The Island of the Colorblind

C. micronesica, it seems, is distinctive not only morphologically, but chemically and physiologically too – with a notably higher content of carcinogenic and toxic substances (in particular, of cycasin and BMAA) than any other cycad which has been analyzed. Thus cycad eating, relatively benign elsewhere, may be peculiarly dangerous on Guam and Rota – and the Darwinian process which has brought a new species into the world may also, conceivably, be contributing to a new human disease.

I find myself walking softly on the rich undergrowth beneath the trees, not wanting to crack a twig, to crush or disturb anything in the least – for there is such a sense of stillness and peace that the wrong sort of movement, even one’s very presence, might be felt as an intrusion, and, so to speak, anger the woods. Tommy’s words, earlier, came back to me now. ‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I was taught to walk backwards in the jungle, and not to destroy anything…I have the attitude that these plants are alive. They have powers. They can invoke some kind of a disease to you if you do not respect them…’ The beauty of the forest is extraordinary – but ‘beauty’ is too simple a word, for being here is not just an esthetic experience, but one steeped with mystery, and awe.

I would have similar feelings as a child, when I lay beneath the ferns, and later, when I entered through the massive iron gates at Kew – a place which was not just botanical for me, but had an element of the mystical, the religious too. My father once told me that the very word ‘paradise’ meant garden, spelling out for me the four letters (pe resh dalet samech ) of pardes, the Hebrew word for garden. But gardens, Eden or Kew, are not the right metaphors here, for the primeval has nothing to do with the human, but has to do with the ancient, the aboriginal, the beginning of all things. The primeval, the sublime, are much better words here – for they indicate realms remote from the moral or the human, realms which force us to gaze into immense vistas of space and time, where the beginnings and originations of all things lie hidden. Now, as I wandered in the cycad forest on Rota, it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or eons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes.[93]

I live on an island – City Island in New York – surrounded by the brilliant transient artifacts of man. And yet each June, without fail, horseshoe crabs come up from the sea, crawl on the beach, mate, deposit eggs, and then slowly swim away again. I love to swim in the bay alongside them; they permit this, indifferently. They have crawled up to the shores and mated every summer as their ancestors have done since the Silurian, 400 million years ago. Like the cycads, the horseshoe crabs are rugged models, great survivors which have endured. When he saw the giant tortoises of the Galapagos, Melville wrote (in The Encantadas ):

These mystic creatures…affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They seemed newly crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the world.…The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that of age – dateless, indefinite endurance.

Such is the feeling inspired, for me, by the horseshoe crabs each June.

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.[94]

It is evening now, and as Tommy and Beata go off to gather some medicinal plants, I sit on the beach, looking out to sea. Cycads come down almost to the water’s edge, and the strand is littered with their gigantic seeds, along with the tough egg cases of sharks and rays, which are shaped like bizarre fortune cookies. A light wind has sprung up, rustling the leaves of the cycads, blowing up little ripples on the water. Ghost crabs and fiddler crabs, hidden in the heat of the day, have emerged and are darting to and fro. The chief sound is the lapping of waves on the shore, lapping as they have done for billions of years, ever since land rose out of the water – an ancient, soothing, hypnotic sound.