Oaxaca Journal (11 page)

When I arrive back at the hotel, I see the participants of an International Conference on Low-Dimensional Physics—they too are here in the hotel, having their formal meetings every morning. What do they talk about, I wonder? Flat explosions, a Flatland world? There has been no contact between us and them—the world
we
call “real,” our pteridological world, is doubtless too coarse for them, and theirs, perhaps, too subtle for us. Yesterday I overheard someone say “You mean to tell me these ordinary-looking people are theoretical physicists!” (Theoretical physicists, I once read, lead all scientists in intelligence, with an average IQ in excess of 160.) Observing some of them today, I am not sure they do look “ordinary.” I see (or imagine) piercing intelligence animating their voices and gestures, but I could well be mistaken. I am not sure whether the super-intelligent scientists I know exhibit any external signs of their great gifts. And I remember contemporary descriptions of Hume—that he resembled “a turtle-eating alderman,” that his own mother thought him “weak-minded,” and that the salons of Paris were bewildered, and intrigued, by the total disparity of inner and outer man. There are similar descriptions of Coleridge’s face: pudding-like, jowly, inexpressive, much of the time, but transformed, transfigured, by the vitality of his mind.

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.

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 arrive 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.