travel

Peyote, a Drunken Sioux Medicine Man, a Snake Museum, and a Scottish Drug Dealer

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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.

Manifesting a Sikh Temple Meal in Berlin, Germany

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There is no such thing as a coincidence; or is there? In February 2025 I was notified that I had one Wooga’s June’s Journey Destination Berlin International Contest. In fact I learned that out of 1.1. million players, and out of all the contest entries, I was the ONLY person in the WHOLE world who got all the quiz questions correct, the question written to find their most ardent detectives correct – NO ONE ELSE DID, and Dario said my essay would have won even if I had failed the quiz!


All the plane tickets to get to Berlin were purchased by Wooga and they put me up in the 5 star Berlin Marriott Hotel near the Brandenburg Gate and the entrance to the Tiergarten and paid for my meals and taxis.

Just a short 110 meters (361 feet) walk from the entrance to the hotel was the entrance to a FABULOUS Indian restaurant. Being partially disabled, this was just the right distance for me to walk to the traffic light, wait, get to the median, wait, then cross. And this is where I ate Sunday and Monday nights.

A lot of Indian restaurants have pictures and statutes of Lord Krishna and Lord Ganesha. Except for a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City which had a statute of Green Tara, it’s rare to find ones that are what the Tibetans call “empowered”. After eating a meal worth traveling for 3 days to get to, I asked if I could take photos. I was transfixed by the seated Ganesha and didn’t notice a man asking me in German how I was. I was startled and he had to ask again in English.

This Ganesha was most definitely “alive” for lack of a better word. I was instructed to touch his foot for a blessing. The energy felt like “home”.

This Ganesha was adorable, but I didn’t “feel” anything.

Lord Krishna was standing right behind my table. I kept feeling like someone was staring at me. I turned and the statue glowed and I felt like Shri Krishna was just as mirthful as could be.

This is the formal entrance to the restaurant.

I sat facing the street. It was just a bit too breezy to sit outside in the outdoor cafe section. A sparrow kept getting on my table and stealing rice so I finally just gave him some.

This a banquet room and the energy in this area was incredible!

That led to a conversation that would blow my mind. One he attended college in Wayne, New Jersey which is not far at all from Upper Montclair where I graduated back in 1975. What was even more of a mind blower is the statues were imported from Bali and they have a shrine in the kitchen.

If you know ANYTHING at all about Sikh temples, known as Gurdwaras, anyone can go and eat a free vegetarian meal called a Langar. Everyone is welcome, rich and poor. The food is blessed and anyone who has the karma to receive such a meal is extraordinarily lucky. I have always wanted to get to India to visit a Gurdwara, but not that I have trouble flying, I hold out no hope of ever going.

HOWEVER, a restaurant where the owner and the chefs are Sikhs cooking in a kitchen with a shrine, I think my wish came true. The food tasted better than anything I ever ate. And the detox effect was indisputable.

This is what I had Sunday night and I went back Monday and got adventurous.

This was the BEST salad I have ever eaten anywhere ever!

THIS is the Mumbai hot fudge brownie with Madagascar Vanilla Ice cream served in a piping hot iron skillet so the hot fudge sauce bubbles the entire time you eat it with a tiny silver spoon!

I had to order the raita – it’s not on the menu. The waiter was shocked when I asked for it. The lamb korma was outstanding.

I was not all that fond of the chicken Punjabi street food. The chicken melt like butter in my mouth, but the flavoring was different than the tandoori chicken spices or chicken tikka spices I’m used to. The samosas were HUGE and I could only make a dent in one.

I fell in love with the tea and am going to order it on Amazon. It was exactly what I needed to detox from getting sick on the flight from Salt Lake City to Boston and then the next day from Boston to Dublin. Right before I had to leave to drive 4 hours east to Salt Lake City so I could fly to Boston, a process server showed up with a SECOND lawsuit filed by Armstrong Steel.

I filed my response when I got back. It hopefully, will be covered by the national news soon.

READ MORE ABOUT IT:

A Black Nissan on Last Chance Road – A Phantom Car or a Genius Loci

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Last week was hell week. On Tuesday, February 4, 2025 I spent all day on Zoom in a forced arbitration one-day Expedited Fast Track Award in Two Weeks Evidentiary Hearing hosted by the American Arbitration Assocation with assets of over $107 MILLION US dollars. I was sued by Atlantic Building Systems, a Delaware Incorporated Limited Liability Company Doing Business as Armstrong Steel in Colorado for breach of contract. I had, according to their general counsel, Repudiated THEIR contract by declaring null and void. I declared it null and void because the company uses bait and switch and high pressured sales tactics. Click on the link to watch one of the news reports about the class action lawsuit and all the irate customers who have been silenced for the most part.

This is my hero! Wish we could do the Haka in our courts or in Congress.

My girlfriend, Ännie who had been in the truck the day I got the phone call from the sales rep and her fiancè had spent the night so Ännie could appear as a witness if called. She was and she did a great job. Two days later on Thursday, February 6 shortly before 11 am, Alex was heading towards town from the gravel pit at the end of Last Chance Road in Elko – the same road where I got the fateful call from Armstrong Steel in 2023, when while on a sharp blind curve on the gravel, a speeding black Nissan came right at Alex. This was the first time EVER that Ännie and her dog, Bandit were not in the truck.

Alex swerved and the truck rolled and he was thrown clear. Truck got damaged but Alex was miraculously not killed nor injured – hurt his back, but it’s healing.

Okay, but here is where it gets weird. The black Nissan could only have traveled on up to the end and gone through the gate to the gravel pit and it didn’t. It was never seen again.

WAS IT a phantom or what’s called a GENIUS LOCI??????

WHAT is a genius loci you ask? Let’s back up a month to June 2021 not long before Mr. Littell was attacked by pit bulls on July 8, 2021 ON LAST CHANCE ROAD! Sometime in late May or early June of 2021 I saw a comment on the Facebook page for Skinwalker Ranch. One of the members of the group posted a comment about his first hand account of encountering a genius loci. His friend saw a truck barreling towards him in the dark and he, himself, saw a gray alien. Click on the screenshot for a great article about genius loci and landscapes.

A genius loci might be an earth spirit (known as chthonic forces) which had never inhabited human form.

What Michael Willis described is really scary. I told him to get in touch with Joshua P. Warren and Josh had him on his podcast. Click on the screenshot to hear it.

The transcript is available and this is where I come in.

Well, you are about to hear the actual words of a guy who says he’s an ex military man who has a heck of a tale and he has never been on a show before, so this is breaking. This is the first time. And I was referred to this guy by a regular listener named Barbara Thank you, Barbara, and I want to reiterate something to all of you. I received thousands of emails each week from people who want to come on this show and tell a story, and as a general rule, I usually don’t allow it. And the reason is that I want to be different from everyone else. This is not primarily an interview show.

Josh goes on to describe how he rarely ever has a guest on. He then talks about a test he does to decide if a person is telling the truth, etc. All that said, Josh then introduces Michael Willis who lives in Washington State. Sometime in 2010 or 2011 Michael was hunting in Alabama with a close friend. If you do not live in the United States, Washington is up by Canada on the Pacific side of the country and Huntsville, Alabama is in the deep state in the now named Gulf of America.

It was in Huntsville where the two men encountered a genius loci!

Now it’s important to point out that Michael is a retired sailor with eleven years out
at sea with a background in what he called Intel which is basically saying he was in Intelligence not just a regular enlisted sailor. He was also in the Merchant Marines. Michael was also a firearms salesman and range instructor so he was not some desk job guy working in a cubicle all day. This is someone with outdoor survival skills.

Michael goes on to talk about Roman mythology to give the audience an idea of what a genius loci is. Click on the links above. To quote Michael “The Romans believed that if you
were strong enough of spirit, like the emperors when they passed away, they would their spirit would guard the empire, or they would guard Rome or Byzantium or certain cities”.

This scene is next to impossible to watch. It is a Thai TV series which aired on Netflix. You can watch it on YouTube with Thai subtitles, but I cannot find a channel that has English. If it ever becomes available again, I highly recommend it. The gist is that the king’s guard is forced to behead his wife who is a temple dancer. He adores her and yet as the temple dancer who is dedicated to the protection of the empire, her soul is the one who must guard the treasure of the kingdom. Once she is chained and beheaded her soul or spirit is stuck and must guard not only the treasure, but she is forced to slaughter (not just kill) evil doers and escort them to HELL!

I blogged about it

A Thai Temple Dancer Goes to Court

This is extremely gruesome so be forewarned. The scene takes place Ayutthaya in April 1760 as the Burmese attacked and massacred the Ayutthayan people and foreign merchants on the southern moat. Minkhaung Nawrahta fires cannons into the Ayutthaya citadel, damaging structures including Ekkathat’s royal residence. This temple guard takes his wife into a secret treasure chamber, chains her to the floor and beheads her forcing her soul to guard the temple forever. GORGEOUS filming and costumes but gory. VERY gory. And you have to have some understanding of Thai culture and history to appreciate the script. If you just want to watch a great series for the cinematography and acting, if it’s ever back on, do try to watch it.

So back to Michael. He says that Huntsville, Alabama is known as Rocket City because of their relationship with NASA. Michael and his best friend who had also been in the Navy like to go exploring spooky places. They decided to check out Hell’s Gate. The legend says that if you drive up to this old, beat up, wrought iron gate and park your car, within minutes, a huge black vehicle black truck would appear from down the driveway and chase you away.

The locals tell stories claiming that if the truck ever caught you horrific horrible things would happen to you. So off these two sailors go to see if any of it as true.

They found the area during the day. There were no trespassing signs nor purple stickers on the on the trees. They went home and went on Google Earth to try and look and see if there
were any structures. They could not find an owner so they decided to go back at night. Michael drove his truck and parked right in front of the gate.

“For about five minutes, nothing happened. Then we decided to get a little braver and walk
up the driveway, which looking back, was not the smartest idea. Being a firearms instructor at the time I was I was carrying and you know, I know, don’t go into the woods without a sidearm in case you run into bears or or worse. And as we were walked up the driveway, we noticed that it overrun there was grass everywhere, about knee high weeds. I mean, there’s no way a car had ever been up and down this driveway for years.


Michael goes on to say that when they got “about a quarter mile in and there was a large field, no trees, no bushes, just a large empty field. Maybe a building had been there a long time ago, but nothing was there now. And we searched all over the area, didn’t find anything, but we were very clearly had a feeling of being watched, that there was something in the woods that was looking at us and watching us, and we decided to try and explore a little further. We decided to go off to one of the nearest paths to the driveway, and as we were walking up the path, I started hearing the sound of the best way I can describe it is like a chittering sound, like a like a chattering sound. No no real no words, just chitter, chitter, chitter like, almost an insect like sound.

And here is where it gets strange.

Michael’s friend told him once they got to safety, that he had started hearing the sound of a large car engine revving. Michael, on the other hand, as they got further into the woods, started seeing things out of the corner of his eyes, darting from tree to tree to tree.

Michael has is terrified of the very thought of alien abduction. A few nights before the two men had watched The Fourth Kind

Michael looked at his friend and I asked if he heard or saw anything. All his friend heard was a truck sound. “I clearly I remember looking up the path just a little bit and I saw what looked to me to be a gray and alien lean out from one of the trees and then go back in”. While talking, Michael spots a gray and says to get out of there. They started walking as fast as they could both hearing something behind them so they started to run.

Michael says “the whole way you could hear these things, something behind us following us. We stopped about and neither one of us were the best of shape, and we stopped for just a few seconds. About half we count the driveway, and I turned around to look at my friend, and standing probably five ft behind him in the middle of this you know, fifteen ft wide, old broke down driveway was what looked like to me, a gray like you’d see in these space movies, and it was reaching out to grab my friend’s shoulder, and I reached out, grabbed my friend, threw him as fast as I could behind me while yelling run, and with my other hand, I drew my side arm, slammed it out and pulled the trigger twice. And as I did that, this thing it just it vibrated like it started shaking, and then it disappeared right in front of my eyes. This thing just disappeared”.

From this point on I urge you to listen to Michael tell the rest. It has all the suspense and drama you could hope for.

Now back to Last Chance Road and the blind curve on gravel and the Black Nissan. I called my friend Melodee to tell her about the accident and she blurted out “I ALMOST got hit by that SUV and I saw it go through the gates racing towards the gravel pit!” Click on the image. This is a Facebook reel I did last summer. Got told to get out I did. I tried to explain I’m from New Jersey and I had never seen anything like this. Didn’t matter. Get out.

So the mystery still hasn’t been solved. WHO drives a black Nissan SUV at what seems like 90 miles per hour on a gravel road paralleling the Humboldt River in Elko, Nevada?

I filmed this last summer when my friends ran out of water. They live off grid and it was super hot out. It’s a 4 minute video so you can see Last Chance Road where Mr. Littell who is in the front seat used to have to hike with his former owner. Now he’s my co-pilot.

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