People who have known me for a long time might raise an eyebrow to hear that I’m on a spiritual journey. But even in my most egocentric moments, I’ve always known I am not the biggest thing in the universe. Three years ago, I had an opportunity to plug into life in an unexpected and blessed way. Through the generosity of the Comanche, I learned about peyotism, the faith that has arguably been practiced in Texas longer than any other.

In the years since, I have participated in all-night meetings conducted by one of the Comanche chapters of the Native American Church, a religious organization that uses peyote as a complex, powerful sacrament. More than 300,000 Native people are members, with chapters spread across the U.S. and Canada. Let me be clear: I am a part of an NAC chapter, but I am not a member. I am white, and only Native people enrolled in a federally recognized tribe can join—and, under federal law, legally possess and use peyote. In 2021, I observed but did not participate in a peyote meeting held on the largest of the four Medicine Mounds in Hardeman County outside Quanah.

That night, the person in charge, the “roadman,” was Billy Komahcheet, whom I’d met previously while working on magazine articles about Comanches. I told him I faced a multifactored personal crisis involving everything from the death of my mother to financial loss. I was seeking guidance, and something deep within told me he might know. Billy invited me to a December meeting at his place near Indiahoma, Oklahoma, in the Wichita Mountains. It was a frigid night in the tepee. The next morning was colder still. But I felt a level of peace and connection to the earth unlike anything I’d experienced before. “Our way is a hard way,” Billy told me after the meeting ended, “but it is a good way.”

I made the five-hour return trip home to Texas. That night, Billy texted me, “Welcome to the Comanche family.” He has been my brother ever since. I have joined Billy and other members of the chapter for meetings in Oklahoma and at ranches in West Texas and North Texas. I started down a path. A hard one. But a good one. I’m indebted for the opportunity I was given.

Now it’s President’s Day weekend and I’m eating puffy tacos in Lala’s Café, a Mirando City landmark for Tex-Mex food. Mirando City is 35 miles east of Laredo, in the heart of the four-county area in South Texas known to Native Americans as the Peyote Gardens, named for the small, spineless, endangered cactus that grows here. All the peyote used by the hundreds of thousands of members of the NAC comes from rural Webb, Starr, Zapata, and Jim Hogg counties—the only area in the U.S. where it grows in sufficient quantities for harvest.

I want to explore the areas where this cactus thrives as a plant and pay homage to it. I am also here to visit some Native American Church landmarks in this thick brush country known locally as la brasada. Later this weekend, I will attend the Native American Church of North America’s midyear conference in Laredo, where peyote and the threats it faces is the central topic. I will not use “medicine” on this trip, but I feel veneration toward the cactus as I sit in Lala’s. It has been a regular dining stop for generations of Native people who have traveled here to obtain peyote.

An NAC meeting runs from after dusk on Saturday until after dawn on Sunday. Comanche gatherings take place in tepees with church members and sometimes guests. I’ve witnessed people of seemingly all ages seated in a circle around the sacred fire as singing, drumming, and praying takes place. Consuming medicine is the heart of the night’s ritual. I’ve swallowed it in shredded dry form, as green cactus tops, and as tea. I’m always asked by non-Natives if peyote makes me throw up. It never has. I’m also asked about hallucinations while “tripping” in the tepee. I don’t trip.

When I use peyote in a meeting, I feel as if I am tapping into something elemental. It frees me from my ego and thrusts me into the moment. I see the circular nature of reality. Linear illusions disappear. A Huichol peyotist in the Mexican state of Nayarit told an American anthropologist, “Peyote is everything; it is the crossing of the souls; it is everything that is.” At the end of the meeting, I feel like I’m a part of that everything.

Two inches of rain have fallen over the past 36 hours, a rarity in the Peyote Gardens. Water stands on the highway, and I can see muddy side streets as I pass by. The town with a population of 222 takes its name from the Spanish land grant awarded to Nicolás Mirando in the early 1800s. Even at its peak during a 1920s oil boom, Mirando City was never big. I drive only about a mile to get from Lala’s on the northside to the southern edge of town. I pull over at the former home of the late Amada Sanchez Cardenas, a legendary peyotera, or peyote supplier.

The U.S. government licenses peyoteros to harvest and sell the cactus to Native Americans. Currently, four licensed suppliers are active. Cardenas dealt in peyote for so long that she became a prototype for modern peyoteros. At the time of her death in 2005, she was almost 101 years old and a beloved figure in NAC circles, though she was not a Native. She did more than just sell medicine to Indigenous buyers traveling here from as far away as Canada. She was a source of wisdom.

An elegantly welded sign was erected over Amada’s driveway in the 1990s. The words “Native American Church” are spelled out in large letters arranged in an arch, with “Spiritual Residence” below, followed by “Hope, Faith, Love, Charity.” In the center is the distinctive emblem of the NAC, a waterbird rising from a tepee. Waterbirds in flight are on each side of the image. The sign’s crescent design reflects the altar used during all-night meetings. It is an eye-catching piece of work and a local landmark. I have scoured photos of it for years, but this is my first time to view it in person. I can’t even describe how peaceful I feel.

Men are erecting a tepee next to the simple frame house where Amada and her husband, Claudio, lived. It will be used for a peyote meeting involving church officers at the conference in Laredo. They will drive over from the hotel after the meeting winds down tomorrow afternoon. Amada’s place represents a gateway between the earth that yields peyote and the people who understand and respect its power.

On the seat next to me, I have a bundle of white sage harvested from the Llano Estacado. I touch my head, shoulders, neck, chest, and arms with it to express gratitude for being here. I learned about the sacred plant sage’s ability to heal, cleanse, and bless from a Southern Cheyenne Dog Soldier when I was around 20 and living in Oklahoma. Like a fool, I neglected it for decades until I used it again at a Comanche sweat lodge just a few years ago. Now, I always keep some nearby.

I leave Amada’s house and drive south for a couple of miles to Los Ojuelos, a ghost town listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The springs that give it its name are the only reliable source of water in this part of la brasada. Stuck back in the brush are remnants of 13 Spanish Colonial-style buildings made of rock known as sillar. The site was on a branch of El Camino Real de los Tejas, a series of “royal roads” that connected Spanish towns on the Rio Grande with Natchitoches in Louisiana. Indigenous people successfully resisted establishment of a permanent settlement of colonizers at Los Ojuelos for decades. Not only were the springs here, but this area was a rich source of peyote, which grows best amid thick brush in rocky soil.

In 1857, settlers established the village of Los Ojuelos and constructed the sillar buildings I am looking at now. Immigrants from Mexico arrived, including Amada’s family. Her father began harvesting peyote to sell to Native Americans. Amada was involved since she was a child. As Mirando City grew in the 20th century, the business relocated there from Los Ojuelos, making the newer town the center for the legal peyote trade in the United States. It remains so today.

“Quanah and those other leaders from that time knew something was missing from the Comanche religion,” Don Parker, Quanah’s great-grandson, told me at the Medicine Mounds meeting. “They found an answer from two Lipan Apaches.” The tribe was a Comanche enemy for generations as they warred over control of what is now Texas. But by the late 19th century, they worked out a peaceful coexistence. Contrary to much of what has been published, Quanah is thought to have been exposed to peyote all his life. The Comanches used it at least since the early 1800s to gain visions prior to hunts or warfare as well as to treat injuries and disease. But making the plant the centerpiece of a religious ritual was something they learned from those two Lipans, Pinero and Chivato, around 1870.

The rites they taught the Comanches were rooted in practices dating back thousands of years. Mummified peyote specimens discovered in the Shumla Caves near the mouth of the Pecos River on the Texas side of the Rio Grande have been carbon dated to between 3780 and 3660 B.C.E. Since then, various groups living along the Rio Grande have practiced forms of peyotism. The Lipans likely learned the religion in the 1750s from Mexico’s Carrizo people. “It is not a Christian religion,” Carney Saupitty Jr. says to me one day at the Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he serves as a cultural specialist. But some Christian elements turn up in NAC ritual. At a meeting I attended in Oklahoma, a young Comanche told me the lyrics of one peyote song roughly translates to: Jesus must have had strong medicine because he could walk on water.

Quanah was the main proponent and protector of Plains Indian peyotism and is credited with founding the Native American Church, though it did not take on that name until 1918, a few years after his death. I remember stories I have heard about a Comanche warrior named Red Sun or Puiwat (Without Eyes), who was an influential spiritual leader in early Comanche meetings. Though aged, blind, and feeble, Red Sun was known for his strong singing and played a role in spreading the faith. In an oral history interview conducted in 1967, a Kiowa named Cecil Horse said the Comanches first evangelized the religion to his tribe in either 1870 or 1872. From there, it spread rapidly to Native people throughout the North American heartland, leading to the more than quarter of a million people it now counts as members.

I leave Los Ojuelos and drive through drizzle toward Laredo. At a meeting I attended in Oklahoma a few months earlier, a storm struck around midnight. Lightning, crashing thunder, heavy rain, fierce winds. The tepee poles and canvas were challenged. Runoff gushed over the dirt floor inside. All of us were soaked, cold, and mud-caked. Yet the drumming, singing, and praying continued. By that point, the medicine was very much within me. I was far from miserable. In fact, I never felt as much a part of the earth as I did during those hours. It was communicating with me—no need to panic.

It was a good message for me to receive. I started attending peyote meetings during a time of crisis. Learning that everything will work out was reassuring. I treasure that stormy night.

There are three parts to the cactus, the most visible an above-ground, greenish-gray crown that typically is about 3 inches wide. Through much of the year it is topped by delicate pinkish-white flowers. Below the crown is a carrot-shaped underground stem with roots at its base. It is a complicated plant, with more than 50 psychoactive alkaloids. The most significant is mescaline, which is concentrated in the crown. It gives peyote its visionary qualities.

Harvesting peyote in the rocky, thorny, rattlesnake-littered landscape of the Mirando City environs is backbreaking work. The upper crown is removed by the deft strikes of a machete. Under the best circumstances, the stem and roots are left undisturbed so the plant can regenerate. Growth is slow. It takes five to 10 years before a plant is ready to undergo a harvest again. I have seen people return from collecting peyote in la brasada with arms scratched by mesquite thorns despite long sleeves, faces sun baked and bug-bitten, various body parts aching from too much stooping. It takes a long time to fill a plastic bucket with “buttons.”

Nevertheless, the demand for peyote grows. Members of the Native American Church in the U.S. and Canada consume hundreds of thousands of buttons. The legal need exceeds what the Peyote Gardens can supply under the best conditions. But these days there are many other threats to peyote. Transforming the brush country into agricultural land destroys a great deal of the cactus habitat, as do large projects like the installation of wind turbines and supporting power lines.

And then there is the ever-increasing number of white people who believe they should have access to the cactus for use in everything from self-treatment of psychological issues to general mind expansion. I realize I might sound hypocritical, but I am grateful for my relationship with my Comanche family. I understand only Native Americans have a right to possess peyote. Still, a black market has developed, charging much more than what legitimate peyoteros charge Native American Church members. Much of what they sell ends up in the hands of white people.

The severity of the endangered cactus is observable at the Peyote Ranch, which is about 20 miles south of Los Ojuelos. The 2,400-acre spread already had that name when Francisco Garcia Martinez bought it in 1916. It remains in the possession of his family. Peyote can be found among 800 acres on the east side of the ranch in rocky terrain and higher elevation, but as Martinez’s great-grandson Ricardo Saldaña tells me, things have changed dramatically over the years as the plant became scarcer on the property. I had heard that the record-setting Texas winter storm of February 2021 dealt a hard blow to native cactus and many plants froze to death. But even months after the storm receded, Saldaña noticed peyote continued to disappear from its namesake ranch. “I can only assume it’s peyote poachers,” he says.

Laredo has been important to the peyote trade since the 1800s. Amada encouraged NAC members to visit during the monthlong Washington’s Birthday Celebration held each February. It has always been a big event, drawing around 400,000 visitors. Native people have taken part in the festivities and sometimes appeared in the Washington’s Birthday parade while they visited the Peyote Gardens to buy medicine.

I take a seat in the back of a crowded hotel ballroom for the conference. NAC North America President Jon “Poncho” Brady (Arikara/Hidatsa) from North Dakota introduces me as a guest and visiting journalist. I am welcomed hospitably. Other visitors include Salvador Johnson, a Mirando City peyotero for more than 50 years. Now 77, he is also Webb County’s Precinct 3 justice of the peace. Zulema “Julie” Morales from Rio Grande City is also present. She too is a veteran peyote dealer. Their report on the status of medicine harvests is discouraging. For most of the reasons I’ve mentioned, the amount of peyote available for legal harvest has greatly reduced. And prices have increased, in part to cover the shortages peyoteros experience. Native American Church chapters are paying more than twice as much for medicine now as they did 20 years ago.

“Preservation of medicine is our goal,” Brady says. “We are trying our best to do what we need to do at the city, state, and federal levels.” Key to this effort is ensuring peyote possession remains illegal in the U.S. for all people except Native Americans. NACNA opposes efforts by pharmaceutical companies to productize mescaline for psychiatric uses. The church believes mescaline, like the plant that produces it, is the sole providence of Native people. Likewise, NACNA disapproves of psychedelic renaissance enthusiasts’ use of peyote and Native rituals, seeing it as cultural appropriation and a violation of intellectual property.

Later, in the hallway during a session break, I look at displays of peyote-inspired jewelry for sale. Morales approaches carrying a burlap sack in which she has several complete peyote plants that fell prey to “root plowing,” digging up whole plants and leaving them to die. Most often this occurs during power line construction or when land is cleared for agriculture. I ponder ways I can help protect the endangered sacred cactus in the future. I realize this is the lesson of my journey. In my brief experience with peyote, it has taught me much. Now I want to give something back to the humble cactus.

Everything is circular. I am reminded of this before dawn the next day as I pack to leave Laredo. I look out the window of my room and see the moon is in a waxing gibbous phase. In five days, it will be full and round. My spiritual journey is not over. I know I will return to the Peyote Gardens to do whatever I can to help the blessed plant thrive in its native habitat. There is much hard, good work to be done.

W.K. Stratton’s Open Road essay “Rapture of the Freeway” appeared in the July 2021 issue.