‘Sounds odd, doesn’t it? We have millions of these brown, tree-climbing snakes everywhere – the whole island is overrun by them. They climb the telephone poles, get into the substations, through the ducts, into the transformers, and then, pfft! We have another outage. The blackouts can happen two or three times a day, and so everyone is prepared for them – we call them snakeouts. Of course, the actual times are quite unpredictable.
‘How have you been sleeping?’ he added, inconsequentially.
‘Rather well,’ I said. ‘Better than usual. At home, I tend to be woken by the birds at dawn.’
‘And here?’ John prompted.
‘Well, now you mention it, I haven’t heard any birds at dawn. Or any other time, It’s strange; I hadn’t realized it until you asked.’
‘There is no birdsong on Guam – the island is silent,’ John said. ‘We used to have many birds, but all of them are gone – there is not a single one left. All of them have been eaten by the tree-climbing snakes.’ John had a prankish sense of humor, and I was not quite sure whether to believe this story. But when I got back to my hotel that evening, and pulled out my trusty Micronesia Handbook, I found confirmation of all that he had said. The tree-climbing snake had made its way to Guam in the hold of a navy ship toward the end of the Second World War and, finding little competition among the native fauna, had rapidly multiplied. The snakes were nocturnal, I read, and could reach six feet in length, ‘but are no danger to adults as their fangs are far back in their jaws.’ They did, however, feed on all manner of small mammals, birds, and eggs; it was this which had led to the extinction of all the birds on Guam, including a number of species unique to the island. The remaining Guam fruit bats are now in danger of vanishing. The electrical outages, I read, cost millions of dollars in damages each year.[66]
The next morning I had arranged to spend some time hunting for ferns in the Guamanian jungle. I had heard of Lynn Raulerson, a botanist, from my friends at the American Fern Society in New York. She and another colleague, Agnes Rine-hart, both work at the herbarium at the University of Guam and had published, among other things, a delightful book on Ferns and Orchids of the Mariana Islands (its frontispiece, a representation of the life cycle of a fern, was drawn by Alma). I met Lynn at the university, and we set off for the jungle, accompanied by one of her students, Alex, who was equipped with a machete. Alex remarked on the denseness of the forest in places. ‘You can still get completely lost, even with a good sense of direction,’ he said. ‘You go five yards in, and it’s so thick, you’re already dislocated.’
The road itself was soon surrounded by an ocean of very large, bright-green sword ferns. Hundreds, thousands, of them pointed straight up into the air, almost as far as we could see. Nephrolepis biserrata, at least the variety we saw, is not your ordinary, humble sword-fern, but a species indigenous to the Marianas, with huge fronds sometimes as much as ten feet long. Once we had waded through these, we were into the jungle, with its great pandanus and ficus trees, and a canopy so dense it closed over our heads. It was a jungle as rich, as green, as any I had ever seen, the trunks of every tree blanketed with a dozen epiphytes, every available inch crowded with plants. Alex walked a few yards ahead of us, clearing a path with his machete. We saw huge bird’s-nest ferns – the Chamorros, Alex told us, call them galak – and a smaller ‘bird’s-nest’ fern which looked like a close relative, but was actually, Lynn told me, a different genus, a Polypodium indigenous to the Marianas.
I was delighted to see ferns of all shapes and sizes, from the lacy, triangular fronds of Davallia, and bristly Pyrrosia sheathing the trunks of the pandanus, to the gleaming shoestring fern, Vittaria, which seemed to hang everywhere. In moist, protected areas we saw a filmy fern, Trichomanes, which excited me, not just because of its delicacy and beauty, but because Safford, in an uncharacteristic error, had written that there were no filmy ferns on Guam (there are actually three species, said Lynn). We came upon the rare Ophioglossum pendulum, an immense ribbon fern with great succulent fronds, rippling and forking as they descended from the crotch of a tree.[67] I had never seen this species before, and even Lynn was excited to find it. We took pictures of it, with ourselves standing by – as one might photograph oneself with a marlin one had caught, or a tiger. But we were careful not to disturb the plant – and glad to think that our path to it would close itself up within days.
‘There is one more fern, over here,’ said Lynn, ‘you’ll want to see. Take a look at this fellow, with its two different types of leaves. The divided fronds are the fertile ones; the spearlike ones are sterile. Its name is Humata heterophylla, and it is named after Umatac (or Humatag) where it was found in the 1790s, by the first botanical expedition to Guam – you might call it the national fern of Guam.’
John and I made some more housecalls in the afternoon. We drove to the village of Yona, and stopped at the first house, where John’s patient, Jesus, was sitting on the porch; now that he had become almost petrified with the bodig, this was where he loved, above all, to sit all day. I was told he had ‘man-man’ – the Chamorro word for staring blankly into space – though this was not a blank staring, a staring at nothing, but an almost painfully engrossed, wistful staring, staring out at the children who played in the road, staring at the occasional passing cars and carts, staring at the neighbors leaving for work each morning, and returning late in the day. Jesus sat on his porch, unblinking, unmoving, motionless as a tortoise, from sunrise till midnight (except on the rare days when high winds or rain lashed across it), forever gazing at a constantly varying spectacle of life before him, an enraptured spectator, no longer able to take part.[68] I was reminded of a description of the aged Ibsen after his stroke, aphasic, partly paralyzed, no longer able to go out or write or talk – but insistent, always, that he be allowed to stand by the tall windows in his room, looking out on the harbor, the streets, the vivid spectacle of the city. ‘I see everything,’ he had once murmured, years before, to a young colleague; and there was still this passion to see, to be an observer, when all else was gone. So it was, it seemed to me, with old Jesus on his porch.
When John and I greeted Jesus, he answered in a small, flat voice, devoid of inflection or intonation, but his answers were precise and full of detail. He spoke of Agana, where he had been born in 1913, and how pleasant and tranquil it was then (‘Not like now – it’s completely changed since the war’), of coming to Umatac with his parents when he was eight, and of a long life devoted to fishing and farming. He spoke of his wife, who had been half Japanese and half Chamorro; she had died of bodig fifteen years ago. Many people in her family had lytico or bodig; but his own children and grandchildren, fortunately, seemed free of it.
We had been told that Jesus might pass the whole day with scarcely a word. And yet he spoke well, even volubly, when we engaged him in conversation; though, it soon became apparent, he waited for our questions. He could respond quite readily, but could not initiate a sentence. Nor, it seemed, a movement either – he might sit totally motionless for hours, unless something or someone called him to move. I was again strongly reminded of my post-encephalitic patients and how they were crucially dependent on the initiative of others, calling them to speech or action. I tore a page out of my notebook, balled it up, and threw the balled paper at Jesus. He had been sitting, seemingly incapable of movement, but now his arm shot up in a flash, and he caught the paper ball precisely. One of his little grandsons was standing by, and his eyes widened with astonishment when he saw this. I continued playing ball, and then asked Jesus to throw the ball at his grandson, and then to another child, and another. Soon we had the entire family playing ball, and akinetic Jesus, no longer akinetic, kept it going between us all. The children had not realized that their ‘paralyzed’ grandfather could move by himself at all, much less that he could catch a ball, aim it accurately, bluff, throw it in different styles and directions, and improvise a fast ball game among them.