would be required to allow fire ants to eat me alive while I wrestled jaguars barehanded. Maybe I would be asked to shimmy up the tallest tree in the forest in the middle of a tropical downpour, and collect a pint of Fer-de-Lance venom. Or maybe he would demand that I lick the back of a poison dart frog and then swim to the mucky bottom of the Macal River and steal the eggs of a wild cayman with my feet tied together. I must be prepared for anything, I told myself.

"How about twenty bucks?" he said. "I'll show you the jungle for twenty bucks ... American."

"Okay," I said, feeling a little stunned.

"Are you the guy on the sign?" Darcy asked. "Hairy Guy?"

"I might be," said Ras-Far-I. "Are you coming to the jungle too, pretty flower?"

"Noooooo, I have to do my laundry."

"What? What is this, lon-dree m'lady? Come! Far-I show you how to HEAL."

"No thanks. I'm fiiiiine," Darcy said, waving her arms slowly.

Far-I rolled his eyes and turned to Laura and I. "I worry about that one. She seems lost. Do you know what you want, child?" he said to Darcy.

"No, not really," Darcy said.

"Child, you are LOST." I rolled my eyes at Darcy and smiled smugly. Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, I thought. How can you not care about finding true knowledge? How can you be so happily ignorant?

"You guys can go and have fun tomorrow. I need to e-mail my mom. There's a cute little internet café that has a really fast connection and it only charges two bucks an hour."

Far-I scoffed at this. "Your mother is gone now, gone... You will not find her inside the electric box."

"Yeah," Darcy continued. "She wants to see pictures of that bar we went to with the fake pirate ship." Darcy walked away slowly, a grin plastered to her gazelle-like face.

Laura looked at me. "I'll go," she said.

"Good then! Twenty dollars for you too. We will see God's great natural cre-a-shon."

"Cool," I said before I could check myself.

Far-I shook his head slowly, as though he was redirecting a dumb dog. "No boy, not `Cool.' Great. Mystery-full." I nodded gravely, my mouth hanging open.

We agreed to meet at the sign the next day and Ras-Far-I would take us to see his home in the jungle in Bullet Tree, about ten miles away. Before we turned to go, the forest shaman turned to me and thrust a few sheets of yellow, stapled paper at me. "Buy my book," he said, without much subtlety. "It teaches the way of No Sad Moment and keeping salt out of your diet." The `book' didn't look like it was worth much. There were photocopied pictures of Ras-Far-I on the front and crude, stick figure drawings of people cooking. "Caution," warned a caption on the front. "This book will make you hungry." On the back it said, "Maintain yu structure fi you structure maintain yu." I said I would think about buying the book after he took us out in the forest. These didn't sound like the hardcore insights of a true shaman. Where were the jaguars? Where was the spirit world? What about the secret vision formulas?

"What?" he said, getting pissed off all of the sudden. "This book is full of Far-I-Knowledge of the RIGHT WAY! It teaches good earth living. Us people here got to make a living to survive! Come on boy, and give me donation." Oh, shit I thought. I held out a five dollar bill. He snapped it out of my hand like an starving iguana slurping up a toucan egg. "Two more of those will be fine," he said. I complied.

That night Laura and I talked over the situation in our rented cabin on the outskirts of town. "You know," she said. "We could always not show up. It seems ridiculous that he would want all that money for his stupid book."

Obviously, she had a lot to learn about the way shamans operated. They didn't just hand out sacred knowledge like candy. They made you pay for it, with money and humiliation. I couldn't blame her, though. Laura had never read the Carlos Castenada books. She didn't know about how Don Juan forced Carlos to do all sorts of strange and uncomfortable things in order to break the bonds of ordinary reality. In fact, Carlos Castenada didn't get to do any of the cool drugs and see the living sleeping bags from another dimension until he'd been forced to run around naked in the desert for months while Don Juan laughed at him. Twenty bucks for a crappy book was nothing, a drop in the bucket.

"Yeah but maybe that's all you'll ever get," said Laura. "A crappy book. Not everybody who claims to know something really does." I knew that of course, but his name was Hairy Guy and I was Hair-e-Guy. He found us in front of the sign. How could that not be an omen of destiny?

"Even if he doesn't turn out to know anything, we're only out twenty bucks," I said. "At absolutely worst it will be an interesting experience, something to write about."

"For you maybe," Laura said. "I'm not a writer."

"Just come with me. It'll be fun. He's a vegetarian."

"Yeah well, most vegetarians are assholes. Why do you think I don't know any? Didn't you see how he was flirting with me and Darcy?"

"Come on."

She let out a long sigh. "I suppose you're right. It will be interesting...if nothing else."

I don't know why I felt the need to drag Laura with. Maybe I was afraid of being alone with him. He seemed like an intense guy, but I guess all shamans are intense. I would need to learn to be more intense too, and eccentric if I wanted to learn anything useful or trippy.

The next day we got up early and went to the sign. He wasn't there. I was nervous. Maybe I wasn't worthy after all. Maybe I shouldn't have brought my camera. Maybe I was just a dumb, chubby white tourist in a floppy hat. Laura told me to relax. Finally, after a half an hour Ras-Far-I sauntered up, a cloth knapsack hanging loosely from a cord over his shoulder. "You came," he said. "Good. Sorry I'm late but I had to reserve a room in town for Easter Sunday. Far-I got no TV in the bush. Need to go to hotel to watch di basketball game. Kevin Garnett, he is one to watch." He let out a rumbling laugh and tapped his head wisely. My mouth hung open in shock. Ras-Far-I not only enjoyed sports but actually rented a hotel room just to watch the games? Suddenly he seemed less like a shaman and more like a U of M fraternity jock, swilling beers in Dinkytown.

"First lesson," said Far-I as we ambled together toward downtown. "See these?" he said, pointing to his fingernails. "Everything in health is about these! Cuticles! See how mine are, yes? Smoooooooth, not crispy. No! Oil them and water them every day and the rest of yu structure be fine. Understand, boy?"

No, I didn't. "Yes," I said. "How do you diagnose your patients when they come to you?" I asked.

"Diagnose? What?"

"How do you know what's wrong with them?"

"Uh?" He scrunched up his face. I had asked a stupid question. "They tell me what is wrong. They say, `Far-I, I have the diarrhea' or `Far-I, cure my cough.' See?" I nodded submissively.

We all piled into a beat-up taxi cab in downtown San Ignacio. Far-I knew the driver and exchanged a hearty handshake with him as he roared off down a winding dirt road through cleared fields alternating with tracts of jungle. Laura and I hadn't given much consideration for how we were getting to Ras-Far-I's jungle or getting back to town. We figured he would take care of the details and anything else would just work itself out.

The taxi deposited us on another dirt road near a tiny, boarded-up shack. There was no sign, no other cars around. "This is Bullet Tree," Far-I said. "Now we walk." We followed him down a maze of graded dirt roads, past expensive-looking homes that just popped up through the surrounding jungle. After we had walked about half a mile he mumbled something about walking in line. Laura and I looked at each other, and we both must have figured that he wanted to physically lead, and have us follow, so we marched along behind him until he wheeled on us, machete in hand. "What is wrong with you people? Are you robbers? Walk with me!"

We responded by apologizing and walked as close behind him as we could without tripping over him, but given his display of anger and armaments, we were a little nervous. After awhile, he suddenly jerked around again and let out an annoyed sigh. "What did I tell you? Come on up here with me! You make bad impression. If you walk behind, people think we up to no good!"

"Oh, so you want us to walk next to you?"

"Yeeees mon! Isn't that what I'm tellin' you?"

After his patience ran out twice, we finally understood what he wanted. We immediately scooted up so that we were on either side of him, but every time a car came, we had to scurry over by the ditch or into a thorny patch of jungle to avoid being hit in a place where daytime drunk driving was the rule.

At various places, Ras-Far-I stopped and pointed out local, medicinal plants. Sometimes he answered my questions respectfully. Other times, he simply shrugged his shoulders or said, "How would I know what its for? Is no `for' anything! It is ALIVE. It lives here. The Earth is ALIVE. Don't you know this?"

As we neared Far-I's house, he pointed to one of his neighbor's places. It was a three-story stucco villa with Spanish tiles and a satellite dish on the roof. It had a massive animal pelt pinned to the front door. "Good people, these," he said.

Laura sighed with disgust. "Even though they have a jaguar pelt on their door? Aren't jaguars protected here?" I made a motion to silence her. I didn't want to make any waves with our temperamental, machete-armed host.

"Huh?" was all he said. "People make a living."

Laura couldn't resist. "Obviously they've made a very good living, judging by their three car garage."

Far-I turned to her. "Be quiet woman! You know nothing."

It was at this point that I began to feel every muscle in my body tense up, and a crushing feeling of anxiety weigh down on me. The feeling wouldn't go away until I had downed the codeine and valium melting in my pockets. The shaman and the girlfriend. If I tried to make peace, Laura would say I was taking his side and hate me. And Far-I did not seem like he would be easily appeased. I crossed my fingers and tried to change the subject.

"Well," I said. "It sure is a well built house!"

"Shut up boy," said Far-I. "You can't even control that lady."

Finally we arrived at the home of Ras-Far-I. It consisted of a tent, a tarp, a hole to shit in and several dozen one-foot high chala plants that he harvested to make soups and salad. He showed us another plant he referred to as "soup basil," which upon tasting appeared to be oregano. Far-I paused to take a shit and Laura and I averted our eyes. I tapped my foot and tried to think of something positive to say. After Far-I was finished purging his bowels, he led us down a road deeper into the jungle by a river. He showed us a few more plants, and rubbed a plant on Laura's hand to demonstrate its use. It seemed like he was trying to be nice to her now. I eased up a little. Maybe things would be okay. Maybe we would gain his respect. Maybe Laura wouldn't be so pissed off. Yeah, I thought. It will be okay now. We got yelled at for awhile, but now the test is over and the real learning is about to begin.

Ras Far-I took us to the edge of the river and told us how river water feels good on the feet. We nodded respectfully. He repeated this observation two more times and then began to wander away, saying he needed to collect some herbs. It was unclear what he wanted us to do, so we started to follow him. Suddenly he spun around on me with the machete, raising it over his shoulder. "What are you doing? I told you THE RIVER FEELS GOOD ON YOUR FEETS! Can you not RELAX! Be at peace! Far-I go collect the herbs!"

"How can we relax when you yell at us and threaten us?" Laura said. It was a valid question, but one that made me squint my eyes and clench my jaw wishing she had not asked.

Far-I threw his machete and dropped to his knees dramatically. "What is WRONG with you, woman? Why are you so strange? Why don't you obey me!"

"I don't obey any man," Laura said defiantly.

"Yes, and that is your problem." Far-I collected his machete and shook his head dismissively and walked away into the jungle.

"I can't take this anymore," Laura said. "This asshole is going to kill us and toss our severed heads in the river!"

"It will be fiiiiine," I said, trying like crazy to sound like Darcy, but my voice was cracking. I was scared too, and I didn't for a moment approve of Far-I's misogynistic treatment of my girlfriend. But nor would I add fuel to the flames of her anger, which was hot enough already. I had to find a way to get her to chill out. We were in the middle of fucking nowhere. We were like infants. We didn't know thing one about the jungle, getting out of here, or finding our way back to San Ignacio. It didn't matter what we felt, what we deserved, or what was right. We were stuck out here-for the time being anyway-with a pissed off guy with a machete. If things were not handled diplomatically, we could find ourselves thigh deep in a shit swamp without a single piece of toilet paper. But Laura never believed in diplomacy. All she wanted to do was kick some ass when she felt she'd been wronged. It didn't matter whether or not it was convenient to our continued survival. By attempting to point out the facts of the situation, all I succeeded in doing was make her cry bitterly. "You don't even care about me!" she accused. I tried to put my hand on her shoulder but she smacked it away. "All you care about is your fucking shaman! You don't give a shit about how he treats me!" I reminded her that he wasn't being friendly with me either, that I was trying to make the best of a difficult situation, all to no avail. I was on "his side" according to her view, and that was that. We had replayed this scenario several thousand times back home. Why not in a jungle in Belize, during a nasty case of cultural miscommunication? Why not, I thought cynically.

Not knowing what else to do, I prodded Laura to oblige Far-I's demand. We went down to the river, shoes in hand, to try to get our feet wet. But this was a more complex task than Far-I let on. The bank was steep, sheer mud, and the river was full of rapids. Laura and I tried to walk barefoot to the edge of the river, sandals in hand, but as we neared we both slipped and slid on our asses the rest of the way on a slick surface of slime and mud. Laura bonked her knee on a tree stump and in the process dropped a sandal in the river. The sandal got caught in an eddy and pushed up against a massive log. "Goddamn it!" she cried. "This fucking sucks! Why did you make me do this? Now I can't even walk out of here! Just so you know, when we get back home, we're through. I am so. Tired. Of this shit!"

"Just hang on," I said, exasperated. "I'll get it." I fumbled in my pockets for the valium and codeine which I now desperately required. My hands were shaking from the stress. My fingers clawed through my deep pockets until they found the crumbled up remains of my stress relief. I hungrily withdrew the powered pills and shoved them in my mouth.

"Why do you always do that?" Laura said. "Are you a fucking drug addict now? You have to take those damn pills to do anything!"

I had had enough. I turned to her. "Fuck you," I said. "I've taken just about enough of your shit. Grow the fuck up." With the bitter taste of the codeine still on my lips, I tried to shimmy out onto the log over the river. I made it about halfway before sliding over the smooth surface into the water. The splash I made dislodged Laura's sandal, which edged away into the middle of the river and then shot like a cannonball down to the Caribbean sea.

"Now you've done it!" she seethed. I never thought it possible to see a person both laughing and screaming with rage at the time time. Laura's expression was one that I cannot put into words. "You can't do anything on those drugs. They turn you into a complete, fucking idiot."

"Give me a fucking break! They haven't even kicked in yet! God how I wish they had. Anyway, you're the one that dropped your fucking sandal into the goddamn river and I'm just the guy who tried to get it! Okay?"

"You suck," she said. "You're utterly useless!" Just then, she began sobbing uncontrollably. I realized that I was face down on my stomach and my nuts were smooshed on this tree truck, and I had to shimmy backwards with my sandals on my hands with my ass in the air to get off the log. Indeed, I did suck and I was totally useless. I was also totally wiped out. I hadn't expected shamanism to be a relationship killer. For a brief moment I wallowed in self pity, wishing I were dead, wishing Far-I really would fulfill Laura's dark, ridiculously over-the-top fantasy, reappearing from the woods to dispatch us with his blade and leave our bloody, headless corpses here to rot anonymously and be eaten by dung beetles. We were nothing but useless tourists with some money to blow, anyway. I wasn't worthy of any vision, knowledge or power. My spirituality was long dead and my girlfriend hated me and, worse, hated everybody else. What the fuck was I thinking, coming out here?

Just as I slithered off the log, Ras-Far-I appeared on the bank above us. My shirt was drenched. My ass was covered with mud and water. Laura was rocking back and forth in the fetal position in the mud, crying and muttering to herself. Far-I had a look of satisfaction and serenity on his face. "You see?" He said, jovially. "The river is good! Cures every-ting!"

Laura looked up at him like a beaten puppy. "Does this look good? What is your problem? Do you hate us because we're white? Because we're Americans and you think we're rich? What the hell is your problem? You're a lunatic!"

"You speak non-sense, m'lady! This is one world, one life." I thought to myself, he better not say `let's get to-gether and feel alright' or I'll puke. "You have no right, little girl, little lady! I am doctor! I don't say mu, mu, mu, mer! I speak truth! With con-vic-shon, m'lady! If you go up into outer space and look down on the Earth, what you see? Belize? America? White? Black? No! You see people, just people, ALL ONE PEOPLE IN JAH EARTH!"

The codeine was beginning to kick in, because I was starting to listen to and understand what he was saying, even if he was an utter, unapologetic hypocrite who didn't practice shamanism at all. After his rant, he walked over to Laura and dropped to one knee with the chivalry of an English gentleman, and wiped Laura's tear-besotted eyes with his bony thumbs, cooing and saying, "there, there m'lady. No sad moment. No sad moment." I realized then that I did not understand this man or this country or my girlfriend or myself, and I never would.

Laura, in a vain attempt to reclaim her dignity tried to brush his gesture aside, get up and hobble away but he followed her and brought her back. She cursed at him a few more times. Then, her energy spent, she sat on her butt in the mud and looked ahead blankly, finally surrendering to the experience, to exhaustion, to her realization that she was unable to control or direct the situation. Far-I found some seeds from a giant pod on the trail and handed them to Laura, showing her how to make beads out of them. He explained that these seeds cannot be painted because that would ruin their texture. He said that each one was unique and no two were alike. He told us how to drill holes in the seeds to make a necklace without cracking them. Before long, Laura was absorbed in the business of collecting the seeds. Far-I took a step back and gazed contentedly. He reached to the ground and found a leaf. With expert precision, he placed a small quantity of marijuana in the leaf, rolled it into a joint, and tied the ends together like a shoelace and lit it up. He turned to me. "You see," he said, observing the situation. "This is no sad moment."

We listened to Far-I talk. He talked about basketball, comparing his favorite players. He told us of the "crack people" in Belize City. "I do not judge them. I just feed them," he said. He spoke of the Easter celebration in San Ignacio and the sound fish make when they jump in the Macal River. We fell into a natural rhythm of interacting. Laura even laughed at a few of his jokes. Finally, as the sun began to go down Far-I pointed the way back to the road and we started to walk. "Come back anytime," he said with unironic sincerity. "You are my friends." There was no taxi out here and Far-I had no phone. We would have to walk ten miles from Bullet Tree to San Ignacio. We were tired, dehydrated and I was beginning to drool from the heat, valium and codeine. At the edge of Bullet Tree, we saw an overturned car on the side of the road. There were no tires on the wheels, nor glass left in the window panes. It was rusted out, abandoned. Spray painted in white on the driver's side door was a single word in capital letters: "WHY?"

We staggered another mile or two in silence until a pick-up truck stopped and the driver let us climb in the back. I don't think we could have made it the rest of the way. We slumped over the steel bars of the frame and felt the wind in our hair as the bush and the fields swept through our overwhelmed vision, blurring all previous moments of the day together into a hopeless, confusing miasma of unextractable memories and emotions. Even when we got back to San Ignacio, Laura still refused to speak to me. I handed the driver a five dollar note and we limped back to our room, Laura awkwardly hobbling on her calloused, bare foot, like a car driving on a broken wheel. We were both broken, and I wondered if we had gained anything to replace what we had lost.

© 2008 by Justin Teerlinck.