Oaxaca Journal (12 page)

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.

I myself may be the only single person here, but I have been single, a singleton, all my life. Yet here this does not matter in the least, either. I have a strong feeling of being one of the
group, of belonging, of communal affection—a feeling that is extremely rare in my life, and may be in part a cause of a strange “symptom” I have had, an odd feeling in the last day or so, which I was hard put to diagnose, and first ascribed to the altitude. It was, I suddenly realized, a feeling of joy, a feeling so unusual I was slow to recognize it. There are many causes for this joyousness, I suspect—the plants, the ruins, the people of Oaxaca—but the sense of this sweet community, belonging, is surely a part of it.

T
oday I pay more attention to the vegetation of the valley as we drive through it—the serried, upright organ-pipe cactus and the prickly-pear, nopal cactus. These cacti form an integral part of the culture—the nopal pads are sliced and cooked (I have had them as a vegetable with almost every meal), and their strawberry-like fruits make very sweet, tasty jelly or jam. The ancient pictographs are full of cacti. An eagle perched on a nopal eating a snake, for example, which the Aztec saw as the sign from the gods that they had arrived, found a place to settle, in 1325. We saw such an image a few days ago, as a giant painting on the face of a cliff near Yagul. In pre-Hispanic days, Luis tells us, seems almost to recollect—at times he seems to contain the entire history of his people in himself—snakes were sacred symbols, earth symbols; they changed their skins as the Earth changed seasons. But in Christian tradition, the serpent
became evil, the tempter. Snakes, once revered, were deliberately killed after the Spaniards came.

Then there are the spiky agaves and yuccas. There are acacias, lots of them. John Mickel warns us to treat them with respect, for some of them host colonies of symbiotic ants, and these will furiously attack anyone who messes with their home. There is a fine tall grass,
Arundo donax
, with spear-shaped blades, some of which are eight feet high or more. This may be used for thatching, or roofs, perhaps for carpets, mats, too. Then there is the dangerous bad woman (
Mala mujer
)
—Cnidoscolus
, a nightmare plant of the euphorbia family covered with poisonous hairs. I had heard this spoken of, its use by pranksters, by my neighbor in the plane, but John warns us solemnly against even the slightest accidental touch.