Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman Page B

right (it was last night), psychedelic mushrooms grow in the cow dung and people make omelets and tea in the camp.
    I have never tried anything psychedelic, but I’ve always wanted to. Would I be wrapped up in colors, attacked by sounds, filled with insights about worlds I don’t even know exist?
    Wolfgang isn’t interested, but he promises to stay with me in case I have “a bad trip.” I have always promised myself that if I ever tried LSD or mushrooms, I would have someone I trusted at my side.
    True, I just met Wolfgang; but he is a gentle man. I know I can trust him. One of the most valuable tools I have honed in the last months is a sense of whom I can trust and whom I cannot.
    Fred, an American my age whom I instinctively do not trust, seems to be in charge of the mushroom events. He offers me a cup of tea. I accept. He’s put sugar in it, but the brew is bitter. I look around at the assembled crowd. There’s a glaze over their eyes, all of them. I’m the last one in. In minutes, my head begins to float. I am euphoric, smiling, swaying, silent.
    I remember very little about the next twelve hours. Every inch of my body from my bubbly head to my floating feet is leaping, flying, soaring. The world is filled with colors and music. There is nothing between my inner self and the outer world. We are one.
    Wolfgang doesn’t leave my side. When the sun goes down, we go back to our platform; he puts his arm around me as we walk. When we arrive at the platform, I fantasize climbing into his hammock and burying my head and hands in his beard; but it is a fantasy that stays inside my head as he helps me gently into my hammock. I close my eyes and float through the night.
    A couple of days later, ten of us pile into the back of a pickup for a trip to the spectacular Agua Azul Park, where turquoise water crashes down rocky cliffs, caresses massive boulders, and slides sinuously over silky stones.
    A group of us wander off the trail to a waterfall that is cascading down forty feet of cliff. The final vestiges of my modesty are tossed off with my clothes as we all run into the falls, the warm and powerful water pounding our heads and shoulders and pouring down our bodies. We laugh and squeal and dance in the sun and the sparkling falls. I am not sure who this woman is, but she is certainly not the me of four months ago.
    That night I lie in my hammock, swinging gently and thinking about the last five days. I have buried my fears, abandoned self-consciousness, and allowed myself to slide into sensation. I like the person I have become. I am even feeling positive and optimistic about the marriage. Surely these new experiences will enable me to bring something different and exciting into our relationship. In less than a week, I will be in Los Angeles.
    Before I board the plane in Mexico City, I call my husband.
    “I may have to go to a meeting,” he says. “If I’m not there, take the Super Shuttle.”

    A four-foot-long sign with bright red letters is stretched between two giggly little girls in braids:
Bienvenidos Papi.
    Two uniformed men, holding placards high above the heads of the crowd in front of them, are looking for their passengers.
    A clutch of people speaking Mandarin are calling to an old man arriving in a wheelchair. His face is glowing and smiling with recognition.
    A shriek pierces the air and a twentyish woman swings her lithe body under the rope and gallops to greet the young shrieking woman who is walking behind me.
    A couple in front of me cannot stop kissing and touching.
    It’s a scene I usually love, families and friends hugging and calling and chattering in different languages, nearly everyone smiling. But this time my heart is pounding and my eyes are tearing. No one is there for me.
    I call the Super Shuttle.
    Forty-five minutes later, I fumble with the key, my fingers barely able to hold it. The house is the same as it was when I left four months earlier; nothing has changed. Except now it feels