Murrieta, California, April 8, 1993: I stared at the hole in the ground in front of me, a hole in the manicured grass. Above it hovered the huge box holding one of my heroes inside it, Howard Scott Gentry. He hated green grass, preferring to sow wild, unruly native plants wherever he had lived. It was not only his preference, it was his trade as well. He was a plant explorer who had spent more than half a century roaming the desert border states, collecting agaves and other wild plants with promise, many of which he brought into cultivation for the very first time.
As of April Fool’s Day, he was done roaming; this would be the last time he was headed for new ground. His daughters, his wife, his Mexican sidekick Juanito, and many old friends were there to see him off. Some of us served as pallbearers. Others just stood back and cried.
They were ready to lower him into the grave, but I was not ready to let him go. I wished I had one last chance to “talk agave” with him. It would have been too hard to tell him all that he meant to me. Instead, I simply wanted to tell him that I had recently found people still growing, eating, and celebrating the Hohokam century plant, Agave murpheyi, a rarity that had posed an unsolved riddle for him for almost thirty years.
When he and I “talked agave,” it seemed that the rest of the world stood still. I could listen to that old man tell me of his plant-exploring adventures for hours. It was funny that we were so much on the same wavelength for that one subject, because whenever we talked about anything else-farming, business, politics, love, marriage, the work of friends, or even the origins of beans-we seldom saw eye to eye. He was forty-nine years my senior, and we had come from different cultures. And yet, we had ended up loving some of the very same things: the smoky taste of home-brewed mescal, the sound of campesinos tending maguey, and the diversity of shapes, sizes, and circumstances in which agaves grow.
Once I had invited him down from his home so that he could talk to a bunch of friends out in a desert garden at night. We sat and drank the fermented, distilled juices of the very plant that was the subject of his rambling lecture. He spoke within the shadow of a giant maguey, and near the end of his talk, he glanced over his shoulder at it and declared that, “Being a man, I think and speak as a man, but today I also speak for agave […]
