For the month of May 2002, with the blessings of the then Assistant University Librarian at UTEP who just happened to be a fifth generation curandero from southern Mexico, I left El Paso to attend a Medical Librarian Conference in Dallas.  My task was to travel around Texas giving presentations on a proposal for implementing bibliographic instruction in the UT libraries.  That effort failed but I got to tour the Crystal Caves with just the guide – no one else showed up – in Sonora, Texas.  Same thing happened at the White Shaman Cave, near Comstock.  I was the only visitor so I got a personal tour.  I was searching for sacred plants in the wild.  Toured the botanical gardens in Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin searching for the plants by “feel”. 

I almost left the gardens in San Antonio without finding Sophora secundiflora.  So I stood at a fork in the trails pondering what to do when I felt like something behind me was trying to get my attention.  I turned around and saw this GIANT tree.  Then I looked at the little tiny marker.  Sophora Secundiflora aka Texas Mountain Laurel! 

I had checked into a motel in Terlingua. I was one of the only guests so the owner, a middle aged lady and I struck up a friendship. She drove us out into the desert to teach me how to find ariocarpi. Harry was growing them, but this fascinating lady said she had a friend who owned a ranch and on the top of hill I’d be able to photograph dozens of them growing wild. It was quite a sight I must say.

At the gas station in Terlingua, I was babbling on about WHY I was on the border searching the parking lot edges and the people “hanging out” there said I needed to call this Sioux Medicine Man who lived nearby. He had moved there from North or South Dakota and was very knowlegable about such things. They warned me he was a heavy drinker.

I was able to call him from the office at the motel. Here’s where it gets weird. I was willing to drive to wherever he was to interview him. NOPE barely got what I was trying to do out of my mouth when he cut me off in mid sentence. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE DINOSAUR AS A KID?

He did sound a bit drunk but I didn’t skip a beat and said “Tricerotops”. Not a T-Rex. No no I have always love the tricerotops. Still do. I got a toy model at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and kept it until I had to move in 1998. When I got to Nevada, the store downtown called Cal Ranch sold very realistic full colored ones and well I bought two because Harry, believe it or not, was also a Tricertops fan.

What he said next has puzzled me for all these years.

YOU DO NOT NEED AN INDIAN to help you find ANYTHING. You will meet up with another Scot,, you’re Scottish, right? Campbell? Uh, great grandparents were. Don’t need to meet me. You do not know what you are. You will find a Scot and when you do, you will find peyote and he abruptly hung up.

After a very pleasant stay and a swim in the pool the next day, I left and headed towards the MacDonald Observatory in Alpine where I planned on attending a night time astronomy lesson. But first I had to get to the next motel and driving in the middle of nothing for hours is deadly.

I was getting bored silly when I saw a sign for a SNAKE Museum. Mmm. Well, it will get me out of the car and although I had no interest in a going IN a SNAKE museum, I felt compelled to go in.

A rather interesting fellow welcomed me, took my entrance fee of all of $3.00, and heard my story about why I was driving all over Texas alone. Turned out the late “Buzz” was of Scottish decent! And he was, the article fails to mention this, a drug dealer who had a greenhouse with several HUGE peyote in the back.

Buzz was so excited to hear about what I was doing that he said I could not leave at all UNTIL I could find every snake in every terrarium and learn how to communicate with snakes because if I was going to be walking in the desert, I needed to sense a snake and see it or get bit. The lesson was pretty intense. I had to find each snake and if I couldn’t, I had to project my mind through the glass to get it to come out. Let’s just say that was a trip and a half. HE HAD DOZENS of them.

When I “passed the test”, Buzz said I had to meet his wife who was born in Korea. Okay, I knew a little Korean so I followed him out the back door and across some dirt and up into a trailer. A trailer filled with furniture that was torn and tattered and in a few places covered in parrot poop. Mrs. Buzz was thrilled to have a guest. I think I made some excuse not to sit down. It was a long time ago.

I do remember accepting a glass of ice tea. Buzz then said he wanted to show me his greenhouses so we left the trailer and went further out back. And sure enough he goes to the back of the largest greenhouse and brings out a medium size Jack O’Lantern size peyote and a couple of smaller ones. I had been introduced to two tiny ones and a HUGE giant before which is two more stories to tell at some point.

I then was invited to drive back the VERY next day to attend a picnic with his friends who were all veterans who well, were all drug dealers of some sort. DO NOT ask when invited to meet people what the DO for a living. Seriously DON’T.

I left thinking, damn, that was trippy, and went on to the coolest motel/hotel I’ve ever stayed at bottom of the hill below the observatory. When it was time to attend the lecture, I just had to drive up the hill. I slept in a hand hewn log bed – one like it that Harry would eventually buy and which I sold and that’s the story about the haunted bedroom set.

The night sky was cloudless and the lecture was fantastic. The next day I drove back to El Paso with a lot of stories to tell. Harry heard that he had been invited to meet this guy I had spent hours with who had a large collection of exotic cacti, so he said we needed to get to the picnic. Mind you I had been driving all over the state for over three weeks, but I drove us 3.5 hours back to the museum cause well, you don’t get invitations like that every day. On the way there were dead javalinas on a hair pin turn in the road with turkey vultures having a feast.

For all the bad things you can say about the late Harry Leo Duran, he was a fierce animal lover. We had to stop regardless or hit the birds, but he insisted I stay put and he got out and moved the carcasses so the birds could continue what scavengers do and they wouldn’t get hit by whatever car or truck would come by. He also rescued a rattler, a nest of baby barn swallows, mice, foxes, turtles, stray cats and dogs, and he fed the road runner that used to visit. I hated him, but that was the one thing about him that held whatever bond we had together.

Buzz and his wife and his rough around the edges friends were ecstatic that a Ph.D. and a Ph.D./M.D. would honor them by coming to their picnic. We sat a standard wooden picnic table that looked 30 years old at least and ate hot dogs while being swarmed with more flies than I think I’ve ever seen in my life. Anthropologists are trained to fit in so I ate my hotdog swatting the flies like everyone else. Harry grew up in Aztec, NM and although he said on the way home that was the most flies he had ever seen as well, we weren’t going to die from the food despite the fact that well, most of it had already had a fly or two land on it.

They all asked us a lot of questions and kept saying – DAMN you two are ED U Cated – insert accents. And YOU are willing to treat us like equals! And they proceeded to tell us all their medical problems which everyone does if they figure out you are a doctor or know medicine etc.

Buzz grilled Harry about cacti and after we ate took us to tour the greenhouses. He said he was so glad to make friends with us he gifted Harry several rare hallucinogenic Peruvian cacti! I always felt bad that we never went back. It was a long miserable drive but still, 3.5 hours one way in Texas is nothing considering El Paso is about 4 hours to Albuquerque and almost 8 to San Antonio with nothing but Ciudad Juarez to the south and Las Cruces an hour north.

My task was to find FOUR sacred plants – peyote, the Mountain Laurel, datura – which was easy = we had datura in our own yard because it grows like a weed in Texas, and Salvia Divinorum which we had growing in a pot in our kitchen.  The arioocarpus was a bonus.

I arrived back home having photographed pictographs at the White Shaman, gone on the tour of the crystal caves – that’s another story as well because it a paranormal twist to it – stayed at motel in Comstock with an old lady who raised parrots, stayed a motel in Terilingua with a fascinating lady, met drug dealers, stuffy librarians, a Sikh who warned me NOT to go driving around Dallas and to DEFINITELY not go to the botanical gardens because it wasn’t safe, a security guard in a Mexican seafood restaurant who stood over me the whole time I ate and who walked me to my car because the restaurant, he said was in the HOOD despite being within walking distance of Baylor University, ranchers who took me on a tour in an ancient pick up truck with no shock absorbers to see metates dug into ancient rock, and seeing dead people in the river on the Riverwalk boat trip in San Antonio. Just your typical road trip, right?

FURTHERING READING:

I found this sad note: Buzz’s museum is now permanently closed as of 11/7/2024. Owner had placed a sign in the door stating the museum has been closed due to personal reasons after 24 years of business.

The boat tour I took was one of the more traditional ones but this is along video if you want to see what the tourists see.