Oaxaca Journal Part 4

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 cl.u.s.tered 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 h.o.m.ogenized 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 b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sion, rendering into words. I have made these last notes sitting under a tree-not one of the bald cypresses, but a p.r.i.c.kly-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 a.n.a.lyze, at the moment, quite what is so ... so right. The soft contours of the weathered hills, beauty. And now, in the gathering dusk, we pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 pa.s.sionate 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.

BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS.

The Mind's Eye.

Musicophilia Oaxaca Journal.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.

The Island of the Colorblind.

An Anthropologist on Mars Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

A Leg to Stand On.

Awakenings Migraine.