Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks

  I sometimes think I have rather a stupid face myself, though most people seem to feel it is a kindly one. This, too, is my own impression when (as happens not infrequently) I fail to recognize myself in unexpected mirrors and windows and think, “Who is that amiable, kindly old fool?” But I have also caught looks of intense concentration, sudden animations of joy or inspiration, and looks of piercing sorrow and desolation, rage too, so it cannot be as pudding-like, as inexpressive, as I fancy.

  I swim after my day sitting and walking in the city. The hotel has a beautiful pool, but I cannot sprint-swim very far at this altitude. Now a meal in the restaurant by myself—the place is almost empty, for our group is still on its daylong trip, and the high-IQ physicists are having a two-dimensional meal, no doubt, somewhere in town.

  I find myself thinking of Scott, who told me yesterday that his true desire is to produce a beautiful botany book with rich, comprehensive texts and lovely, accurate illustrations. He hopes that the atlas he has been working on for ten years—of all the vascular plants of central French Guiana, the flowers, all their forms, colors, aromas—will be a book of such value and beauty. He is ambitious, he allows, for a beautiful botany book, but he has no sense of professional rivalry or competition. When I relayed these comments to a colleague, he was surprised. But perhaps he knows only the outer Scott, the administrator, the head of a busy department. For while Scott may be, may have to be, “a tough nut” outside, in order to keep his department going at a time when field botany is giving way to genomics and lab science—there must be another Scott as well, more inward, more lyrical, more concerned with the Ideal, and it is this Scott who dreams of “a beautiful book.”

  The fern tour is turning out to be much more than a fern tour. It is a visit to another, a very other, culture and place; and (so saturated is everything, everyone, here in the past) it is as much a visit, in a profound sense, to another time. The fusion of cultures hits one everywhere—in the faces, in the language, in the art and pottery, the mixed, colorful styles of architecture and dress, the complex doubleness of the “colonial” at every point. Luis, our guide, though Hispanic in many ways, also has the dark skin, the powerful build, the high cheekbones of a Zapotec. His ancestors, some of them, crossed the Bering Strait in the last ice age; B.C., for these people, means Before Cortés, the absolute divide between the pre-Conquest, the pre-Hispanic—and what happened later.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WEDNESDAY

  I more and more regret that I did not go on yesterday’s marathon trip to the rain forest, for everyone is telling me of its wonders, and some of these will be displayed at a show-and-tell this afternoon. How could I have sacrificed this to the banality of a slipped disk? After yesterday’s long and exhausting day, today is one for “optional activities,” and the most attractive one of these, to my mineral-loving mind, is a visit to the Hierve el Agua mineral springs.

  The area itself is fairly arid, only two hours away from Oaxaca city, and we will be able to see some unusual stunted palms (they grow in clusters, resembling, says my Oaxaca Handbook, in an unusual burst of imagery, “regiments of desert dwarfs”). We will see more xerophytic ferns, adapted to the dryness—these never cease to fascinate me, because I always used to think of ferns as water-loving, shade-loving, delicate, vulnerable; and here one sees ferns able to survive blistering sun and prolonged dryness almost as well as euphorbs or cacti. And, I am told, there is a great variety of other plants—and birds—too, and it is this which animates J.D., who has also come along.

  J.D. gets extremely excited at seeing a rare specimen which he has never seen before. Though he works at the New York Botanical Garden, he is not primarily a fern man, like John and Robbin—his special interest is in the Anacardiaceae, a family of flowering plants with oily resins, and he has studied these all over the world. Poison ivy, Toxicodendron, is the best known one. But many others in this family can cause toxic reactions too—the cashew-nut tree, the mango tree, the Brazilian pepper tree, the Japanese wax tree, the Chinese lacquer tree (I had never been sure where lacquer came from, and in Mexico, I heard, it was made from an insect). Many of their resins, J.D. tells me, have industrial or medical uses, like the dhobi or marking-nut tree, whose liquid is used as an indelible ink to mark laundry. And cashew-nut shell liquid is used to control mosquito larvae and as an antimicrobial agent. “A wonderful family!” J.D. exclaims, in conclusion.

  But now his attention comes back to the plant in front of him. “This is the greatest thrill for me—I never thought I would see Pseudosmodingium, actually see it growing.” He goes on to speak of a toxin it has. “It’s horrible. Never been analyzed. You get a terrible rash, internal troubles too, ulcers. Poison ivy is nothing compared to it. I should have had my rubber gloves with me.” He specifically brought thick rubber gloves for such an eventuality, and today—of all days!—he forgot to bring them. “Would you imagine there was such an exciting thing?” he goes on. He will see if he can return here, tomorrow, take a taxi, no matter what it costs—bringing the rubber gloves with him.

  The spring percolates through a whole mountain of limestone before it bubbles out from the side of the mountain into a huge basin, and from here it tracks downward, depositing lime and other minerals as it goes, until it makes its final drop from a semicircle of cliffs. But by this time, with evaporation and absorption, the water is so saturated with minerals that it crystallizes, turns to stone, as it falls—thus the “petrified waterfall.” It is an amazing simulacrum of a waterfall, consisting not of water but of the mineral calcite, yellowish-white, hanging in vast rippling sheets from the cliffs above. There are pools of the warm, mineral-rich water at the summit. I long to immerse myself, at least paddle, in this concentrated water. But I fear to intrude my dirty, alien germs in this innocent, pristine habitat. John Mickel bestows a brief glance at this unique natural spectacle, the only such (someone says) in the entire world, and then attends to the varied ferns at the top. He finds some new (at least new to me, to us) xerophytic ferns on the rock—a very handsome silvery Argyrochosma (I misheard this as “Argyrocosmos,” and thought of a silver universe) and an Astrolepis integerrima, both desiccated, but alive, next to each other on the blue-gray rock.

  What fascinates me equally are the mosses and the tiny heart-shaped liverworts adhering to these bone-dry rocks. I would not have thought such things possible, for one thinks of these (liverworts above all) as quintessentially moist and moisture-loving plants, among the first plants to make it onto land, but having (one would think) no way of conserving water or otherwise protecting themselves, for they have such thin and delicate tissues. But they are evidently able to survive the dry season, apparently quite as well as the xerophytic ferns. The question is—must ask John—whether flowering plants can do as well as these “primitives” in this sort of suspended animation.

  On the way back from the falls, I join J.D. again, who is all excited at seeing a Mexican pistachio, Pistacia vera, which, he says, hails from Central Asia. This too belongs to “his” family, the Anacardiaceae. “This is so exciting,” he murmurs. “No Anacardiaceae till today—and now two!”

  Between identifying these plants (and many others, including a beautiful blue Wigandia, a member of the waterleaf family), J.D. continually spots different birds, is preternaturally skilled at seeing and following them—often tiny hummingbirds, hundreds of yards away—whereas I can see nothing smaller than hawks or vultures.

  As the bus heads back to Oaxaca I gaze idly out the window—fields of agaves; old women in dark shawls, moving in the fields, checking the agaves; thatched cottages shaped like beehives. Some of the roofs on the larger ones are reinforced with cornstalks—this (I am told) insulates them better. In one field there is a satellite dish rising from the cornstalks—a surreal twenty-first-century thing, cheek by jowl with a natural form of roofing, unchanged for thousands of years. I try to photograph this, but, missing—we are going too fast—attempt a tiny sketch in my notebook.

  We a
rrive back at the hotel in midafternoon, ready to share all of our botanical findings with one another in a sort of show-and-tell.

  We sometimes do this at our Saturday AFS meetings back in New York, but here we have so many riches that it will take hours to show them all.

  Some of the dried-up, seemingly dead ferns gathered the day before have been left in water overnight: the Astrolepis, the Notholaena, a Cheilanthes, and, of course, the resurrection fern—all of these, after a good soaking, have miraculously turned green, expanded and uncurled like Chinese water flowers.

  Robbin has brought some segments of tree fern trunks all the way from New York, in order to bring out a point. We had all seen such segments in the market and elsewhere; they are widely sold throughout Mexico, as containers for orchids, and professional orchid growers in Mexico and the U.S. use them by the thousand. But this, of course, involves the destruction of the plant itself, and tree ferns in Mexico are now endangered by the practice. The tree fern trunks he has brought are very beautiful in cross-section, because six or seven vascular bundles run up the stem, their black sheaths in dramatic contrast with the white pith and cortex around them.

  Many treasures have been brought back from the Atlantic slope expedition, which I missed yesterday. Robbin had looked by my room the previous evening—exhausted, but elated, having been on the road for sixteen hours—with a beautiful, giant frond of Pteris podophylla, and a Psilotum which he had seen growing on a tree fern, one fern growing on another. Now I see these and many more specimens, carefully laid out on a table.

  John Mickel shows us a frond from a rare Elaphoglossum—he risked his life, apparently, crawling far out on a tree limb to get it; the tree limb cracked under his weight, almost precipitating him below. These enthusiasts think nothing of risking their limbs and lives for ferns—and they are astoundingly agile. Here is John, in his mid-sixties, leaping brooks, scrambling up cliffs, climbing trees, like a boy—and this is so for almost all the party, including some who are ten years his senior.

  There are several species of Botrychium, including one never before described. If only I had been there, been at the discovery! Discovering a new species is the high point of a field botanist’s life, almost the equivalent of a chemist discovering a new element. Perhaps the new species of Botrychium, if it is a new species, and not merely a variant, will be named for Herb Wagner—a teacher of John’s and Robbin’s, and a long-standing and much loved member of the AFS, who died earlier this month. Or perhaps after our beloved Eth Williams.

  Eth Williams has been very much on my mind, on all our minds, for she too died, at ninety-five, just a few days before we left, and we are, all of us, bereft. The fern society meetings will never be the same now that she is gone. Eth and her husband, Vic, were there at the first meeting of the New York chapter, and she became its president in 1975. She would come to every meeting, bringing along dozens of little ferns that she had raised from spores in her greenhouse—beautiful, and sometimes quite rare, ferns which she sold or auctioned for a nominal dollar or two. She had the greenest thumb of anyone I ever met: She would sow the spores on sterilized peat pellets, keep them in a humidity chamber until they sprouted, and then prick the tiny sporelings into little pots. She could coax spores into growing where no one else succeeded, and she was responsible for providing not only the ferns at our meetings, but all the spore-grown ferns in the New York Botanical Garden’s collection for the past twenty-five years, working at first by herself, and then with a devoted group of five volunteers, the “Spore Corps.”

  A great hiker in her younger days, Eth had started using a stick at the age of ninety, but remained upright and very active, with a dry, charming humor and total clarity of mind to the last. She knew all of us by name, and was for all of us, I suspect, a sort of ideal aunt, or great-aunt, the quiet center of every meeting. She and Vic had married in the 1950s and were both avid field botanists. When a new Peruvian species of Elaphoglossum (she was particularly fond of these) was found in 1991, John named it E. williamsiorum in honor of them both.

  Someone else exhibits some filmy ferns which she found in the Oaxacan rain forest. Eth, I cannot help thinking, would have loved these delicate things: Only one cell thick, these ferns require nearly constant 100 percent humidity, so they cannot grow anywhere except in a rain forest (I have seen them in Pohnpei, and in Guam, too). There are at least ten species of these lovely, diaphanous, infinitely delicate Hymenophyllum growing in the Oaxaca rain forest.

  A whole banquet of Polypodium, the “many-footed” fern, have been collected—martensii, plebeium, longepinnulatum—but, John says, there are more than fifty species here if one is really looking, not just the nineteen noted in our list.

  Dick Rauh shows us the beautiful fern drawings he has been doing—thirty or more, each a few inches square, on a long zigzag of paper which folds up like a concertina. I am especially enchanted by his drawing of the resurrection fern, and by a drawing of the dramatic scene I missed the previous day, of John Mickel outstretched on a high branch, risking his life to get his Elaphoglossum.

  Scott and Carol have prepared an exhibit of local fruit and vegetables and other foods. They also have some castor “beans,” which look like bloated ticks, the seeds of the euphorb Ricinus communis. Though the castor bean hails from Africa, they tell us, it is now cultivated in large amounts in Mexico, too, for the oil has innumerable uses: as a lubricant in engines (including the racing oil, Castrol), as a quick-drying oil used in paints and varnishes, as a water-resistant coating for fabrics, a raw material in the production of nylon, a lamp oil, and not least, as a gentle purgative (I am reminded of childhood, and the doses of castor oil I was sometimes forced to swallow). But while the oil is benign, the seed itself is lethal, because it contains ricin, thousands of times more toxic than cobra venom or hydrogen cyanide. This stirs memories, and we all reminisce about the mysterious death in 1978 of Georgi Markov, a dissident Bulgarian journalist, in a London street. Markov died an agonizing death three days after being jabbed in the leg at a bus stop with the sharp ferrule of an umbrella. Scotland Yard later established that the umbrella jab, far from being accidental, had delivered a pellet the size of a pinhead containing ricin.

  While Scott is primarily a plant systematist and Carol is primarily a plant photographer, both are very knowledgeable about the economic uses and natural history of plants. It is lovely to see their complementary enthusiasms and interests. I have a special feeling for these botanical couples who are both spouses and working partners; they seem much more romantic to me than medical couples, like my parents. I find myself wondering how these couples met, and at what point their shared botanical enthusiasm became enthusiasm for each other. I am especially touched by Barbara Joe and Takashi Hoshizaki, who are now, I guess, both in their seventies, having spent a half-century or more of inseparably mixed botanical and married life together. Takashi is Japanese-American, born in California, and he tells frightening stories of how he and his family, most of his neighbors, were forced to live in internment camps during World War II. Barbara Joe, also a California native, is a Chinese-American, and such mixed marriages, in their generation, were rare. They met as students in Los Angeles, and when they married, Takashi designed a house for Barbara Joe which would accommodate her ferns—from any spot inside the house, she can look out onto lush, ferny plantscapes, and there is a greenhouse for the delicate ones. While both of them are primarily interested in ferns, Barbara Joe is above all drawn to the description and classification of ferns, their filiation and taxonomic relationships. She is the national president of the American Fern Society, and the author of a beautiful and encyclopedic book called Fern Grower’s Manual (she is currently working on a new edition of this with Robbin). Takashi is more drawn to plant physiology, but he has other, unexpected interests as well. He worked for many years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, and is an expert in the mechanisms of flight. A genius with models and simulations, he once made an artificial condor which
was so realistic that when he set it on long flights around Los Angeles, there were puzzled reports about giant condors in the area. The Hoshizakis have pressed me to visit them in Los Angeles, where, they promise, I will be shown the magic fern garden they have created around their house.

  I have also observed—I was a little slow to see it—two lesbian couples, and one gay couple, in our group. Very stable, long-term, as-if-married relationships, solidified, stabilized, by a shared love of botany. There is an easy, unselfconscious mixing here of all the couples—straight, lesbian, gay—all the potential intolerances and rejections and suspicions and alienations transcended completely in the shared botanical enthusiasm, the togetherness of the group.