1996 - The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

  As we walked slowly among the stones, I remembered another graveyard, also by the sea, which I had visited in up-island Martha’s Vineyard. It was a very old one, going back to the end of the seventeenth century, and there I also saw the same names again and again. In Martha’s Vineyard, this was a graveyard of the congenitally deaf; here in Umatac, it was a graveyard of the lytico-bodig.

  When I visited Martha’s Vineyard, there were no longer any deaf people left – the last had died in 1952 – and with this, the strange deaf culture which had been such a part of the island’s history and community for more than two hundred years had come to an end, as such isolates do. So it was with Fuur, the little Danish island of the colorblind; so, most probably, it will be with Pingelap; and so, perhaps, it will be with Guam – odd genetic anomalies, swirls, transients, given a brief possibility, existence, by the nature of islands and isolation. But islands open up, people die or intermarry; genetic attenuation sets in, and the condition disappears. The life of such a genetic disease in an isolate tends to be six or eight generations, two hundred years perhaps, and then it vanishes, as do its memories and traces, lost in the ongoing stream of time.

  Rota

  When I was five, our garden in London was full of ferns, a great jungle of them rising high above my head (though these were all uprooted at the start of the Second World War to make room for Jerusalem artichokes, which we were encouraged to grow for the war effort). My mother and a favorite aunt adored gardening, and were botanically inclined, and some of my earliest memories are of seeing them working side by side in the garden, often pausing to look at the young fronds, the baby fiddle-heads, with great tenderness and delight. The memory of these ferns and of a quiet, idyllic botanizing became associated for me with the sense of childhood, of innocence, of a time before the war.

  One of my mother’s heroines, Marie Stopes (a lecturer in fossil botany before she turned to crusading for contraception), had written a book called Ancient Plants, which excited me strangely.74 For it was here, when she spoke of ‘the seven ages’ of plant life, that I got my first glimpse of deep time, of the millions of years, the hundreds of millions, which separated the most ancient plants from our own. ‘The human mind,’ Stopes wrote, ‘cannot comprehend the significance of vast numbers, of immense space, or of aeons of time’; but her book, illustrating the enormous range of plants which had once lived on the earth – the vast majority long extinct – gave me my first intimation of such eons.751 would gaze at the book for hours, skipping over the flowering plants and going straight to the earliest ones – ginkgos, cycads, ferns, lycopods, horsetails. Their very names held magic for me: Bennettitales, Sphenophyllales, I would say to myself, and the words would repeat themselves internally, like a spell, like a mantra.

  During the war years, my aunt was headmistress of a school in Cheshire, a ‘fresh-air school,’ as it was called, in the depths of Delamere Forest. It was she who first showed me living horsetails in the woods, growing a foot or two high in the wet ground by the sides of streams. She had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and told me that they were among the most ancient of living plants – and that their ancestors had grown to gigantic size, forming dense thickets of huge, bamboolike trees, twice as tall as the trees which now surrounded us. They had once covered the earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, when giant amphibians ploshed through the primordial swamps. She would show me how the horsetails were anchored by a network of roots, the pliant rhizomes which sent out runners to each stalk.76

  Then she would find tiny lycopods to show me – club mosses or tassel ferns with their scaly leaves; these too, she told me, once took the form of immensely tall trees, more than a hundred feet high, with huge scaly trunks supporting tasselled foliage, and cones at their summits. At night I dreamed of these silent, towering giant horsetails and club mosses, the peaceful, swampy landscapes of 350 million years ago, a Paleozoic Eden – and I would wake with a sense of exhilaration, and loss.

  I think these dreams, this passion to regain the past, had something to do with being separated from my family and evacuated from London (like thousands of other children) during the war years. But the Eden of lost childhood, childhood imagined, became transformed by some legerdemain of the unconscious to an Eden of the remote past, a magical ‘once,’ rendered wholly benign by the omission, the editing out, of all change, all movement. For there was a peculiar static, pictorial quality in these dreams, with at most a slight wind rustling the trees or rippling the water. They neither evolved nor changed, nothing ever happened in them; they were encapsulated as in amber. Nor was I myself, I think, ever present in these scenes, but gazed on them as one gazes at a diorama. I longed to enter them, to touch the trees, to be part of their world – but they allowed no access, were as shut off as the past.

  My aunt often took me to the Natural History Museum in London, where there was a fossil garden full of ancient lycopod trees, Lepidodendra, their trunks covered with rugged rhomboid scales like crocodiles, and the slender trunks of tree horsetails, Calamites. Inside the museum, she took me to see the dioramas of the Paleozoic (they had titles like ‘Life in a Devonian Swamp’) – I loved these even more than the pictures in Marie Stopes’ book, and they became my new dreamscapes. I wanted to see these giant plants alive, straightaway, and felt heartbroken when she told me that there were no more tree horsetails, no more club-moss trees, the old giant flora was all gone, vanished – though much of it, she added, had sunk into the swamps, where it had been compressed and transformed into coal over the eons (once, at home, she split a coal ball and showed me the fossils inside).

  Then we would move ahead 100 million years, to the dioramas of the Jurassic (‘The Age of Cycads’), and she would show me these great robust trees, so different from the Paleozoic ones. The cycads had huge cones and massive fronds at their tops – they were the dominant plant form once, she would say; pterodactyls flew among them, they were what the giant dinosaurs munched on. Although I had never seen a living cycad, these great trees with their thick, solid trunks seemed more believable, less alien, than the unimaginable Calamites and Cor-daites which had preceded them – they looked like a cross between ferns and palms.77

  On summer Sundays, we would take the old District Line to Kew – the line had been opened in 1877, and many of the original electric carriages were still in use. It cost 1d. to enter, and for this one had the whole sweep of the Garden, its broad walks, its dells, the eighteenth-century Pagoda, and my favorites, the great glass and iron conservatories.

  A taste for the exotic was fostered by visits to the giant water lily Victoria regia, in its own special house – its vast leaves, my aunt told me, could easily bear the weight of a child. It had been discovered in the wilds of Guyana, she said, and given its name in honor of the young queen.78

  I was even more taken by the grotesque Weiwitschia mirabilis, with its two long, leathery, writhingly coiled leaves – it looked, to my eyes, like some strange vegetable octopus. Weiwitschia is not easy to grow outside its natural habitat in the Namibian desert, and the large specimen at Kew was one of the few which had been successfully cultivated, a very special treasure. (Joseph Hooker, who named it and obtained the original material from the euphonious Welwitsch, thought it the most interesting, though ugliest, plant ever brought into Britain; and Darwin, fascinated by its mixture of advanced and primitive characteristics, called it ‘the vegetable Ornithorhynchus,’ the platypus of the plant kingdom.)79

  My aunt especially loved the smaller fern houses, the ferneries. We had ordinary ferns in our garden, but here, for the first time, I saw tree ferns, rearing themselves twenty or thirty feet up in the air, with lacy arching fronds at their summits, their trunks buttressed by thick cably roots – vigorous and alive, and yet hardly different from the ones of the Paleozoic.

  And it was at Kew that I finally saw living cycads, clustered as they had been for a century or more in a corner of the great Palm House.80 They too were survivors from a long-distant past, a
nd the stamp of their ancientness was manifest in every part of them – in their huge cones, their sharp, spiny leaves, their heavy columnar trunks, reinforced like medieval armor, by persistent leaf bases. If the tree ferns had grace, these cycads had grandeur and, to my boyish mind, a sort of moral dimension too. Widespread once, reduced now to a few genera – I could not help thinking of them as both tragic and heroic. Tragic in that they had lost the premodern world they had grown up in: all the plants they were intimately related to – the seed ferns, the Bennettites, the Cordaites of the Paleozoic – had long ago vanished from the earth, and now they found themselves rare, odd, singular, anomalous, in a world of little, noisy, fast-moving animals and fast-growing, brightly colored flowers, out of synch with their own dignified and monumental timescale. But heroic too, in that they had survived the catastrophe which destroyed the dinosaurs, adapted to different climates and conditions (not least to the hegemony of birds and mammals, which the cycads now exploited to disperse their seeds).

  The sense of their enduringness, their great phylogenetic age, was amplified for me by the age of some of the individual plants – one, an African Encephalartos longifolius, was said to be the oldest potted plant in Kew and had been brought here in 1775. If these wonders could be grown at Kew, I thought, why should I not grow them at home? When I was twelve (the war had just ended) I took the bus to a nursery in Edmonton, in north London, and bought two plants – a woolly tree fern, a Ci-botium, and a small cycad, a Zamia.81 I tried to grow them in our little glassed-in conservatory at the back of the house – but the house was too cold, and they withered and died.

  When I was older, and first visited Amsterdam, I discovered the beautiful little triangular Hortus Botanicus there – it was very old, and still had a medieval air, an echo of the herb gardens, the monastery gardens, from which botanical gardens had sprung. There was a conservatory which was particularly rich in cycads, including one ancient, gnarled specimen, contorted with age (or perhaps from its confinement in a pot and a small space), which was (also) said to be the oldest potted plant in the world. It was called the Spinoza cycad (though I have no idea whether Spinoza ever saw it), and it had been potted, if the information was reliable, near the middle of the seventeenth century; it vied, in this way, with the ancient cycad at Kew.82

  But there is an infinite difference between a garden, however grand, and the wild, where one can get a feeling of the actual complexities and dynamics of life, the forces that press to evolution and extinction. And I yearned to see cycads in their own context, not planted, not labelled, not isolated for viewing, but growing side by side with banyans and screw pines and ferns all about them, the whole harmony and complexity of a full-scale cycad jungle – the living reality of my childhood dreamscape.

  Rota is Guam’s closest companion in the Marianas chain and is geologically similar, with a complex history of risings and fallings, reef makings and destructions, going back forty million years or so. The two islands are inhabited by similar vegetation and animals – but Rota, lacking Guam’s size, its grand harbors, its commercial and agricultural potential, has been far less modernized. Rota has been largely left to itself, biologically and culturally, and it can perhaps give one some idea of how Guam looked in the sixteenth century, when it was still covered by dense forests of cycads, and this was why I wanted to come here.83

  I would be meeting one of the island’s few remaining medicine women, Beata Mendiola – John Steele had known her, and her son Tommy, for many years. ‘They know more about cycads, about all the primitive plants and foods and natural medicines and poisons here,’ he said, ‘than anyone I know.’ They met me at the landing strip – Tommy is an engaging, intelligent man in his late twenties or early thirties, fluent in Chamorro and English. Beata, lean, dark, with an aura of power, was born during the Japanese occupation, and speaks Chamorro and Japanese only, so Tommy had to interpret for us.

  We drove a few miles down a dirt road to the edge of the jungle and then went on by foot, Tommy and his mother with machetes, leading the way. The jungle was so dense in places that light could hardly filter through, and I had the sense, at times, of a fairy wood, with every tree trunk, every branch, wreathed in epiphytic mosses and ferns.

  I had seen only isolated cycads on Guam, perhaps two or three close together – but here there were hundreds, dominating the jungle. They grew everywhere, some in clumps, some as isolated trunks reaching, here and there, twelve or fifteen feet in height. Most, though, were relatively low – five or six feet tall, perhaps – and surrounded by a thick carpet of ferns. Thickened and strengthened with the scars of old leaves, leaf scales, these trunks looked mighty as locomotives or stegosaurs. High winds and typhoons beat through these islands regularly, and the trunks of some of them were bent at all angles, sometimes even prostrate on the ground. But this, if anything, seemed to increase their vitality, for where they were bent, especially at the base, new growths, bulbils, had erupted in scores, bearing their own crowns of young leaves, still pale green and soft. While most of the cycads around us were tall, unbranched ones whose life force seemed to be pouring upward to the sky, there were others, almost monstrous, which seemed to be running riot, exploding in all directions, full of anarchic vitality, sheer vegetable exuberance, hubris.

  Beata pointed out the stiff reinforcing leaf bases which ringed each tree trunk – as each new crown of leaves had sprouted at the top, the older leaves had died off, but their bases remained. ‘We can estimate the age of a cycad by counting these leaf scales,’ said Beata. I started to do this, with one huge prostrate tree, but Tommy and Beata smiled as I did so. ‘It is easier,’ she said, ‘if you look at the trunks – many of the older ones have a very thin ring in 1900, because that was the year of the great typhoon; and another thin ring in 1973, when we had very strong winds.’

  ‘Yeah,’ inserted Tommy, ‘those winds got to two hundred miles per hour, they say.’

  ‘The typhoon strips all the leaves off the plant,’ Beata explained, ‘so they can’t grow as much as usual.’ Some of the oldest trees, she thought, were more than a thousand years old.84

  A cycad forest is not lofty, like a pine or oak forest. A cycad forest is low, with short stumpy trees – but the trees give an impression of immense solidity and strength. They are heavy-duty models, one feels – not tall, not flashy, not capable of rapid growth, like modern trees, but built to last, to withstand a typhoon or a drought. Heavy, armored, slow growing, gigantic – they seem to bear, like dinosaurs, the imprint of the Mesozoic, the ‘style’ of 200 million years ago.

  Male and female cycads are impossible to tell apart until they mature and produce their spectacular cones. The male Cycas has an enormous upright cone, a foot or more in length and weighing perhaps thirty pounds, like a monstrous pinecone, tessellated, with great chunky cone scales sweeping round the axis of the cone in elegant spiral curves.85 The female of the Cycas genus, in contrast, lacks a proper cone, but produces a great central cluster of soft woolly leaves instead – megasporophylls, specialized for reproduction – orange in color, velvety, notched; and hanging below each leaf, eight or ten slate-colored ovules – microscopic structures in most organisms, but here the size of juniper berries.

  We stopped by one cone, half a yard high, ripe and full of pollen. Tommy shook it, and a cloud of pollen came out; it had a powerful, pungent smell and set me tearing and sneezing. (The cycad woods must be thick with pollen in the windy season, I thought, and some researchers have even wondered whether the lytico-bodig could be caused by inhaling it.) The smell of the male cones is generally rather unpleasant for human beings – as far back as 1795, there were ordinances in Agana requiring inhabitants to remove the cones if they grew male plants in their garden. But, of course, the smell is not for us. Ants are drawn by the powerful smell, said Tommy; sometimes a horde of tiny, biting ones will fly out as the tree is poked. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘See this little spider? We call him paras ranas in Chamorro, ‘the one that weaves the web.’ This
type of spider is mostly found on the cycad; it eats the ants. When the cycad is young and green, the spider is green too. When the cycad starts to become brown, the spider takes that color too. I am glad when I see the spiders, because it means there will be no ants to bite me when I pick the fruits.’

  Brilliantly colored fungi sprouted in the wet earth – Beata knew them all, which were poisonous, and what remedy to use if poisoned; which were hallucinogenic; which were good to eat. Some of them, Tommy told me, were luminous at night – and this was also true of some of the ferns. Looking down among the ferns, I spotted a low, whisklike plant, Psilotum nudum – inconspicuous, with stiff leafless stems the diameter of a pencil lead, forking every few inches like a miniature tree, bifurcating its way through the undergrowth. I bent down to examine it, and saw that each tiny fractal branch was capped with a yellow three-lobed sporangium no bigger than a pinhead, containing all the spores. Psilotum grows all over Guam and Rota – on riverbanks, in the savannah, around buildings, and often on trees, as an epiphyte drooping like Spanish moss from their branches – and seeing it in its natural habitat gave me a peculiar thrill. No one notices Psilotum, no one collects it, esteems it, respects it – small, plain, leafless, rootless, it has none of the spectacular features which attract collectors. But for me it is one of the most exciting plants in the world, for its ancestors, the psilophytes of the Silurian, were the first plants to develop a vascular system, to free themselves from the need to live in water. From these pioneers had come the club mosses, the ferns, the now-extinct seed ferns, the cycads, the conifers, and the vast range of flowering plants which subsequently spread all over the earth. But this originator, this dawn-plant, still lives on, humbly, inconspicuously coexisting with the innumerable species it has spawned – had Goethe seen it, he would have called this his Ur-pflanze.86