Origin Stories

Rivers, psilocybin, and bodies that hold secrets.

During the summer of 2002, I drove from Sonoma County, California to Missoula, Montana with my friend Tim and my boyfriend, now husband, Andy. We made the journey in Tim’s white Ford pickup, sitting three abreast on the grey vinyl bench, eating cheese sandwiches and tacos, and listening to Fela Kuti and Brian Eno as the warm wind whipped across our faces.

In Idaho, we stopped on the Salmon River to hike to a hot spring that Tim had been visiting for years. The spring, which featured a hot waterfall and a series of smaller, blisteringly hot pools that nestled against the rocky banks of the river, could be reached via trail or by swimming. It was late June or early July and the river was running fast and cold, but we decided to swim it anyway. Before we jumped in, Andy and I each ate a handful of psilocybin mushrooms. Tim abstained.

In hindsight, I see the decision to take a large amount of psychedelic mushrooms and jump in a swiftly moving body of water as probably not advisable. Although I’d been experimenting with mushrooms and other psychedelics since I was 15 years old, this particular situation posed some unique challenges that I hadn’t fully grasped. In other words, a safe container matters, and a river is probably not a safe container.

Anyway, my familiarity with psychedelics at this point in my life was no match for the raw power of the river. The sting of the frigid water was the first surprise. The second surprise was the flow and velocity of the water. The icy current pulled me quickly downstream, much faster than I had anticipated. Although the chill of the water mixed pleasingly with the slowly intensifying tingles of the mushrooms branching through my fingers and toes, I was acutely aware that I needed to stay alert and not succumb to sensory overwhelm before I reached the hot springs.

And then BAM!

I smacked into a boulder hidden beneath the surface of the water. I had been floating feet first, which meant that I made solid contact with the rock with my tailbone and coccyx. The impact was so sudden and jarring that I stood up in the water, the current pushing me forward as I braced myself against the offending rock. I could see Andy downriver, he’d found the springs and was climbing out of the flow onto the rocky beach. I made a calculation that at this point walking might be harder than floating, so I braced myself, took a few deep breaths and floated. As the water carried me, the sky sucked in on itself and the mushrooms took effect.

Somehow I managed to drag myself out of the water onto the banks of the river and into one of the smaller hot pools. I could not speak or move, as the entire world was folding in above me. And that’s when things really started to get wild.

The first leg of the journey. Still sitting.

But first, I should back up.

When was 16 I had patella re-alignment surgery on my left knee. The surgery came at the end of a series of soccer-related kneecap dislocations and a torn medial collateral ligament. The idea was that by re-aligning my patella tendon and bolting it to my femur, my patella would track correctly and my kneecap would stop dislocating. My orthopedic surgeon was the team doctor for the San Jose Sharks; he had a big head of hair and an even bigger ego. I trusted him because I didn’t know that I shouldn’t, and he performed surgery on my knee that left me in excruciating pain. When I’d finished the 4 months of post-op physical therapy I made the incredibly wise decision to do a backflip on my friend Megan’s trampoline and broke my leg right beneath the screws. From that point, running became incredibly painful; each impact with the ground would send a sharp shooting pain down my shin. In time I came to terms with the reality that I wouldn’t be playing college soccer, and that I’d experience chronic pain in that leg indefinitely.

Tim and Andy on our roadtrip.

Now back to the river in Idaho.

I’ve dragged myself into one of the scalding little pools. Andy is less than a hundred feet away in a pool of his own, and I can see Tim sitting by the hot waterfall. But I’ve lost my ability to use words. I cannot tell them what’s happened because the bulbous cumulus clouds overhead are sucking inward, and the pain in my tailbone is beginning to radiate through my body like a sonic wave. Then, the pain becomes a sound, or rather, a sort of audio recording that is playing just for me.

As I lay in that hot spring beside a river in Idaho, I heard, word for word, drill by drill, hammer for hammer, the entirety of the audio of my knee surgery. I listened to the nurses joking around and the quippy little asides that my doctor made as he drilled into my leg. I heard everything. Unable to move, I bore witness to an event that I’d experienced under anesthesia the first time. My body remembered all of it.

The impact of hitting the rock had knocked the entire memory of my surgery loose.

Over the course of the next few hours I dragged myself from that pool into the river, where I purged and purged. I’d slide my body carefully into the frigid flow so that the water washed over me, an act of purification, releasing the memories and pain of that surgery, long held by my body, into its flow. (Sidenote: Ewww, gross. I know. And not great for the river. Mea culpa)

Eventually, I was able to stand and hobble back to our campsite with Tim’s help. For the rest of the road trip I had to lay down in a soft bed of blankets and pillows that Andy and Tim made for me in the back of the truck; sitting was simply too painful. Watching as the truck swallowed the road, yellow dotted lines stretching into the distance, I tried to make sense of what I’d experienced. From my cozy little nest, I marveled that my body had been keeping these secrets. It would be years until I learned about somatic memory—but I knew that what I’d felt and heard was real.

Me, in the Smith, captured by Andy Paiko

This story can read as a cautionary tale about risk-taking and youthful hubris, or as a story about a profound psychedelic journey. It is both those things. Over the years, and through numerous re-tellings, I’ve also come to understand it as something more fundamental. It is an origin story.

On that day, the river, perhaps my most important teacher, taught me to recognize the wisdom of my own body. It took striking a rock with my ass —my root—while caught in the wild flow, to really listen.

I want to stop here and acknowledge how uncomfortable it makes me to 1) write about psychedelics on the internet and, 2) write with such unabashed earnestness. My instinct is to make jokes and deflect when I lean too far towards the mystical. It’s really easy for me to fall back on well-tread traditions of critical and analytical thinking to discredit and topple all the other ways of knowing. But, that’s bullshit. And really, how are we to tackle the enormous problems of our world if we don’t listen and speak to that deeper knowing? So fuck it.

The river gives life. It draws from source. It also takes life. There are moments when the pull of the current, a particular sucking around a rock or beneath a rock, reminds me how quickly the river could simply claim me, or anyone for that matter.

A picture of my butt, legs, and Chacos diving into our favorite local spot on the Washougal River. Photo by Tracy Harrison

Reverence for the river is as old as human story. In ancient Greek mythology, the river Styx was both a female deity and one of the five rivers that merged in the center of the underworld, and the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In order to avoid being trapped on earth to haunt the living, souls paid for a final journey across the Styx on Charon’s ferry to pass into the afterlife. In India, the Ganges is a sacred entity known as Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges. Hindu belief holds that ritualized bathing in the river aids in the forgiveness of transgressions and helps the faithful to attain salvation. Ashes of the deceased are scattered into the Ganges in order to end the cycle of reincarnation and release the soul to Moksha (heaven). It’s also important to note that today the fertile deposits of the Ganges basin support a population of a half billion people.

Our kids swimming in the Smith River. Photo by Jacob Katz

For one week each year, our family travels to the Smith River in rural Northern California to spend a week swimming and spending uninterrupted time with our dear friends. We stay on the property of the Smith River Alliance in an off-the-grid ranch house outfitted with a propane fridge and a huge library of books left behind by the scientists, volunteers, and visitors like myself who pass through. We cook, we catch up, and we swim and swim and swim.

The Smith is unique in that it is the largest un-dammed river in California. The water is cold, clear, and an intense emerald green due to serpentine deposits laced throughout the surrounding rock.

Our children learned to swim in this river.

Each year they grow bolder, diving deeper, jumping from higher rocks, and snorkeling through bigger rapids to catch glimpses of the Cutthroat Trout and Steelhead congregating in the deepest pools. From its banks, we watch dippers feeding their young and playful minks weaving their way along the edges of the cliffs. When we’re lucky we catch glimpses of bears and river otters; sometimes there are rattlesnakes.

The river is also the place that we go to process the biggest challenges in our lives. In the early years this meant commiserating about sleep deprivation and the relentlessness of raising young children in late capitalism. One year was skipped because a wildfire threatened the property. One year it was processing the suicide of a dear friend and responding to a fire that threatened our friends’ home. Other years it was managing marital crises, political chaos, pandemics, and prolonged illness. And more recently, it’s been holding each other in grief after the death of three of our friends’ parents.

Life happens and we endure. Then we travel to the river to talk, fight, laugh, cry, fish, float, and immerse ourselves in the jade waters. And each year we emerge anew; not always healed, but somewhere closer to it.

Photo by Jacob Katz

I’m always the last one in the river. I’m terrified of the cold, and also a big weenie. So I pretend to be a lizard, stretching myself low against the hot rocks and I warm myself until there is no other choice but to succumb to the water.

Submerged beneath the weight of the water I can hear myself more clearly. My heart beats loudly in my chest and my lungs burn; I am completely embodied. I remind myself to remember this feeling, to float as I listen to the river, harnessing the power of its movement, its fluidity and flexibility. In it I find stillness despite its turbulence.

The Buddha is quoted as saying: “Just as a mountain stream, coming from afar, swiftly flowing, carrying along much flotsam, will not stand still for a moment, an instant, a second, but will rush on, swirl and flow forward; even so . . . is human life like a mountain stream.”

It seems as though there is a logjam of flotsam right now, and that the terrors of the world are bigger and scarier than ever before. The suffering is great, and the hopelessness is flattening. The devastation I feel about the way we are treating this incredible planet feels paralyzing. I have no answers, other than to head the advice of the river. Like my dance teacher Tahni Holt reminded me at class last night, I take what it gives and then step back into the world to do the hard work. One little step into the abyss at a time.

And that’s it, my friends. Beads of sweat are rolling down every crack and crevice and it’s time to stop hunching over this keyboard.

Sending all of you love.

xo,

Belle

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