Oliver Sax May 1, 2023
“Missed views of Ixtlán and Guelatao across the valley. Guelatao, Luis tells us, ‘is where Benito Juarez was born in 1806, the 21st of March. This is a holiday in Mexico.’ His life, his upbringing, his mission, is detailed by Luis. ‘He learned to read with the priests; went to the seminary; met there with philosophers. Then he went to the University of Oaxaca—and finally the president of Mexico, in 1856.’ We are treated to an elaborate discourse on the situation and politics of Mexico in 1856. A polite and finally stupefied silence greets this. Meanwhile, all sorts of wonderful plants slide past us.”
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, 2002
My first introduction to Oaxaca was some twenty years ago when Oaxaca Journal was published. The author, Dr. Oliver Sacks, was one of my favorites, as I loved the way he could write so empathetically—lovingly, really—of his subjects. These people were often his psychiatric patients, or his family, or both.
Through the ’90’s, with a meager high school science department budget, I bought many hard-cover copies of Uncle Tungstun, about the Doctor’s brilliantly eccentric childhood love of chemistry, growing up in an erudite, if slightly zany, Jewish family in London. I love to hear his stories, and his rich insights into science, the mind, epistemology and perception. Written beautifully, the book was the prize I awarded our outstanding science student each year. By Oliver Sacks. The guy who Robin Williams played in Awakenings.
That same un-bottled curiosity with which he treated his mind-addled patients was first developed at a young age. And even in the twilight of his clinical career, his curiosity continued to flower, in myriad directions—including ferns (a flowerless plant), as well Oaxaqueño customs and complexions, the seven moles, grasshoppers and ants, mezcal, cacao, the precious carmine dye of the Cochineal beetle, the central markets, the southernmost grove of Douglas firs in the world, “this timelessness, this medieval life”—as he continued to explore in writing what it all might mean:
“We got lost, almost killed, trying to cross the Pan American Highway. We saw open sewers, children with infected eyes and sores. Fearful poverty, filth. We were almost asphyxiated by diesel fumes; we were almost bitten by a ferocious, perhaps rabid dog. This is the other side of Oaxaca, a modern city, full of traffic, with a rush hour, and poverty, like any other. Perhaps it is salutary for me to see this other side, before I get too lyrical about this Eden.”
High on the travertine hills of Hierve el Agua, Sacks and his comrades from the New York Fern Society encounter the unique plants they apparently have come expressly to see: “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.” He even brought desiccated and crumpled Resurrection Ferns back to his hotel, where he watered and instantly reanimated them. Observant Catholics should want to know about these.
In 2010, thirteen years before I would remember his Oaxaca Journal, when my connection with him became more intimate, I had the rare chance to share lunch with Oliver Sacks and Hal Miller, a mutual colleague and psychology professor, in Utah. Perhaps foolishly, I declined for the simple reason I had to teach that day. Honestly, I would not have known what to talk about or where to begin. Until now.