To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  Weston studied the blonde girls, calculating possibilities and interest. We took the front wheels off our bikes and removed the panniers, while the crew looked on, seeming annoyed that they’d have to jigsaw these bulky sharp bikes into their vehicles.

  The Jeeps climbed up the mountainous center of Panama and dropped into the jungles on the northern coast. Most of us slept along the way. I stared out the window, wanting to capture every mile of the road in my mind’s eye, watching tree species and terrain change almost by the mile.

  We were approaching the end of North America. The beginning of the great south.

  At the coast, our drivers offloaded our things to small wooden boats that took us through a tangle of canals and mangroves out to a bay, where several large sailboats waited at anchor.

  There she was. The Wildcard. Long and white and beautiful. We pulled up next to her, and a leather-skinned man with Oakley sunglasses and sun-bleached dreads called down to us. “Welcome to your chariot! I’m Wayne,” he said. He had cracked, rough hands, and a cigarette bounced on his lips when he laughed.

  We were assigned to bunks, got our bags organized and put away, and they handed us beers. Wayne tied our bikes to the railing on the foredeck. He said he’d never taken on cyclists as passengers before. Then he called out for passports. “I’ll keep them in one place so that we can have them stamped out of Panama and then into Colombia.” He took them below, only to reappear.

  “Jedidiah and Weston?” he called to the group, not knowing who was who.

  “Yeah, that’s us,” I said.

  “You guys don’t have a Panama entry stamp. How is that possible?”

  “What? It’s that little sticker they gave us,” I said.

  But Wayne shook his head. “That’s not the stamp. That’s some customs thing. You need the stamp. How did you get the sticker and not the stamp?”

  “I have no idea. The border was weird. We did it on the Caribbean side.”

  “Well, you can’t get stamped out of the country if you haven’t been stamped in,” Wayne said.

  “Well, shit,” Weston said.

  The other passengers looked at us with curiosity and Wayne stroked his wiry beard. Finally, he said, “I know the guy who stamps us out. He’s just on a dinghy making the rounds before we set sail. I’ll see if he’ll just overlook your stuff. He owes me a few favors. This is a tricky one. Worst-case scenario we might have to take you back to shore and you’ll have to go back to the border and get the stamp.”

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  Weston and I paced anxiously on the boat for an hour while we waited for the border agent to show up and stamp everyone’s passports. How the hell did this happen?

  When the border agent came aboard, Wayne handed him the passports and then pulled him aside, speaking to him quietly. Weston and I craned our necks to watch. The border agent began stamping the passports, they exchanged some words we couldn’t hear, the agent handed them back without stamping ours, then climbed down to his dinghy. He rode away as Wayne began passing out the passports.

  “Well,” Wayne said, “he said he wouldn’t stamp yours out because it would only raise more suspicion. So, hopefully, Colombia doesn’t notice. But I have an idea. I know a woman in Colombia who is pretty high up. I think it’ll be okay. Let’s try it.” He flashed an adventurous smile.

  “What’ll happen if they say no?” I asked.

  Wayne shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and began prepping the boat for launch.

  Within an hour, we set sail, and the bright blue water and the beautiful backpackers on our boat began to push away our anxiety. “Let’s just believe it’ll work out,” Weston said. “Wayne’s a salty dog, I like him.”

  “Yeah, I choose to believe,” I said.

  We drank our beers and soaked up the sun and ocean air, and quickly felt camaraderie with our fellow passengers. They all spoke English well. The crew on the boat were all white, and American. Wayne’s age was hard to assess. He was either thirty-five or fifty-five. The sun had turned his skin to dark brown plastic. He wore torn khaki shorts. Two blonde girls and a tall younger man with brown hair crewed for him. The voyage would take five nights and six days, and our phones wouldn’t work again until Colombia. For part of the trip, we would hop from one island to the next. One would be a tourist stop, seeing a native village and the chance to buy some souvenirs. The others would be empty white sand paradises, a chance to swim and play, and then two nights in the open sea as we crossed to Cartagena, Colombia.

  Weston soon settled into a new level of Westonness on the boat—shirtless, shoeless, tan, and happy. The captain had either a cigarette or a spliff in his mouth at all times. Weston happily rolled him fresh spliffs.

  Meanwhile, I synced my phone with the Bluetooth speaker to DJ the journey, then I cued up Michael Jackson and Beyoncé and hits from the nineties, going for commonality and nostalgia. The Dutch couple loved my music and bobbed their heads in affirmation.

  “What is it like to have all music in your native language?” the boy asked me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, they all sing in English. You can understand every word, yes?”

  “Well, yes, of course, I’ve never thought about it. You don’t have Dutch music?”

  “We do. But most of the radio music is American, or British. Pop music is almost always in English. We can understand a lot of it, but we miss a lot, too. When music is in Dutch, it is usually folk music, or holiday music. So, when we hear music in our language, it feels different. Special.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I guess the closest I have to that is country music. I am from Tennessee, so it is nostalgic and feels down-home.”

  “Down-home? What does that mean?” his girlfriend asked.

  “Like, from the country, where I’m from. Old-timey maybe. Feels like my childhood.”

  “Yes, that is how Dutch music feels. But you don’t feel that with Katy Perry, even though it’s in English?”

  “No. I’ve never thought about it. It’s just pop music. I’ve never thought about what language it was in.”

  On the second day we dropped anchor off an island the size of two football fields. The villagers had no natural water source, so big plastic containers held water on the roofs of their palm-frond houses. I asked our captain how they survived out here, and he said, “They used to live only by fishing. But now they survive from tourists.” It felt a bit like visiting a zoo. The children ran up offering beads and brightly colored scarves and dolls made from folded palm fronds. It didn’t feel like life in paradise. It felt like poverty tourism.

  We camped that night on a nearby abandoned island. We cut down fresh coconuts with machetes and sliced them open. We passed around a rum bottle and poured rum into the coconuts, mixing it with the coconut milk for a refreshing cocktail. We collected fallen palm fronds and made a massive bonfire. We had the whole island to ourselves and danced on the beach into the night.

  Two more days of island hopping and swimming and talking about our cultures and stories. Then two days out at sea. The waves got big and we stood on the bow to ride them like a roller coaster. The boat divided into the people who loved the thrill of the boat pitching up and down, and those who threw up for two days straight.

  I thought about the symbolism of the crossing. From North America to South. The old route from Atlantic to Pacific had meant a perilous voyage around the tip of Patagonia. These warm Caribbean waters separated by a thin strip of land, Panama, and then the cold Pacific. The old route from Atlantic to Pacific was all the way around the tip of Patagonia. A hundred years ago the Panama Canal gave boats the ability to bypass an enormous landmass that ran half the length of Earth. We were sailing through the same Caribbean waters where pre-Columbian natives had witnessed the arrival of Spanish galleons. I remembered the stories o
f the ships showing up on these beaches for the first time, and the pre-Columbian natives seeing them, or not seeing them. I’d heard that the ships pulled up to the beaches, and many of the indigenous people were unable to see the ships at all. They were so strange, so alien to anything they’d seen before, that their brains didn’t recognize them, or acknowledge them as real. They were invisible until the ships themselves were right up on the shore. The Spanish descended from the boats on horses. The indigenous people didn’t know it was possible for a human to ride an animal. No similar animals existed in the Americas. They existed only in legends and myths. So they mistook men on horseback as centaur alien creatures with giant bodies and human parts coming out the top. Some were frightened. Others were fascinated and kind. They had little idea that these aliens carried with them guns and germs and the end of their way of life.

  It is a trippy thing, to ride across the waters of first contact. To feel the air that the Spanish felt, bringing with them the future. Bringing with them death. On this stage of unimaginable paradise.

  On the final day, the coast of Colombia came into view. The fabled southern universe. This continuous stretch of land would define the rest of my year. The Andes. The headwaters of the Amazon. Machu Picchu, Chile and Patagonia, and all their peoples and cultures. I had given it a power over me, an invitation to change me, to reveal me. As I watched the continent rise up on the horizon, I felt like a kid waiting for college, having bestowed it with answers to questions that he hasn’t even asked yet.

  I would live my entire thirty-first year in South America.

  Chapter 12

  COCAINE AND CUTE LITTLE MUSHROOMS

  (Cartagena and Medellín)

  8,080 miles to go

  Sailing around the jetty to enter the harbor of Cartagena, Colombia, the skyline seemed filled with cranes and high-rises. Weston was squinting, studying the city in the distance. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “What if everyone is an addict and everything is a drug?”

  “Weston, do you ever turn your brain off?” I said.

  “Some things that we all accept are actually addictions. The Internet, we’re addicted to it. Our phones, are you kidding? The dopamine hit of checking your phone. We can’t function without them. Notice how these five days on this boat…no phones, no access to the outside world. There was a withdrawal period. It was weird, right? Everything is a drug. Coffee. Caffeine. Sugar. Sugar is in everything. It’s all drugs. What does addiction mean? Can we choose or help our addictions?”

  I had gotten used to Weston tossing out deep thoughts in odd moments. He could have remarked on the skyline, the houses on the water, the beautiful yachts pulling in behind us, the new cultures and experiences we’d find in South America. Instead, Weston, a plume of smoke jetting from his lips, was staring past all these things and seeing addiction and unjust social expectations.

  “Society thinks people are addicted to weed, which is medicine,” he went on. “Mushrooms grow wild on cow shit. A gift from nature. But if you walk across your own land and collect them, growing all on their own, the government can arrest you.”

  “You don’t think you’re addicted to weed?” I interjected. “You smoke every day.”

  He turned to me with an earnest look on his face. “What’s the difference between being addicted to something and wanting to do something because you love it?” he said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Addiction is a term people use to label and categorize and dismiss. It stops you thinking about it. Addiction implies that the thing is bad. It’s all made up. I just want to think critically.”

  The boat pulled into the dock and the staff hopped off and tied her down. We lined up and got off the boat and waited to be led to customs. I was nervous about our passports, but I also had confidence in our skipper. You don’t get leathery skin and a swagger like that without knowing your shit.

  He came around and collected all our passports again, taking special care of mine and Weston’s, putting them in a separate pocket. Then he led us from the dock to a large marble-and-cement building a few blocks away. Inside, bored tourists sat waiting, some on their iPads, some reading, some dead asleep on the shoulders of their friends. But our eyes were on Wayne. He seemed to know an important woman who sat behind a glass wall at an old wooden table stacked high with manila folders. As he handed her the passports, he patted her shoulder and smiled at her and said something. She didn’t smile back. She glanced at our group with deadpan consideration before disappearing back into an office. Wayne spun on his heels toward us, smiled wide, and shrugged.

  We waited for about an hour. Wayne left to “grab something,” he said. The rest of our group passed time by reminiscing about our boat trip, but Weston and I were growing more and more worried. Our fates were in the hands of grumpy Colombian government workers behind glass.

  Then, all of a sudden, Wayne was back, holding what looked like a potato sack full of lumpy objects. As he strolled in, an older man waddled out of the back room where all the official business was happening. Wayne handed him the bag, and they shared a joke. The old man looked inside, grinned from ear to ear, shook Wayne’s hand, and walked back to the back. Two seconds later, he emerged with a stack of passports and handed them to Wayne. Were ours in there?

  Wayne passed them out, winked at us, and handed ours to us. Sure enough, they had been stamped like everyone else’s. Colombia. We were official, even though there was no proof we’d been in Panama.

  “What was in that bag?” I asked.

  “San Blas lobster,” Wayne said, smiling big. “They love it down here.”

  * * *

  —

  WAYNE HAD DIRECTED a group of us to a hostel in the old town. “It’s clean and cheap.” I wondered if he got kickbacks or something for directing business to them. We wound our way through the narrow streets, with Spanish architecture and flowers on every balcony and terrace. Weston and I were so happy to be in Colombia with our passports. We were in South America. We’d made it to a new continent.

  Cartagena reminded me of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Some of the buildings were falling apart, but their tall shuttered windows and ornate carvings gave testimony to a former glory. They looked haunted. The hostel turned out to be an ugly white box of a building, stained from humidity and rain and soot. But we could get a big bunk room that fit most of us for $11 a person per night. Not bad.

  During the week we’d spent on the boat, Weston had bonded with Henry, the bald Asian man with good hats and a kind smile. A former military man, Henry was traveling the world solo, hoping to reignite his love for the world. He and Weston had a shared love of weed, but now that they were in Colombia, they wanted cocaine. “It comes from here, so we owe it to ourselves to have it from the source,” said Weston.

  I’d never done cocaine. People who “do drugs” do cocaine. Coke was the drug in the movies that gave people nosebleeds, funded the cartel wars and beheadings, and fueled the sloppiest of Hollywood parties. It didn’t have the lazy harmless charm of weed, or the spiritual gospel of mushrooms. It seemed darker, dirtier to me. And now Weston and Henry were heading to the streets to find some. “Y’all, just please don’t go down any alleys or anything,” I said. “It will be very annoying to try and bail you out of jail.” I was feigning irritation, but I was actually nervous.

  “Every gringo on the street down here is looking for coke,” Henry said. “Don’t stress. We’ll be right back.”

  By the time I unpacked and took a shower, they were already back. I laughed and they laughed and the anxious kid inside me that doesn’t like breaking rules twisted and turned. They had cocaine in their pockets.

  Henry saw my laptop on my bed and asked, “Can I use that for a second?” Then he sat down next to it and poured a bit out—right on top of the Apple logo. White powder, just like in the movies. I thought about my laptop having cocaine on it.
About drug-sniffing dogs in the airport detecting it. I just watched, frozen.

  Henry took out his credit card and cut two lines. He leaned over and sucked one up. Then Weston bent down and did the same. Henry wiped the bit left with his fingers and rubbed his finger around his gums. Done and done.

  “Uhm, please wipe my laptop clean,” I said. Henry smiled an understanding if not patronizing smile and wiped the laptop with his T-shirt.

  “Okay now,” he said. “Let’s go check out this town!”

  We rounded up the other boaters—the Swedish girls and the Dutch couple—and headed to a bar.

  Along the way, the streets were crawling with locals trying to sell us coke. As we walked by, men would mumble “coca,” “coca-ee-na” under their breath. Some said it full volume with bravado. Some of the guys had bruises on their faces, tattered clothes, strung-out speech. It was dark. I kept watching Weston for a change in his behavior. I expected him to get glazed and spacey like he did on strong weed. He didn’t. He was hilarious. His wit was sharp as we laughed and told stories.

  “Are you feeling anything?” I asked him between beers at the bar.

  “God, yes. I am alive.”

  “But you don’t seem like you’re on anything.”

  “Coke is an upper. It just gets you going.”

  I didn’t know drugs could be like that. A thought crossed my mind: Wow, I like Weston so much more on coke than weed. Maybe this is a good change. Another thought crossed my mind: I am glad my friend is on cocaine right now. My new normal would have shocked my teenage self.