Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks

This, like the smacking of hands, high-fiving, is our jovial, arsenical greeting.

  I have seen my first giant horsetails in the wild—Equisetum myriochaetum—topping my head. John says it can grow to fifteen feet tall. But how big is the stem, I ask? He makes an O with his thumb and forefinger—one and a half centimeters diameter, maximum. I am deeply disappointed. I had hoped he might say like a slender tree trunk, as thick as a young Calamites.

  David, overhearing, nods. “You really are an old fossil man.” (I had told him, earlier, of my interest, my initiation, in paleobotany.) Robbin recounts the story of how Richard Spruce, the great botanical explorer, coming upon a stand of giant horsetails in Ecuador in the early 1860s, spoke of them as having stems nearly as thick as his wrist, as resembling a forest of young larches. “I could also fancy myself,” he wrote, “in some primeval forest of Calamites.” Could Spruce, we wonder, in fact have come across a population of miraculously surviving Calamites, the truly treelike giant horsetails which flourished in the Paleozoic, but extinct for 250 million years?

  It would seem very unlikely, and yet … not completely impossible. Perhaps he did find them, perhaps they are still there, a secret enclave, in some lost world of Amazonia. This, says Robbin, is a fantasy he sometimes has (“in my more irrational, romantic moments”), and such a thought is one I sometimes have, too. Stranger things have happened, after all: the discovery in 1938 of the coelacanth, a fish supposedly long extinct. The discovery in the 1950s of an entire class of molluscs thought to have been extinct for nearly 400 million years. The discovery of the dawn redwood, Metasequoia, or, most recently, of the Wollemi pine in Australia. Robbin speaks of the isolated high plateaus in Venezuela, with rock walls so sheer one has to helicopter to the top. All of these have endemic species, unique plants of their own, plants seen nowhere else in the world.

  We regroup in the casita, spread our specimens out. The giant horsetail (though no Calamites) outshines all the others in splendor, to my mind. Boone comes by now—he has been with the Norwegian soil scientists all this while—and takes us out to show us the perennial corn, Zea diploperennis, he has grown from seed. It was discovered, a tiny patch of it, about fifteen years ago, in Jalisco, and Boone, among others, realized the agricultural potential it had—both as a plant in its own right, and as one whose corn-smut-resistant genes could be transferred to other varieties of corn. It comes to me, as we stand about him, that there is something different about Boone. With his extraordinary technical ingenuity and originality, his immense range of reading and reference, his passionate, lifelong dedication to restoring the self-respect and autonomy of the impoverished farmers of Oaxaca, he is, intellectually and morally, a being of another order. Boone stands beside the high corn, his strong figure casting a diagonal shadow in the afternoon sun, and bids us goodbye. I have the sense of a rare, a heroic and extraordinary figure—the tall corn, the strong sun, the old man, become one. This is one of those moments, indescribable, when there is a sense of intense reality, an almost preternatural reality—and then we are descending the trail to the gate, reboarding the bus, all in a sort of trance or daze, as if we had had a sudden vision of the sacred, but were now back in the secular, everyday world.

  We pile out at one point, a point John has marked and borne in mind from his many previous trips to Oaxaca. Here it is, he says, as we get out: Llavea cordifolia—you may never see it again. It is confined to southern Mexico and Guatemala. John had spotted this rare endemic the first time he came to Oaxaca, scanning the banks along the road.

  I look at the Llavea. Just another damn fern, I think (but this is not a thought I would dare express with this group!).* At the same time I see, out of the corner of my eye, something infinitely stranger and (to me) more interesting—Pinguicula, the butterwort, a carnivorous plant. Its leaves are oval and mucilaginous—I touch them gingerly—little insects get stuck in the mucilage and are gradually digested.

  Llavea is not all that rare. But supposing, I ask Robbin, there are only twenty or thirty plants altogether, all in one spot and nowhere else? Would the location be published and divulged? Robbin and Judith Jones, who sits next to him, agree that, in such circumstances, it would not. I mention an exotic cycad, a species of Ceratozamia, of which only twenty or so plants were found in Panama—and how the entire population was removed by a collector, rendering the species extinct in the wild. Judith, who runs a fern nursery in the Pacific Northwest, mentions a botanist, Carl English, who claimed to have discovered a new maidenhair fern, a dwarf Adiantum, in the 1950s, but would not say where. He was, in consequence, disbelieved—or told he had a “sport,” of no special interest. Thirty years later, after his death, a second isolate was found—so, posthumously, he was vindicated. But why had he concealed its location in the first place? His motivation was not commercial—he made no profit, he distributed the spores freely, all around the world; it was, perhaps, partly professional, the desire to establish scientific priority (though undermined, in this case, because no one believed him), and partly protective, to keep the little patch of plants from being destroyed by collectors. Or perhaps, as Judith thinks, he was simply by nature a secretive man.

  This leads us, as the bus wends its way through the high mountains, still high above Oaxaca, to a long discussion of openness and secrecy in science, the questions of priority, of piracy, of patents, and of plagiarism. I say that I am happy for my patients to be seen by other colleagues, I welcome any genuine interest in them or their states, but that I have some colleagues who feel very differently, colleagues who would not let me (or anyone else) see their patients, even briefly, because they are afraid they might be “scooped,” and whose correspondence is similarly uninformative and guarded. I mention Lavoisier, who was at pains to make careful notes on all his own discoveries, and to place these, sealed, with the Academy of Sciences, so that there could never be any contesting of his priority; but who, on the other hand, shamelessly, or shamefully, appropriated the discoveries of others.

  We shake our heads over the complexity of it all.

  Coming back from Boone’s, exhilarated, exhausted, Robbin and I decide to spend a last night on the town—a final stroll around the zócalo, a final meal in one of its sidewalk cafes. But first we will go to the cultural museum in town, a vast collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, housed in an enormous seventeenth-century convent. The richness, the range, of the last few days has bewildered us, and we need to see a summary, a synthesis, everything ordered and catalogued before us.

  We stop first in the museum’s biblioteca, a long, long room, and high, stacked up to the ceiling with incunabula and early calf-bound books. There is a sense here of great learning, of tranquillity, of the immensity of history, and of the fragility of books and paper. It was this fragility that made it possible for the Spanish to destroy the written records of the Maya and the Aztec and preceding civilizations almost completely. Their exquisite, delicate, manuscript books of bark had no chance of surviving the conquistadors’ autos-da-fé, and they were destroyed by the thousands—barely half a dozen remain. The writings and glyphs inscribed on the statues and temples and tablets and tombs were somewhat less vulnerable, but many of these are still indecipherable to us, or largely so, despite a century of work. Gazing at the fragile books in this library, I think of the great library of Alexandria, with its hundreds of thousands of unique, uncopied scrolls, whose burning lost forever much of the knowledge of the ancient world.

  We had learned, in Monte Albán, about Tomb 7, where a fabulous treasure had been discovered, the Mesoamerican equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The treasure itself, now displayed in the museum, is relatively late, for the original eighth-century contents of the tomb had been removed, and the tomb reused in the fourteenth century to bury a Mixtec nobleman and his servants, along with a hoard of gold and silver and precious stones. There are great funerary urns, such as we had seen all over Monte Albán. And exquisite jewelry and ornaments made of metal—gold, silver, copper, and alloys of these—a
nd of jade, turquoise, alabaster, quartz, opal, obsidian, azabache (whatever this was), and amber. Gold was not valued by the pre-Columbians as such, as stuff, but only for the ways in which it could be used to make objects of beauty. The Spanish found this unintelligible, and in their greed melted down thousands, perhaps millions, of gold artifacts, in order to fill their coffers with the metal. The horror of this comes upon me as I gaze at the few artifacts of gold which had been preserved, through a rare chance, in Tomb 7. In this sense, at least, the conquistadors had showed themselves to be far baser, far less civilized, than the culture they overthrew.

  One display case is devoted to the pre-Hispanic cultures’ cosmology, with all their gods of sun, of war, of “atmospheric forces in general,” of maize, of earthquakes, of the underworld, of animals and ancestors (an interesting conjunction), of dreams, of love, and of luxury.

  In another case we find small mirrors made of pyrite and magnetite. How is it that while these Mesoamerican cultures appreciated magnetite for its luster and beauty, they did not discover the fact that it was magnetic, and that, if floated in water, it might act as a compass? Nor the fact that, if smelted with charcoal, it would yield metallic iron?

  How strange that these brilliant and complex cultures, so sophisticated in mathematics and astronomy, in engineering and architecture, so rich in art and culture, so profound in their cosmological understanding and ritual—were still in a pre-wheel, pre-compass, pre-alphabet, pre-iron age. How could they be so “advanced” in some ways, so “primitive” in others? Or were such terms completely inapplicable?

  If we compare Mesoamerica to Rome and Athens, I was beginning to realize, or to Babylon and Egypt, or to China and India, we find the disjuncture bewildering. But there is no scale, no linearity, in such matters. How can one evaluate a society, a culture? We can only ask whether there were the relationships and activities, the practices and skills, the beliefs and goals, the ideas and dreams, that make for a fully human life.

  This has turned out to be a visit to a very other culture and place, a visit, in a profound sense, to another time. I had imagined, ignorantly, that civilization started in the Middle East. But I have learned that the New World, equally, was a cradle of civilization. The power and grandeur of what I have seen has shocked me, and altered my view of what it means to be human. Monte Albán, above all, has overturned a lifetime of presuppositions, shown me possibilities I never dreamed of. I will read Bernal Díaz and Prescott’s 1843 Conquest of Mexico again, but with a different perspective, now that I have seen some of it myself. I will brood on the experience, I will read more, and I will surely come again.

  * When I did say this to Robbin later he was quite indignant. Llavea was extraordinary, he said, for it bore its reproductive organs, its fertile pinnae, on the same leaf as its sterile pinnae, and the two had completely different shapes. Wild! And its rarity and restricted range made it doubly fascinating. “Not just any fern has these qualities!” he exclaimed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SUNDAY

  Today, on this final trip, we are traveling south of Oaxaca toward the city of Sola de Vega. For our last collecting we go to a limestone area, to see lime-loving, calciphilic ferns and other plants. I have a certain feeling of exhaustion, at least of narrative exhaustion, but there is no exhaustion of the others’ enthusiasm—it is as if they are seeing all these ferns afresh, for the first time. I too enjoy the ferns—and the others’ enthusiasm—but with a sense perhaps of the trip’s imminent ending, content myself with the making of a list: Cheilanthes longipila; Cheiloplecton rigidum; Astrolepis beitelii; Argyrochosma formosa; Notholaena galeottii; Adiantum braunii; Anemia adiantifolia; two species of Selaginella; as well as lichens, mosses, tiny agaves, mimosas, and innumerable DYCs.

  After ferning we backtrack to El Vado—the ford—to have a final brunch under the bald cypresses by the river. Magnificent trees, not as large as El Tule, but still wonderful to see them clustered along this thin watercourse (a watercourse which expands and flows over the road in the rainy season, but is still substantial, even in the middle of the dry season now). Little girls, no more than five, are doing laundry in the river. And we are attended by the village dogs, a dozen or more, strikingly different in size, breed, and color—not like the homogenized dingo-like dogs we have seen in other places. They are attracted (as we are, even my quasivegetarian self) by the delicious smell of beef cooking on a wood fire, and we are happy to feed them as we eat. They are curiously polite, for three or four of them will sit or stand around one, patiently at the ready, but fully accepting of being fed in serial order; 1, 2, 3, 4 … 1, 2, 3, 4. No dog tries to butt in, or take the other’s meat—we are very impressed by this social sense, this sense of equity—or is it just hierarchy and dominance? How is it with wild dogs or hyenas, faced with a kill?

  Are these dogs owned—individually or communally—or are they semiferal commensals just living in the village? Dogs, I am told, are rarely owned or treated as pets here—most skulk around and scavenge, and people kick them in an offhand way. They look domesticated, and yet I have a frightened feeling as I am eating, surrounded at one point by as many as seven of them. A frightened feeling of their wolfish potential, wondering how readily they could turn wild, and turn on (rather than to) one of us humans. We probably deserve it. (Perhaps there is always, with me, some of this discomfort, this fear, when I am around large dogs. I love dogs, and have a canine, or rather lupine, middle name myself—Wolf. But my first memory is of being attacked and bitten by a dog—our chow, Peter—when I was just two. I pulled his tail while he was eating, gnawing a bone, and he leapt up and bit my cheek.)

  Luis’s mother has come along for the trip, and helped by Umberto, the driver, and Fernando, his son, she has set up trestle tables by the river. Luis’s brother is a butcher, and has provided the marvelous meat; and his mother, a fine cook, has made two grand traditional dishes—estofado de pollo, a Spanish chicken stew in almond sauce, and a mole amarillo, with pork, spiced with yerba santa and pitiona. And to wash everything down—the meats and the tortillas—a huge urn of hot cinnamon-flavored Oaxacan chocolate—a chocolate to which, in the past week, I have become completely addicted. The atmosphere of the brunch is very sweet, very easy. We have been together for nine days now, and all know each other. We have worked hard, climbed gullies, leapt streams, and have seen a quarter of the seven hundred-odd fern species in Oaxaca. Tomorrow we will all have to leave this place and go back to our jobs in Los Angeles or Seattle or Atlanta or New York. But for now, there is nothing to do but sit under the great bald cypresses by the river and enjoy the simple animal pleasure of being alive (perhaps the vegetable pleasure, too; feeling what it might be like to live, unhurried, century after century, and still feel youthful at a thousand years old).

  My own self-imposed task, or indulgence, the keeping of a journal, is coming to an end. I am amazed that I have kept at it with such pertinacity—but this is my passion, rendering into words. I have made these last notes sitting under a tree—not one of the bald cypresses, but a prickly-pear tree, and John Bristow (the third John in our group!—as obsessive with his camera as I with my pen) took my picture quietly when he thought I was not looking.

  Setting sun, long rays, gilding little Zapotec villages and sixteenth-century churches—a sweet, mild, gently undulating land. This has been a lovely trip. I have not enjoyed one so much for many years, nor can I analyze, at the moment, quite what is so … so right. The soft contours of the weathered hills, beauty. And now, in the gathering dusk, we pass El Tule once again, its enormous bulk dwarfing the old mission just by it.

  The soft shadowed hills remind me, oddly, of such hills on Route 50 near Tracy, California, and a photograph I once took of them, in 1960. I feel young again, or, rather, ageless, timeless.

  A hand—dark, shapely, muscular—hangs out the window of a bus as we pass it. It is quite beautiful in itself. I am not curious about its possessor.

  Dawn is announced by the coming of the
brilliant, still-almost-full orb of the moon to my window. It brings a ghostly, diaphanous light to the room every morning around 4:30 and it is still visible now, high in the sky, as we prepare to jolt through the city to the airport, in broad daylight, three hours later.

  There are eighteen of us taking the early plane to Mexico City—from there we will scatter all over the States.

  John and Carol, and Robbin, have come down to see us off. There are emotional hugs, hopes to meet again, perhaps on a future visit to Oaxaca. I, of course, will see these three in New York in a couple of weeks, but some of the others may not see them again for a long time.

  On the way to the airport, I reflect on my trip to Oaxaca. It had been billed as a fern tour, a sort of amplification of the fern forays we often make on summer Saturdays around New York. And it has been this, a wonderful fern adventure, with novelties and surprises, great beauty at every point. It has been a revelation, too, of how deep and passionate the love of ferns can be—I think of John risking his life to get an Elaphoglossum—and of how the sharing of such an enthusiasm has bonded us together. We met as virtual strangers, just ten days ago, and we have become friends, a sort of community, in this short time. We break up now, with reluctance and sadness, like a theater troupe when the play is over.

  David and I exchange a last M-O-R.

  “Mispickel!”

  “Orpiment!”

  “Realgar!” A grand man. I will write to him, and hope to see him again, sometime.