William S. Burroughs, Yage, and Bicycle Racing

Last week during the Tour of Lawrence bike races, I happened to be talking with an acquaintance and very accomplished rider (he'd finished 2nd in the sprints a couple of days earlier) about why he had pulled out of the crit. He had a good place and was cruising along, and the next time I saw him, he was sitting on the bleachers watching as the peleton passed by.

He mentioned that there had been something going on with his bike - a mechanical issue, or a tire inflation problem that was making the bike feel too lose to safely continue in the close quarters of the peleton. It was all pretty benign until he mentioned that it was just as well because he was out of shape from spending 12 days in Peru recently.

That comment struck me as odd, and I said as much. If he had been hanging out in the mountains of Peru, that would almost be like a natural version of blood doping. He should've come back ready to rumble.

But no. As it turns out he went to Peru to do something that 99% of tourists going to that country don't do. He went to the Amazon instead. He had flown into Lima, gone on to Iquitos, taken a bus to a boat, a boat to a path, and then walked for an hour up the path in the wilderness. What he (and his accompanying grandpa) were seeking was a traditional healing retreat that focuses on purifying mind and body through ritual and the use of Ayahuasca. His story actually blew me away.

Having worked for William S. Burroughs some years ago, I thought I was well-acquainted with what was written about the plant. The Yage Letters - the famous series of notes sent between Ginsberg and Burroughs as they searched the Amazon for the psychotropic substance - was all about Ayahuasca/Yage.  For my whole life, I thought that pretty much the Beats and native people were the only ones who had actually tried Yage. I thought that knowledge of the plant was probably lost in time.

As it turns out, that is not at all the case.  There are many people worldwide who know of and travel to experience the effects and (potential) healing properties of Ayahuasca.

I am reading up on more recent writings about it as well as other medicinal plants that ethnobotanists have been looking to identify in the Amazon (and other climatically similar places).

I never thought a discussion at a bike race would circle back to Burroughs and Yage. It is a strange wonderful world.