The Evangelical church of San Luis Potosi

There's a town in Mexico called Real de Catorce. It's known for two main things. One is that it was a big silver mining town in the 1880s, with 20,000 inhabitants, and then the silver ran out and the population went down to about 800, so for the most part it's a ghost town, full of ruined walls with cactuses growing atop them. The second is that it's right next to the place in the desert called Wirikuta where the Huichol Indians go on pilgrimage to collect their peyote. In early 1993 I had begun to study shamanism earnestly, though I had not yet met the teacher I would later meet in Ecuador. I was still in Mexico, in the dry hills of the Sierra Madre, trying to get fluent in Spanish and hanging out with Indians who practiced their old traditions. Well, at one point I was invited to go on a peyote pilgrimage. Not, unfortunately, by the Indians, but by a man from a government agency who was organizing transportation for them. He had had one or two too many, and in a grandiose gesture he invited me along. The Huichols themselves had not been consulted, apparently didn't want a 25 year old gringo whom they didn't know to accompany them on their sacred pilgrimage, and simply waited me out, delaying the departure date again and again (too polite to tell me to my face that they didn't want me along) until my cash had run so low that I had to head in the general direction of a bank to replentish it. So I ended up in Real de Catorce about ten days later on my own. Got off the bus in the sunny street with my backpack. Immediately met a woman from the States about my age. We got into a long conversation, as one does when one has been in a foreign country for a long time and meets someone else from one's own country. She brought me back to the "hotel" where she was staying with her Mexican husband. The hotel was a collection of run-down buildings around a courtyard. The husband was a little jealous. One enclosure off the courtyard contained a gigantic pig that was being fattened up for Easter. In my room was a glow-in-the dark crucifix. After a little arm-twisting on my part, the husband gave me a peyote button and we all smoked a joint. It was only then that I realized that the Huichols had waited me out, and with perfectly good reason. It occured to me suddenly as I sat there on the warm stones under the bright sun in the company of these two friendly strangers. I had an odd image of the sun then, too. In my mind's eye, it appeared to be full of ecstatic people engaged in a collective work party to create heat and light, and delighted that I had become aware of them. The next morning I met another guy from the USA at breakfast at another tiny (but more upscale) hotel nearby. He was also there looking for peyote. He was Jack, an old hippie. We planned our strategy. Real de Catorce is at the edge of the hills, next to a desert that's as flat as a kitchen table, and that desert is where the peyote grows, under creosote bushes. On the following day, from Real de Catorce, we would take one of the rattling deathtrap taxis down to Estacion Catorce, the village around the railway station, and from there, strike out into the desert in search of our quarry. That night, I was eating alone in a chilly, drafty restaurant, when two other male travelers came in. I invited them to my table, which was the most sheltered from the wind. "We won't bother you?" asked the younger one, who looked exactly like an Italian version of Bob Marley. "We'll see if you bother me or not," I said. The older one started going off on Jews. "They deserved what happened to them in World War Two," he said. "They're dishonest. Plus, look around Latin America. They never travel alone, always in big crowds." "Look at me, I'm a Jew traveling alone," I told him. "And there is good and bad in every group. It's nothing to commit genocide about." Or something. I can't remember the exact words I used. Mauricio and I didn't have much to say to each other after that. But the two Italians did decide to join the move to Estacion Catorce the following day, and we all descended the steep road together in the rattling black automobile, ready to jump out if the brakes failed. They didn't, and we ended up in a tiny hotel that had been recommended to me by the guy who had given me the peyote button. In my notebook from that trip, I still have the map he made me to get to the hotel. The hotel was run by a Sra. Sabas, an elderly lady with blue eyes. She was all ready to put the four of us up in two double beds because she thought we would want to save money that way. It surprised her that it was not our custom to sleep two to a bed, but she was okay with it. A Mexican guy in his late 20s named Alberto was also there. He said he had a general idea where the peyote grew, as he had been there the previous year. At about noon, four of us all headed out into the desert on foot--all of us but Mauricio the antisemite, who was staying behind to photograph the cemetery. A car was coming and we flagged it down. There was no room inside but they let us stand on the back bumper and grip the smooth roof as best as we could. When the car started up again, Jack immediately fell off, and the driver stopped. He got back up and gripped my arm to help stay on, whimpering. Was he really whimpering in fear? Yes, he was. And he nearly yanked me off as the car gathered speed. But I was feeling cool and my palms had a good grip on the roof. They let us off and we headed into the mini-forest of creosote bushes, looking and looking. Jack found a single peyote cactus and cut it in the approved fashion, just the top so the root would regenerate. Walking and looking, walking and looking. I had been fasting that day, as I understood that was the indigenous custom. After two and a half hours we stopped to rest under a solitary tree. We had found nothing but that one button of Jack's, and we would have to think about heading back into town before long so as not to be out in the desert when night fell. This day and night would be my only opportunity to take a good journey with peyote, because I had to take the train out of town the following morning and head back to Guadalajara and then to Mexico City, because I was meeting my mom for ten days in Costa Rica before heading to Ecuador on my own. So we sat under a tree and shared an orange, then shared a joint. The great moment in international communication occurred when we realized that potheads in every country have names for the butt end of a marijuana cigarette. In the USA, it's a "roach." In Italy, something else, in Mexico, something else. Fourteen years later I can't remember the exact terms, but it was a nice moment. I said, "Look, I've been studying the Indians' traditions, and they all say that the peyote lets you find it if it wants you to find it. And they try to pray and get in tune with the environment, and they talk to the peyote with their hearts and tell it why they want to find it. So what would you think if we prayed and meditated a little?" They all said fine. The Italian Bob Marley, I can't remember his name now, took out a flute that he'd got in Bolivia, and he played it some, and I spoke to god and nature and explained who we were and that we wanted to find some peyote to help us get a vision of how we could proceed with our lives. Then we were all silent for a few minutes. We stood up. Ten seconds later, Alberto said, "Ah, here it is." He had found three peyote cacti growing together in a clump, and he bent to cut them. After that, we began to find it all around, as much as we wished. I began to eat a button, slowly, savoring the bitter emerald jelly of its tough flesh. The largest button that Alberto found looked exactly like the face of a smiling clown, so much so that I carefully took a photo of it, convinced that the photo would prove once and for all the existence of the spirit world and the validity of shamanism. When I ran across the photo again two years ago, I could just barely make out the features of the clown. So we’re walking on the road in the direction of Estacion Catorce, and Jack is like, “You know, it sounds crazy but it almost seems like praying helped us find the peyote.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “I wish we had a ride back into town.” And I’m like, “Why don’t you pray for one?” And five minutes later a pickup stops and picks us up and we head back down the road. Peyote can amplify one’s sense of balance, so I was standing up in the back of the pickup with no fear at all, keeping an eye on the road ahead. The people in the front waved at me to sit down, and I did. Back in town we found Mauricio having a very civilized chicken dinner at a tiny metal table at a little restaurant. Jack and I headed back to the hotel while Alberto and Bob Marley stayed in town to find some weed. Jack went to sleep early. Alberto and Bob got in and we hung out in Alberto’s room. They unwrapped a piece of newspaper with plenty of ganga in it and rolled joints as I melted cheese on tortillas over the fire in the fireplace in the corner of the room and fed us all. Still eating peyote slowly and steadily, one button per hour, I passed up the pot most of the time. Alberto had a guitar and photocopies of Beatles lyrics, so we sang for a long time in between mirthful conversations. I went outside to look at the stars. Sra. Sabas was there. “What are you doing?” she quizzed. It was about midnight. “When one eats peyote, one often has the urge to go look at the stars,” I said. “I never took peyote,” she said. “Cada quien a su gusto,” I said. To each, his own. I don’t remember what we talked about then, just that it was interesting–I think she told me about her life in that town, and how her grandfather had come to Mexico from Germany, among other things; the conversation ended, neatly, by mutual consent, before it became boring, and she went inside and I went out walking, looking at the stars, wondering about my future. Went back inside and sang and talked with Alberto and Bob some more, and talked some more, and ate some more peyote. A carload of friends of Alberto’s showed up, suddenly, in the middle of the night, and Sra. Sabas woke up and found rooms for them, and they joined us in Alberto’s room, sharing some organic baked goods. The room suddenly seemed too loud and too full. I went out walking again, heading out the road into the desert. The night fog was in, nourishing the plants. In the dimness, the stones on the road seemed to change position like mice as I looked at them. When I closed my eyes as I walked, I could see horrible visions: a soldier’s bleeding face wrapped in barbed wire, children being crushed by tanks, skulls enveloped in flame. The solution came to me: don’t walk with your eyes closed. Sitting down by the roadside, I closed my eyes and saw something like a sketch of a rectangular box: I could just see the outlines, glowing yellow. Within it, distinct energies moved. One, a jagged electic blue line, was a voice that spoke when it touched and rebounded off the invisible walls of the box. It spoke words that were mysterious but very clear; each word was a mixture of three languages, Spanish, Italian and Huichol. I thought about my brain as a recording studio which had recorded the sounds and then remixed them. I stood up and walked on. Soon, ahead of me in the fog, coyotes began to howl, perhaps five or six of them. I paused to listen. How can I communicate the breathtaking beauty of their music? It was simply the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. The artistry, the perfection; the precision of their collaboration, like one coyote with six voices. I didn’t know what a coyote was anymore; perhaps something otherworldly that had come here to teach or tantalize us with the fragrance of its dreamlike and hyperreal philosophy. When they fell silent I turned and headed back, aware of tall thin gray shapes, letters, that glided past each other in the darkness around me. Dawn came and I packed my backpack quietly, so as not to wake Jack. The others were all asleep in their rooms. I settled my bill with Sra. Sabas and got into another long conversation with her. I learned that in her spare time, she produced cheese, and I bought a wheel of white cheese from her, and accidentally left it on top of her refrigerator when I left, where I imagine it might remain to this day. I caught the 7 AM train, an old slow one called the “burro.” It was packed with sleepy, good-natured Mexicans. There were no seats left so I sat on a sack of corn in the aisle next to my pack. A guy smiled knowingly at me before openly splitting a large peyote button in half and sharing it with his friend. Two kids on the seat next to me, a brother and a sister about nine or ten, put their jackets over their heads and gently swatted each other with the sleeves, pretending to be elephants. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see designs. When we reached the train station in San Luis Potosi at 11 AM, I was well-rested, though I hadn’t slept a wink. Getting off the train I saw I guy from the USA standing on the platform in some perturbation. He said “Do you speak English?” “Sure, I’m from Michigan, where are you from?” “Ohio.” His name was Ray and he was traveling with another guy, who, unfortunately, was an alcoholic and submerged in all kinds of problems. Ray had never been outside the States and spoke no Spanish and wanted help to cash his travelers checks so he could start heading home. We went to the exchange place and changed $150 in checks into pesos. I couldn’t resist chatting up the girls who worked behind the desk. It was just the mood I was in. Ray said he was going to meet another American guy at an ice cream shop, a missionary. Would I like to come? Sure, why not. Over sundaes, Greg told me his story. He made me think of a slightly warped mirror of myself; as close as one could get to being me without actually being me. Born six months after me in upstate New York, he had been into drugs and alcohol for a while, but found himself in a spirituality that included Martin Buber and the Evangelical movement. He had been living in Mexico for a year and a half, loving the adventurous lifestyle, the new language, the feeling of the closeness of God. “One time we were driving the van into Mexico City,” he said. “We always had trouble with that van, and we never had money to fix it. So I’m driving, and we’re going down this long long hill, and this girl sitting next to me goes ‘Gregorio! Mire! Mire! La llanta!’ I look at the road in front of the van and I see our rear wheel go rolling by us!” During this conversation I had managed to put aside my habitual prejudice against Evangelicals, so when Greg invited Ray and me to lunch at the church, I was able to smoothly accept. Sitting in the church kitchen with Greg and Ray and a bunch of Mexican women, I couldn’t have been more content. The pork in mole sauce with tortillas was a culinary coup de grace, the taste equivalent of the coyotes’ singing the night before. “Who made this miracle?” I asked. No one wanted to accept the praise, but I could see that one woman looked especially pleased. For the next half hour I joked with them. I have no idea what I said, just that I had everyone but Ray in stitches. Did we want to come to the culto, the church service? Ray and I were asked delicately. Sure, why not, that seems to be the way that the current is flowing. Sitting there in the pew, listening to testimonials from people about how they had been dissolute alcoholics and then found Christ, I started to feel tired. It lasted a little over an hour. Greg gave me a copy of the New Testament in Spanish, a little one with green plastic cover. I wished Ray good luck in getting home safely and headed off to find the bus station. A few minutes later I had to stop to ask directions and got into a forty minute philosophical discussion with a couple of guys who were standing on a streetcorner. That’s the kind of day it was. At the bus station I was talking to a dignified fiftysomething rancher. “Where are you coming from?” he asked. “From Real de Catorce,” I said. “Ah, el peyotito,” he said. “Do you know it too?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “We have great respect for that.” The bus for Guadalajara pulled out with me on it, and the cells in my brain began to pull down their shades and draw their drapes in earnest. It was a long ride to Guadalajara, and after I got there and went to the house of the family I was staying with, I was in a tired stupor for the whole day, annoying them because they wanted to hear well-told stories of the strange adventures of the gringo who wanted to be a shaman.