Oliver Sacks. Oaxaca Journal.
Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2002. 161 pp.

Oaxaca Journal recounts Oliver Sacks’s two-week tour with a group of people who are nuts about ferns—pteridologists, members of the American Fern Society (AFS). Relaxed in tone, the writing interweaves meandering conversations of Sacks’s traveling companions with his own personal observations and musings.

In describing the AFS and how the current understanding of fern reproduction has developed, Sacks relates that “[t]he great Linnaeus himself, in the eighteenth century, did not know how ferns reproduced, and coined the term cryptogams to denote the hiddenness, the mystery, of their reproduction.” To show the importance of this hiddenness to (and possibly the level of superstition in) our own earlier culture, Sacks reminds us, “Invisible themselves, they were thought to confer invisibility on others: ‘We have receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible,’ says one of Falstaff's henchmen in Henry IV.”

Similar wide-ranging associations permeate the journal and account for part of its appeal. The sighting of a plant in the genus Nicotiana (one of many non-ferns encountered) is followed by the group’s discussion of the history of tobacco. Ruminations on the logarithmic spirals of fern crosiers, the red dye, carmine cochineal, derived from local insects, the hallucinogenic properties of morning glory seeds, and Oaxacan history and legend are integral parts of the journey.

Sacks writes with open affection for his mostly-amateur fellow-travelers and their enthusiasms. Some, however, are professional pteridologists. A neurologist by profession, Sacks discovers, or maybe rediscovers, why scientists do what they do—something in the natural world has totally charmed them, sucked them into their discipline—and out in the field, here in Oaxaca, they reconnect, rejuvenate (fairly literally, based on descriptions of men and women in their fifties and sixties crawling, climbing, and leaping in pursuit of ferns).

Sacks begins this journey as an “outsider,” writing while others crawl through grasses and underbrush, valuing the fern allies (especially the horsetails and whisk ferns) above ferns, and guarding his susceptible back while others literally go out on slender limbs to collect fronds of epiphytes. But he finds, by the end of the trip, “a strong feeling of being one of the group, of belonging, of communal affection—a feeling that is extremely rare in my life.”

Sacks does describe some fairly primitive accommodations. Even so, readers may hope to take such a trip with a similar bunch of enthusiastic oddballs and to participate in such encompassing discussions, to be a part of a group “hav[ing] exactly this—a passion, a love, for their subject, and the accumulated experience, often, of a lifetime of acute observations in the field.”

The journal exemplifies what Sacks claims to admire about the journals of the old naturalists who were also true amateurs—a lyricism brought on by being enthralled by something in the natural world. For Sacks, that something is most often the traveling companions, who repeatedly surprise Sacks with their own lyricism—the traveling companions who accept him as one of their own: a dedicated and enthusiastic observer and a lover of plants.

Amy Whitney