Oaxaca Journal (17 page)

“Hanging
Polypodia
on the rocks,” announces John, who, having dealt very coolly with the military, is now back to his botanical self. “We are going,” he adds, “to see the genus
Llavea
.” I like the name, with its Welsh-looking double “l.” No, not Welsh, John corrects me;
Llavea
was named in 1816 in honor of Pablo de la Llave, who traveled and botanized in Mexico two hundred years ago.

Arriving at the gate to Boone’s property, we are disgorged from the bus, and start to trek quite steeply upward. We are quite high again, over 7,000 feet, and with the addition now of a slightly fluey bronchitis (several of us have contracted this), I find myself a little short of breath. Boone comes out to meet us—broad-shouldered, compact, not in the least short of breath (but he lives at this altitude, so it is normal for him)—tough, agile, for all his seventy-five-odd years. He is unsurprised to hear about our encounter with the army. He speaks of the current political situation in Mexico, and then immediately asks, “Have you read Locke?” and goes on to speak of Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government
. Agriculture, genetics, politics, philosophy: all are admixed in Boone’s spacious mind, and his often sudden transitions from one subject to another are natural associations for a mind of this sort. There will be a period in the middle of the day when some of the group will go trekking in the forest, and others, like myself, can stay in the casita—then, I promise myself, I will have a real talk with Boone, who fascinates me more and more, and whom I want to know better. But this wish is frustrated: Two young soil botanists appear—they
have just arrived from Norway, and are making a special pilgrimage to see Boone. Boone greets them, welcomes them, in fluent Norwegian—how many languages, for God’s sake, does the man know?—and then disappears, closeted somewhere with them.

The casita itself is both dilapidated and charming—ideal for a dedicated visiting scientist, intolerable, perhaps, for anyone else. But then it is not meant for anyone else. There are tangled plants everywhere, there is a lizard in the sink, and there are six bunklike beds almost on top of each other in the bedroom. There is a fine central table for having a conference, and a large covered area outside for the preparation of specimens. There is a stove and a refrigerator, electricity, hot running water. What else should the visiting botanist desire?

What he truly desires is outside, all around him—for the casita is set in rich and varied forest, with sixty-odd species of ferns within a kilometer of the house and more than two hundred within a radius of fifteen kilometers. The dry central valley and city of Oaxaca lie an hour and a half to the south, and the lush rain forest is only two or three hours to the north. There is, in addition, Boone’s small farm, where he still grows corn and much else, and his personal garden with everything from grapefruits to rhododendrons, to say nothing of fish ponds and antique statues.

Carol Gracie has picked a passionflower,
Passiflora
, and now gives us an impromptu talk on how it was used symbolically by
the Jesuits. The three stigmas stood for the three nails of the Cross; the five stamens stood for the five wounds of Jesus; the ten tepals for the ten Apostles at the crucifixion; the corona for the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’s head; and the tendrils for the whips with which he was beaten as he carried the Cross to Calvary. If the good Fathers had a microscope, I thought, they could have found another dozen structures and symmetries which they could have interpreted as symbols of the crucifixion, embedded by God in the very cells of the plant.

I wander out with Scott, Nancy, and J.D. to a grove of passionflowers, an ideal spot for watching the hummingbirds and butterflies and for botanizing in the dense surround. We have barely settled ourselves before J.D. cries out, “A hummer! In the
Cryptomeria
. He’s got a band of iridescent green, like emerald.”

J.D. and Nancy keep spotting more and more birds—they must have identified more than twenty species in the course of an hour—and exclaiming in wonder as they do so. I look, and see nothing whatsoever. Or, rather, I see some hawks, and some vultures, nothing else—and the tiny stuff they are exclaiming about I miss completely. It’s my eyes, I apologize, poor visual acuity. But my acuity is fine—it is the brain that is defective. The eye must be educated, trained—one develops a birdwatcher’s, or geologist’s, or pteridologist’s eye (as I myself have a “clinical” eye).

Scott, meanwhile, with his eye honed to observe animal-plant interactions, identifies ripped flowers in the
Passiflora;
other flowers, seemingly intact, he bisects with his knife, and finds depleted of nectar. “Illegal entry,” he says darkly. Bees, most likely, have preempted the hummingbirds, ignored the
ants, and stolen the nectar, often damaging the flowers as they did so.

As I admire the neat way Scott bisects the flowers, I hear J.D.’s voice. “Oh, my God, it’s a kestrel. It’s magnificent.” Nancy, hearing me confuse hawks and vultures, tells me of the aerodynamic differences between them, how vultures, as opposed to hawks, hold their wings at a dihedral angle and then rock … so. She brings a different point of view (a mathematician’s and engineer’s point of view) to birds and their flight, whereas J.D. is primarily a taxonomist and ecologist. Nancy’s interest in birds and plants only started a few years ago, and she brings her mathematician’s mind with her into the field. I am excited to see this, to see how her abstract-mathematical and naturalist’s passions are not in separate compartments of her mind, but can join, interact, fertilize each other, as I see now.

David, the jolly chemist-botanist, bellows, “Mispickel!” whenever he sees me.

I answer, “Orpiment!”

“Realgar!” he retorts.

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.