I remember the first time I met Richard Schultes; it was not what I expected. It was September of 1974; I had come from Berkeley to Cambridge on a Greyhound bus, via a circuitous route that had taken me through the Stropharia fields of Louisiana, through the deep South and on through New York to Boston. I was 23 and on a pilgrimage to find myself, to see the country, to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Mostly, I was on a pilgrimage to see Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, who in my estimation at the time was the world’s greatest scientist, and certainly the world’s greatest ethnobotanist. Twenty-seven years later, on hearing the news that Dr. Schultes had left this world, I found little reason to revise that initial estimation. The world has lost a great man.
I had come to Cambridge to meet Dr. Schultes and to discuss the possibility of doing graduate work with him; a dream that was not to be realized in the end, but the beginning of a warm friendship between us. I arrived at his office, breathless and sweating in the unseasonably hot, humid temperatures. Still covered with road grime, I had come directly from the bus station, carrying my backpack and my precious file box of Schultes reprints. Schultes’ receptionist gave me a place to store my things, and ushered me into a dimly lit office with all the shades drawn; I could hear the low hum of an air conditioner going full blast, but at first I couldn’t see anyone. Then, in the corner by the air conditioner, I spotted a crewcut man in a white coat, with thick, steel-framed glasses (like my own). His back was to me and as I stared I realized that he had both arms around the air conditioner, and was literally hugging it, trying to get closer to the little bit of cool air the thing feebly spewed forth. I smiled to myself at this incongruous encounter. This swashbuckling botanist who had spent years in the Amazon, under the most extreme and daunting conditions, was ensconced in his Harvard office in September, huddled up to his air conditioner! I was immediately charmed, and disarmed. The great Richard Schultes liked his comfort, just like we all do; what made him different from most was that he never let discomfort or inconvenience interfere with what needed to be done. Ethnobotany in the field, the way Schultes did it, is a dirty business. You have to go to remote places and eat strange food (or sometimes little food at all), expose yourself to malaria, insects, parasites, and sundry diseases, hang out with strange and not always friendly people; you have to put up with a lot, in order to do ethnobotany Schultes-style. He was a collector and cataloguer of plants; he understood that that was his job, and he endured incredible hardships, not out of some misplaced sense of macho adventurism, but simply because it was part of the job. I doubt that he ever thought of himself as particularly adventurous. If you wanted to collect plants, you went where the plants were, simple as that. The inconvenience and dangers of getting there were for him a side issue.
Besides plants, which he knew well, Schultes was also a keen observer of how humans use plants. He understood people as well as plants. Because of this perspective, he understood all of the economic and cultural implications of humanity’s relationship with plants. Schultes was warning about loss of biodiversity and cultural destabilization in the 1950’s, long before it was popular. Similarly, I think his fascination with hallucinogenic plants, and the people’s use of them, was a reflection of his deeper understanding of the cultural foundations of the use of these plants. The values and fads of the 60’s-era hippie culture, with its own peculiar fascination with things psychedelic, meant nothing to Schultes (except that it kept him well-supplied with a steady crop of graduate and undergraduate students, all eager and smart and ready to do about anything to please their mentor). By the time the 60’s got rolling, Schultes had been studying hallucinogenic plants in the Southwest, Mexico, and South America, for 30 years. Schultes had never encountered the use of hallucinogens outside of a cultural milieu in which these substances were revered and respected. The connection of the plants with the spiritual and mythic lives of the people who used them was transparent and obvious to Schultes; it never occurred to him to question whether this was a "legitimate" connection because it involved the use of plants. The very idea would have seemed absurd to him.
Schultes was keenly aware of the medicinal potential of the plants he collected, and tirelessly documented numerous uses for everything from new fruit species to arrow poisons. But it was with respect to the hallucinogenic plants that he achieved notoriety, and judging by the volume of his own writings on the subject, it was a subject for which he had a particular passion. I believe that Schultes’ interest in the hallucinogens sprang from the same altruistic roots as his interest in the healing power of plants for all of the ills that afflict humanity. He had seen the role that such plants fulfilled in the spiritual and cultural life of the peoples he lived with, worked with, and loved. I believe he had an intuition that the hallucinogenic plants, used in the proper way, could do much to heal the spiritual ills of our own desacralized, confused civilization. His job, as he saw it, was to document these uses and preserve this knowledge, until such time as a more humane, less polarized culture could appreciate them, and perhaps even integrate them.
Now R. E. Schultes has left the stage of the world. This great man, whom so many of us loved, admired, and sought to emulate, has gone to a better place, a place, to use his own phrase, "where the gods reign." Let us hope that he is enjoying himself there, and that he looks back with satisfaction on a life well lived. For those who have remained behind, we can only wish that we might, someday, be half as well remembered. The memory and the legacy of Richard Evans Schultes will always abide in the hearts and minds of those he inspired.
Dennis McKenna
Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota
April 2001
