Seeing Jupe

    Three out of the four people in the car were conscious as we drove past the sign that read “Santa Maria: 45 miles”. I was driving, Zoe was beside me in the passenger seat, and Hana and Martin were in the back. Martin was asleep and Hana was groggy. Despite the fact that I was driving, and therefore in control of the vehicle-able to take any detour I may have wanted to take- I had been nagging Hana all day about making a quick stop in Santa Barbara to pick up some cuttings of the hallucinogenic herb, Salvia divinorum, from a man I had spoken to online two or three times and had never actually met. Zoe was indifferent as to whether or not we stopped in Santa Barbara from the start of the argument whereas Hana and Martin were strictly opposed to the idea. Hana seemed uncomfortable with the fact that there is a culture of gardeners who take pride in cultivating and distributing large quantities of semi legal plants. Martin just seemed to want to get home as soon as possible.

            The night before our trip back home, the three of us had found ourselves scavenging for shelter. Hana thought that we would be able to find a generous student or free campground easily in or around the campus of UC Santa Cruz. Hana was mistaken. Around 9:30 we contacted an alumnus from our high school that had a dorm to his self. Unfortunately (and understandably) he didn’t want to house three near strangers—one of which being partially drunk and chain smoking ceaselessly (me). He rejected us as gently as possible and wished us good luck as he walked back into his building. Later that night, Hana, Martin, Zoe, and myself, the four of us, found ourselves sitting in the middle of an abandoned café in the center of the campus, pirating wifi and scouring facebook for potential friends on campus. As we all secretly suspected it would, our endeavor failed and left us literally out in the cold. Hana, fed up and verging on frantic, approached a passing group of students, curtsied, and kindly asked if one of them could house the four of us. I am sure my embarrassment was clearly visible. Strangely, they didn’t mock Hana’s request. Rather, the five or six members of the group seemed to all sympathize with us and our circumstances and in a matter-of-fact way told us that camping on campus (Hana had noted the similarity between the words camping and campus earlier) was quite acceptable. Setting up the tent somewhere discreet had been one of our options all along but for some reason didn’t seem to be a very realistic idea to us four until it was suggested by the group of students. Thusly, we set off into the patch of woods beside the parking lot and erected the tent. We didn’t sleep very well on the rough twig covered ground beneath the sequoia near Hana’s car but slept nevertheless and were glad to have shelter of some sort.

            Due to this sequence of events, all of us were dozing off during the drive back home. Our restless sleeps had been followed by a large Mexican breakfast, intensifying our overall drowsiness. I timed my final nag perfectly. Just as Hana was about to join Martin in sleep, after I had taken over the driving responsibilities, I explained that a trip through Santa Barbara to meet the Salvia man would be fast, easy, free, safe, and simple. She finally bought it and, because Martin was asleep, had no one to try to convince her out of giving the detour her blessings. I called Jupe as soon as Hana agreed to let me drive us through Santa Barbara and, after figuring out who I was and mentally going through the plans he had made for that day, Jupe told me to make my way down the 101 to the San Ysidro exit in Montecito. We spoke for 12 minutes or so and determined that I would call back after exiting the freeway. For the hour or so between that original call and my arrival in Montecito, Hana and Martin slept in the back seat of the convertible while Zoe and I admired the amazing scenery of the areas in and around Big Sur.

As I came to a complete stop at the end of the San Ysidro Ave. off-ramp, I removed my cell phone from the cup holder to my right and dialed Jupe’s number. He described a shady road to the right of the freeway ramp and told me to park within plain view and wait outside the car for a man on a bike “in a Mexican straw hat” to ride down from the direction of the mountains opposite the beach. This was the sort of shadiness Hana had made clear she disliked. By this time both she and Martin were awake.I stepped out of the car with legs asleep and tried to fix my greasy tent hair. I knew I looked dirty and sleep deprived. I leaned against the driver’s side door and Zoe stood outside the passenger’s side door with her arms rested on the roof of the car. A fit young bicyclist in skin tight racing attire rode past us and grinned. This wasn’t Jupe. Finally, a man with a backpack who looked kind from a distance rode down the road we were facing, turned towards the car, and asked if I was Tom. I shook his hand after he dismounted and watched as he pulled his over-stuffed backpack onto the ground. He started to transfer leafy branches from a one plastic bag to another, finally transferring all of the material he had brought into one plastic bag and into an empty cardboard box. All the while he spoke about the various strains of Salvia he had selected for me, about his own strain, about a man in Malibu named Daniel Siebert, and about UC Santa Barbara’s reputation as a party school. “Siebert’s a botanist—I’m a gardener” he said as he recounted his experience growing Salvia. Jupe occasionally looked towards a politely smiling Zoe. “I don’t think very many commercial vendors sell Lunas anymore” he bragged in reference to the cutting of the rare Luna strain of Salvia divinorum he had included in the assortment of branches. Once I had been holding the box of cuttings for a minute or more and had nearly exhausted all of the interesting anecdotes I could fit in between gaps in Jupe’s narrative, the four of us were bade adieu and left to finish the journey back to Los Angeles. Jupe rode back to his Salvia paradise and I returned to the driver’s seat of Hana’s Father’s car, gleeful about the fact that I had met such an extraordinary Salvia grower and excited that I had, in a period of one day, increased the genetic diversity of my Salvia garden by 60%. 

    The cuttings sat in Zoe’s room for a couple weeks after the Sunday we met Jupe. Although they were soaking in light-shielded bottles of water, I knew that the branches weren’t going to root without increased humidity. A few of the cuttings have rooted since that Sunday in April, a few of them have died, and as of now, three or four cuttings of cuttings are sitting beneath a fluorescent lamp on a shelf in my bathroom, slowly forming small white roots. Jupe told me that one of the seeds he was able to produce one year was successfully germinated and that the plant that resulted from its germination was officially the first member of the Jupiter strain. Although Jupe technically gave me cuttings from the Hoffmann & Wasson and Luna strains of Salvia divinorum, the plants that I now possess thanks to Jupe’s kindness will perpetually conjure in my mind images of the man in the Mexican straw hat.