The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  At Martin’s booth a man was squawking. “Hey, I got a bad plant from you last year!” he said. “It was a mutation. It’s in the car. I’ll go get it.”

  “I believe you,” Martin said. “I don’t need to see it. Why don’t you choose another beauty for yourself?”

  “Hey!” another man at the booth said. He held up one of the lavender vandas. “How much salt will this take? I mean, how much salt can it handle? And is it called Mood Indigo or Indigo Mood? And should I water the hell out of it?” Martin conferred with him while wrapping the plant that the man with the mutant had chosen. Another man, tall and bemused, wandered by. “Beautiful,” he said to Martin. “Absolutely beautiful. By the way, Martin, you need your teeth cleaned.”

  “Lord,” Martin sighed, “you can never hide from your dental hygienist.”

  Martin’s canoe scene hadn’t won anything in the display competition. In fact, the show committee clerk confided to me that the judges hadn’t liked it at all. “In fact,” she whispered, “they hated it.” She told me that the judges thought Martin’s plant labels were homely and that overall the display was too cluttered, and that when it came down to giving awards they hadn’t even given Motes Orchids a second thought. I asked her about the other displays. The Hawaiians they liked, she said, but they didn’t like the moss on top of the orchids, and one display called YESTERDAY they loved because “they loved the fake water.” The Victorian sitting room failed because Mr. Grow-Mor had used an ugly white backdrop and the colors of his plants didn’t flow. It was a long, critical list. On the other hand, the judges did like Bob Fuchs. All the major awards went to the R. F. Orchids Florida cabin—the artistic trophy, the five-hundred-square-foot-display trophy, and the ultimate award, the show trophy. It was a matter of pride, of professional respect, of personal satisfaction, to win at a show, and it was a matter of money, because plants with show ribbons command higher prices, and also it was a matter of something unimaginably profound—it was a matter of shaping evolution, because plants that win in shows become popular, and other breeders will use them as parents for new hybrids and as a model for the kind of plants they will try to produce on their own. Winner take all, including the future. All day, the first day of the show, every time I turned around I saw Bob’s orangey hair and luminous pale face and the cool bright composure on it of someone who knew he’d won.

  For a while I walked around with a man who was looking for a white Phalaenopsis with a gold and red lip and no mottling, who said he used to be an avid bridge player but finally quit because he thought bridge people were too weird, had too many emotional problems, and that he was much happier in the orchid world, and he had three different alarm systems in his greenhouse in case anything went wrong with the temperature or the light or the humidity, so he was usually very relaxed. By this time it was late and it was dark outside. I remembered that Laroche had said I could try to call him if I felt desperate. I didn’t really feel desperate but I really wanted to see him here in the world that he had planned to conquer, even though in his mind he was already a million miles away from it. He was home when I called and said he’d see about coming by to meet me after he took his girlfriend and her son to a soccer game or a birthday party or something—I couldn’t quite hear. He said I should just stick around in the Convention Center and he’d find me, which I knew would be impossible because it was as big as a planet and you could be lost in it for hours. I didn’t for a minute expect Laroche to come and I didn’t wait to see, I just flitted from one orchid to another, from one orchid display to another, from one orchid person to another, until I was as dizzy as a bee.

  A Kind of Direction

  A ranger at the Fakahatchee once told me a story about a woman from Georgia who had called one morning and asked if there were any ghost orchids in bloom in the swamp. The ranger told her he had just spotted a few flowering near Deep Lake. This woman was madly in love with ghost orchids and said she would go anywhere to see them, so as soon as the ranger told her this, she got into her car, drove to Atlanta, caught a flight the next morning to Miami, rented a car at the airport, drove to the Fakahatchee, got directions from the ranger, and spent the next several hours hiking toward Deep Lake, toward the ghost orchids. Less than a day had passed since the woman had first called, but orchids are changeful things, and by the time she reached the plants their flowers had shriveled up and were finished for the year. She took a long look at the green coil of roots that remained. Then she turned around and hiked out of the swamp and returned to Georgia that afternoon. I assumed the woman had been disappointed to have traveled all that way for nothing. The ranger said no, she hadn’t seemed disappointed at all, and in fact she had told him she was glad she had come, and she made him promise to call her anytime he saw a ghost orchid flowering; she would happily come back again.

  Laroche promised that he would go with me to the Fakahatchee before I left Florida, and he promised that when he went with me to the Fakahatchee we would see ghost orchids. I took this under advisement. I had begun to doubt that I would ever see a ghost orchid flower. For that matter, I had begun to suspect that Laroche and I might never even hike the Fakahatchee together. It just seemed as if every attempt I made had been thwarted. When I first asked Laroche to go with me he couldn’t because he was prohibited by court order from entering the area, and then he couldn’t because he got too busy with the Seminole nursery, and then he couldn’t because he refused to enter the swamp as a protest against the Seminoles and against the orchid world and against the world itself, and then he got busy with his new computer business and couldn’t take the time. In the meantime, winter was passing and a sharp new spring heat was rushing in—the sun was higher and more ferocious every day, and I knew that if we didn’t go soon the weather would become unbearable and we would have to wait until next season.

  A few days after the South Florida Orchid Society show, I called Laroche and told him all about the experience, and about Bob Fuchs’s win and Martin Motes’s disappointment, and then I raised the question of our trip to the Fakahatchee. He announced that he was now ready to go, and that he wanted to plan the trip for the upcoming Saturday. I was astonished. I packed up my belongings in West Palm Beach and checked into a hotel in Miami Beach so I’d be a little closer to Laroche. On Friday night I could hardly sleep. I didn’t want to think about the hike but I couldn’t help myself; I kept dreaming of my initial trip to the Fakahatchee, the time I went with Tony the ranger and saw for the first time the lavish dome of bromeliads and the trees swathed in orchid roots, but in the dream I was alone, and when I had walked deep into the swamp I stepped into one of the black sinkholes and in an instant something ropey wrapped around my legs like a lasso and I toppled over, arms flapping against the luminous enamel surface of the lake. I snapped awake, eyes wide open, blankets braided around my legs. I don’t remember how I spent the next several hours, but at last it was morning. Laroche and I were planning to leave for the swamp in the early afternoon. While I was getting dressed I turned on the radio and heard a news bulletin reporting that Valujet Flight 592 en route from Miami to Atlanta had crashed into the Everglades and vanished beneath eighteen inches of marl and sand and mud. The crash site was only twelve miles from the city of Miami, only twelve miles from valet parking at a shopping mall, close enough to ride a bicycle from the Biltmore Hotel, but it was really a world away, wild and severe and almost inaccessible. The plane crashed on the edge of the Miccosukee Reservation, between Everglades Canal L-67A and L-67C, in an area of the swamp that local people called the Pocket. All the nearby roads, including the roads to the Fakahatchee, were closed. I stopped dressing when I heard the bulletin and immediately called Laroche, who had obviously still been sleeping, even though according to the schedule he had decreed I was already running late. We agreed that we couldn’t possibly get to the swamp now and that we’d try Sunday instead. I told Laroche that we absolutely had to make it that day, because I had booked myself on a Monday flight to go home.

&n
bsp; —

  I spent Saturday watching news of the plane crash and an interview on CNN with a Miccosukee named Buffalo Tiger, who said that the crash was caused by the spirits of nature who are angry over the damage that man has done to the Everglades. He said that the Everglades had often swallowed people for spite—that sometimes even tribe members who’d headed out into the swamp were never seen again. Laroche called me during the Buffalo Tiger interview and suggested that I meet him for a few hours at an orchid show at Fairchild Garden in Miami. He hadn’t been to a show since the Seminoles had fired him and I wasn’t sure why he wanted to go to one now, but I was glad of it. I drove to the garden and waited for him in the Fairchild parking lot. He showed up only a little late in a bright, bouncy mood, and insisted we first stop in the gift shop, and then, once we were in the shop, he insisted on buying me a red rubber fish I admired. Then we ambled around. The Fairchild show was in a busy room full of displays and the cool vegetal smell that rises off plants and the hollow pop! of shopping bags being snapped open and loaded with hundred-dollar seedlings. We surveyed row after row of orchids, stopping to admire a table of peach-colored polka-dotted dendrobiums and then to examine a Laeliocattleya that from a distance looked remarkably like a buck-toothed blond kid I’d known in grammar school. At one point Laroche dragged me over to see some clamshell orchids that are native to Florida. “We’ll see a million of these tomorrow,” he said, twiddling the plant’s roots. “The Fakahatchee is just lousy with these fuckers.”

  The proprietor of the clamshell booth had her back to us, and just as he said that she spun around and gave Laroche a look. Then she gave him a second look and lit up. “John Laroche!” she said. “John, how the heck have you been? What are you up to these days, John?”

  “Barbara!” he said. He turned to me. “This is the woman I told you about, remember? The one who I took to the Fakahatchee and then had to hack up a couple of snakes that got between her and a ghost orchid.”

  Barbara grinned. “John, how have you been?”

  “Great,” Laroche said to her. “You know, I’m an Internet publisher now. I don’t have a single orchid anymore. I don’t even have a single plant.” He sounded proud.

  “I’m glad for you, John,” she said, in a tender voice. “I was worried about you. It was beginning to wear and tear on you. Like a bad marriage.”

  Laroche nodded. “Well, I love computers now.” He stroked one of her orchids and added, “It’s really such a relief not having to rely on living things anymore.” He became preoccupied with a bromeliad at the next table. Barbara watched him for a moment and then whispered to me, “He seems so much better now. For some people, it’s just too intense, this whole orchid thing. It infects their whole being. John was just being eaten up by it.”

  A few minutes later when we were at the other end of the room, another dealer recognized him. “I’m an Internet publisher now!” Laroche declared. “I don’t have even a single orchid anymore!” It was almost a boast. “I kicked the habit!” he said to another acquaintance. “I gave it up!” After an hour or so we left the show and went walking around the grounds. Hurricane Andrew had ripped up acres of the Fairchild property, and even though there had been some replanting, it still had the shocked look of a newly shaved head. The busted garden seemed to make Laroche morose. “You should have seen this before the hurricane,” he said, looking around. “Christ, it looks like hell now.” He patted the trunk of a bottle palm. “I love these,” he said. “I always loved plants that were silvery and different. I used to have this silvery-gray hibiscus, it was just a crummy little runt I found at a nursery, and I brought it home and doctored it up and fuck if it didn’t turn out to be one of my favorite plants! It was the coolest color.” He leaned against another tree. “Name this tree,” he said. “Forget it. You’ll never know it. It’s a zombie palm. Now why do you think a plant would look like this? That’s how I’d always get caught up in this stuff. Botany by imagination. I’d put myself in the plant’s point of view and try to figure them out. I’m a plant. Why do I want rough bark instead of smooth bark? Why do I want narrow leaves instead of wide leaves? I was always really good at feeling things out that way.”

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  Laroche snorted and lit a cigarette. “Of course I miss it,” he muttered. “I mean, Jesus Christ. You just have to find something else to fill up your life.”

  —

  On the way home Laroche wanted me to come with him and visit a friend of his named Dewey Fisk. He thought I would find Dewey illuminating. “Dewey’s place is right near here,” he said. “You should meet him. Really. He’s got tons of shit, really cool shit, and he’s just plant crazy. You’ll see what I mean when I tell you that there is a whole universe of people who just live for their plants.”

  I said I’d slept badly the last few nights and thought I should go back to my hotel and rest up for our hike.

  “Look, I think this will be really good for you,” Laroche continued. “And anyway, it’ll only take a minute. Less than a minute. Dewey’s place is right around the corner. I know exactly where it is.” An hour later, after driving up and down many of the obscure and unmarked streets in Dade County, we finally pulled into Dewey’s driveway. His house was on a moth-eaten back road, one of those old Florida roads with rain ruts and grassy edges, and rows of one-floor bungalows with screened porches and dead cars and dead bicycles and dead appliances lying out in the open to molder, the way the Seminoles lay out their dead. This was one of those parts of Florida that have nothing to do with the other Florida, the brassy, booming Florida of superstores and tall hotels. This was the low, simmering part of the state, as quiet as a shrine except for crickets keeping time and the creak of trees bending and the crackly slam of a screen door and the clatter of a car now and then. Dewey was in his shadehouse when we arrived. He strolled out when he heard the car. He was dressed in a pair of saggy khaki pants and a chewed-up plaid shirt and was brandishing a pair of rose shears. In appearance he reminded me of Laroche—an older, grizzled Laroche with more meat on his bones, but the same rough-knuckled look and the same strange air of benign derangement.

  He and Laroche hadn’t seen each other in months. “Hey, Dewey,” Laroche said in greeting. “You quit smoking?”

  Dewey glowered at him and said, “Hell, no.” He searched his pockets until he found a dented pack of cigarettes. Laroche introduced us and said I was interested in plants. Dewey gave off not one glint of interest. After a moment he cocked his head toward me and said, “See that yellow dog there?” He motioned with his chin toward a rangy dog with strawberry-blond hair. “That dog will bite.” He paused. “I’m not saying ‘can bite.’ I’m saying ‘will bite.’ ”

  “Thanks,” I said. I thought maybe I should wait in the car.

  “Oh, for Chrissakes, come on,” Dewey said, walking toward the shadehouse. He stopped after a second and handed me a business card that said

  THE PHILODENDRON PHREAQUE

  Rare and Unusual Plants

  DEWEY FISK, PLANT NUT

  He spun around and continued toward the shadehouse and Laroche and I followed, stepping around heaps of green plastic pots and piles of plant cuttings and then ducking under hanging baskets of curly ferns and then finally squeezing past a rotting old garden bench on which there were dozens of plants, including miniature trees with bronze bark and blush-pink flowers.

  “See this?” Dewey said, pointing at a shoot in a gallon pot. “This was collected in Vietnam by a friend of mine. Amorphaphallus henrii. And that? Over there? Julius collected that in Trinidad. Remember Julius, John? And there, that tree has the flower that is used in that perfume, Chanel No. Five.” He riffled through the stuff on the bench and then picked something up. “Holy Christ! I don’t know if this is a bloom or what. What do you make of this, John?”

  Laroche was examining another plant and barely looked over. “Well, damn it to hell, Dewey,” he said, shaking his head at the plant he was examining. “This was
always my favorite little aeroid.”

  “A guy sent it to me,” Dewey said. “He said it was slightly nonaggressive.” He was still holding the plant he’d picked up off the bench and suddenly remembered it. “Laroche!” he growled, holding it high. “Name this.”

  Laroche studied the plant for an instant and then said something Latin.

  Dewey smirked. “Small form or large form?”

  “Let’s see,” Laroche said, squinting. “Jesus, Dewey, I’m an Internet publisher now! I’m not as fast as I used to be. I’d say that’s the large form.”

  “Bullshit,” Dewey said, triumphantly. “You’re losing it, buddy. You’re through.”

  It was a dazed, shambling kind of afternoon, a day seen through a scrim, the time gliding by. It had to have something to do with the plants. When I first met a lot of orchid people, they all said that time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality—a day could go by and they wouldn’t even notice it had passed if they had spent it among their orchids. That afternoon at Dewey’s the light shifted and dropped, and then dusk drifted in, and the time passed, and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been. Being in the shadehouse was restful in a way that being around people can never be, and it was vivid the way being around lifeless objects can never be, and in the veil of evening air it was as fantastic as a dream.