A Brief but Insightful Account by Oliver Sacks of Visiting Oaxaca with Fellow Fern-enthusiasts: Oaxaca Journal

Neurologist Oliver Sacks is a marvelous writer whose curiosity is wide-ranging and who has a gift for making phenomena on which his curiosity focuses interesting to readers. His writings about neurological anomalies appear regularly in the New Yorker. Awakening was made into a movie, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was made into an opera (that was then filmed).

A few weeks ago, while part of a tour group of 31 Americans in quest of monarch butterflies wintering in the Sierra Madre Occidental on the border between the Mexican states of Michoac¡n and Mexico, I read his 2002 book, Oaxaca Journal, about a 1999 tour group of 30 in quest of rare fern species in the highlands of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Sacks did not report the price of the American Fern Society trip. I'm sure it was more expensive, since it was organized by John Mickel of the New York Botanical Garden, coauthor of Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, Mexico, and included some very hardcore pteridologists, including some professional ones, whereas our group only had two hardcore (amateur) lepidopterists. Both groups included some birdwatchers. Since the very common yellow-rumped warbler is a bird that Sacks takes note of the birdwatchers spotting, I can easily believe that he saw anything smaller and closer to the ground than hawks and vultures.

I'm a little surprised that someone who has long lived in New York is so easily shocked by poverty as Sacks was. And I am pretty sure that I know more about Oaxacan history and culture than Sacks does. On multiple visits over the course of many years, I had better know more about these matters than he does on the basis of a ten-day fern tour! What he was told and passes on to his journal and then readers of the book is, I think that I can pronounce with some authority, quite sound. The image the group's Zapotec guide passes on about the ancient Zapotec is romanticized, somewhat in the manner of the now-exploded representation of "the gentle Maya." The Zapotecs in Oaxaca (and the P'urh©pecha, formerly called Tarascans, in Michoac¡n) did not avoid being conquered by the Aztecs by being gentle!

Although some of the group members barely looked at the ruins of Monte Alban and Mitla (looking only for and at flora that has grown up in and around them), Sacks definitely did. Some of the awe that Monte Alban inspires stems from a vastness that as Sacks suggests is exaggerated by its current emptiness. All the wooden structures of a bustling city are long gone. The inhabitants are long gone too, and with them went their gods (reminding me of Saint Augustine commenting on the Trojans protecting and supporting the gods who had failed to protect and support the worshipers).

Sacks is a keen observer of others, in part because he is a perpetual loner and most of the other tour members are coupled. When the group goes up to a mountain top the night of a full lunar eclipse (fortified by a lot of mescal), Sacks moves off by himself to focus on the celestial event rather than to bask in the camaraderie. Not that he fails to appreciate and even celebrate the camaraderie with those who share one of his interests, but even a single-minded tour group can be too much for someone used to thinking in peace and the solitary task of writing. (I was amused that one of the louder members of our butterfly group remarked that the swarms of butterflies at the El Rosario Reserve might have provided a spiritual experience if the other 30 members of the group had been quiet when we got to where the butterflies were concentrated.)

Sacks writes interestingly about the ferns, too. There are more fern species in the state of Oaxaca than in all of the continental United States plus Canada. Sacks considers flowers too explicit, and part of his fascination is that ferns are among the oldest forms of life. ''Ferns had survived, with little change, for a third of a billion years. Other creatures, like dinosaurs, had come and gone, but ferns, seemingly so frail and vulnerable, had survived all the vicissitudes, all the extinctions the earth had known. My sense of a prehistoric world, of immense spans of time, was first stimulated by ferns and fossil ferns."

The book, in a National Geographic "Literary Travel Series" (the only other ones of which I have read is Francine Prose's excellent Sicilian Odyssey and Peter Carey's more superficial Wrong About Japan; some other combinations of writer and place sound interesting) is much shorter than its ostensible length of 160 pages sounds. There are blank pages between chapters and line drawings of ferns by Dick Rauh. I can recommend the book for those with no previous particular interest in ferns or ferners. For those familiar with Oaxaca, Sacks's writing will evoke the place. Those not familiar with Oaxaca can trust that there is nothing that Sacks gets wrong. That is, there is nothing in what he wrote that contradicts either m experience of the place or my fairly extensive reading of the scholarship on ancient and contemporary Zapotecs.