On that first day we ate the food we would always eat. We stopped at a little restaurant for a delicious lunch of pork, pork, and pork (steamed, fried, congealed, and then sliced thinly), sautéed green leaves, sautéed bamboo, boiled rice, and beer. We got back on the bus and the botanists began their funny back-and-forth chatter, but their eyes were always glued to the landscape. After two and a half hours of sitting and looking, they demanded that a stop be made. They had seen an intriguing gulch in the side of a mountain; we were at a much higher elevation than Kunming, we were in an American zone 8, no longer in the tropics. They grabbed their collecting vests, their backpacks, their cameras, and rushed out of the bus. I followed Dan, not because I wished to collect anything (I live in an American zone 5) but because I wanted to get the feel of it, going up and down in this unfamiliar brush, looking and looking for some vegetable treasure with fruit on it; but I could not keep up with Dan; he bounded up the mountain like a four-footed furry mammal (a bear) and disappeared. I only knew how to follow him by seeing the trembly branches and flattened undergrowth that were left in his wake. I came upon a cow, which looked at me; I came upon a dog, which barked crossly at me. This surprised me; I had not expected to find a cross dog in China.
We got back to Dali and found the streets full of non-Chinese people, and I don’t know if we looked as strange and out of place as they looked to me. We went out for a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, chicken, yak, sautéed vegetables, and beer, then went back to our rooms, slept, and the next morning, after a breakfast of rice noodles and instant coffee, got on the bus and started toward Zhongdian. We were climbing up now, higher and higher into the mountains, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, avoiding oncoming traffic as it avoided us; there were choruses of sharp intakes of breath, there were individual ahhhs; and the reason we were aware of each almost disastrous end is that we were looking out on an amazing landscape of hills, mountains, valleys, and terraces carved out of the mountains, cultivated, planted with corn—mostly corn, the rice grew in the valleys where we saw many people harvesting it—and as we drove through the villages that were in the mountains and the hills and the valleys, there was that strange, rotting, fetid, unpleasant smell of other people, their shit; human feces is such a valuable commodity in China, it is why all the vegetables were so vigorous-looking in cultivation, it is why people were so able to feed themselves. In all the time I was in China (four weeks spent in only two of its provinces) the thing I noticed people doing most frequently was growing food and eating food.
The botanists could take only so much sitting (three hours of driving); they demanded a stop. We had not reached the Yangtze, we were still among eucalyptus forests and bamboo, zone 8 or 7, but in the hills the botanists saw something. They collected seeds from arisaema, rhododendron (species not readily identifiable and so it became temporarily, until it bloomed, Rhododendron sp. or spa, as they jokingly pronounced it), hypericum, clematis, and other things which were new to me, but I could hear them speaking to each other in excitement about seeds from plants I had never seen or heard of in an American (or other) garden. I followed Dan, and this is how he got rid of me: he pointed to a cluster of red berries attached to a limp brown stem lying on the ground and said, “Here is your first ariseama.” I was directed to my first real collection, my first distinguished collection, but after I had gathered the cluster of fruits, placing them in a Ziploc plastic bag (just the way Dan had instructed me), when I looked up again Dan was not there, he was way up above me, I could tell because he kept calling kindly to ask if I was all right. I was almost on the edge of the world (the world as I understood and do still understand it) and I was not all right; I wondered if Annie was all right, I wondered if Harold was all right; I took for granted that Allen was all right and loved me in the way he already loved me.
We drove along for miles and miles of seeing mountains and hills in front of mountains, and then the former mountains becoming mere hills and terraces carved out of the side of the hills (or mountains) planted with corn (or something else from that family), and then the road ran parallel to the Yangtze River and we could see places where the river had overflowed its normal barrier and destroyed crops of food and may have caused deaths. The Yangtze moved swift and furious, not like any river I had ever seen before (Mississippi, Missouri) but more like the sea, concentrated, boiled down, reduced. We drove over a bridge, crossing the Yangtze, and the botanists grew restless again; it had been four hours since the last stop; they had been seeing nothing but villages and the cultivation of plant life that goes with them (people settled, needing and tending a constant source of food); the Yangtze turned west or north (I know it turned away from us or we turned away from it), and we traveled along a road that paralleled one of its tributaries. For a very long time (or so it seemed to the botanists and to me, too—I was beginning to see things only from their point of view, I was beginning to see, even more pointedly, the landscape only from Dan’s point of view), we saw nothing of interest, one-story building attached to rubber-coated wires (it was not the other way around), scrub and scrub and scrub (scrub as an entity holding nothing that the botanists thought of as garden-worthy, and that whole idea, “garden-worthy,” will eventually have its own enemies, its own friends and passionate supporters), and then suddenly, meadow upon meadow of euphorbia growing wildly everywhere, starting at the road, going all the way up to a farmhouse, going beyond the farm to the foot of hills; turn after turn in the road would reveal this scene, meadows of euphorbia, the farmhouse, the euphorbia coming to a stop at the foot of hills; and then the landscape changed again, narrowing, and the mountains towered above us, and the sides of the mountains were covered with things even I could recognize: rodgersia (pinnata, it turned out), viburnum (betulifolium, it turned out), ligularia, astilbe (chinensis, it turned out), Rosa (sericea pteracantha, it turned out), impatiens, an evergreen dogwood (Dendrobenthamia capitata), Clematis akebioidies, a single climbing aconitum (volubile, it turned out); and all this just in a day’s travel, from Dali to Zhongdian. It was dark when we arrived in Zhongdian; we washed, had a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, chicken, vegetables, no fish, rice, and beer, went back to our rooms to de-hiss and clean the seeds collected that day, went to bed just before midnight.
We all by then knew each other so well that it would not have been a surprise if some people had decided to spend the rest of a long life with one another, and it would not have been a surprise if some people never wanted to see one another again, even for a day. Laura Lu had the habit (charming sometimes, not charming sometimes) of asking you a question, repeating your answer, and then adding her response. It went like this: “Frank, you want some water? Frank, you don’t want no water. I guess I’ll just drink all this water myself.” But it was consideration and affection for others that made her do this; when I was thirsty, I drank the bottled water we had with us and never asked anybody else if they wanted some. John (who shall have no other name, he is only John) had a voice that was not pleasant to the ears and he used it to excess. Hans, a very young plantsman, admired the older botanists, especially Dan. George, from Switzerland, was a plantsman with the German seed company Jelito. Grace, married for the second time, but only for three months, was missing her second husband. Pierre, a nurseryman for many years now, had the most interesting stories to tell, which were wonderful to hear each time he told them again and again. When observing groups of Chinese people do some perfectly monotonous thing that made the idea of work seem a curse and not an opportunity to explore the meaning of existence (and observing this chore being performed would make anyone understand the reason for automatization), Pierre would say, “Look at that, you would think they would have …” All his observations and statements were quite accurate, only he did not take note of the fact that our Chinese guides spoke English and may have thought his observations were criticisms. Ozzie was mostly quiet, tortoise-like looking at the landscape and tortoise-like gathering seeds from it, and often gathering the most desira
ble things. And Frank was married to Laura Lu.
I had by then had many of my nervous breakdowns (this is how I characterize my monumentally rude and truly insulting behavior—a temporary lapse in sanity). I found sitting down to a meal an experience filled with pleasure, the raised surface of my tongue swelling, shrinking, twisting, eventually simply surrendering (to xanthocarpom, which turned up frequently; in the weeks after I returned from China, I cooked Chinese food obsessively and could not find xanthocarpom and was not sorry); I found going to the lavatory so fraught with anxiety that I would not do it at all, except in cases where I had so cruelly controlled my natural bodily functions that they rebelled and forced me to do the necessary.
A week passed by after I left my family and I missed them and I missed my surroundings in Vermont; I was almost on the edge of the world (the world as I have come to know it); I could still speak to them directly through a telephone, but I was beginning to think that everything I had known, everyone I had known, was very far away and I might not be able to get back to them. One day later than a week, I felt sad, I felt sick, I stayed in bed, Dan said it was altitude sickness (we were in Zhongdian, a city miles and miles above sea level, enough to induce altitude sickness) and that may have been so, but I was, on the other hand, just about to have my menstrual period; I always take to my bed at that exact time. On the day I stayed in bed, the nursery people—Grace, Pierre, George, and Hans—went off to an alpine region while the botanists—Dan, Ozzie, Paul, and Frank—went off to another part of the mountain above Zhongdian. The nursery people got lost, the vehicle taking them up and then down collapsed on the way down, they had to walk for miles (which didn’t bother Grace at all), they were very irritated that night at dinner. The botanists, on the other hand, had found many things they wanted, especially the Meconopsis horridula (which I had never even heard of, other meconopsis yes, but horridula, no), and they were so pleased with themselves, pleased with their success; the botanists did utter some oh-ohs and ah-ahs of sympathy for the disappointment of the nursery people, but I was not at all convinced that they were sincere.
In Zhongdian, though, I noticed this about the botanists: wherever they found themselves, they looked forward to the next place: the place to come held the thing that was most desired, the place to come contained the satisfaction they longed for, the longing (for blooms, and blooms that were not normal to us), the emptiness (of blooms, blooms that were not in our normal surroundings), would be filled in the place to come. And so we went from Zhongdian to Deqen, but Deqen was not our real destination, Deqen was only a place to stay for three nights; it took two days on the bus to arrive at Deqen. On the way to Deqen we collected seeds of Paeonia delavayi, Aconitum pendulicarpum, philadelphus, thalictrum, and a maple (Acer something; Dan was not sure) on the side of a mountain just above Napa Hai. We were going to spend a night in a place called Benzilan. The botanists had been to Benzilan two years earlier and they had not liked it; they kept saying to me, each time I rudely whined about something (the toilet!), Just wait until you get to Benzilan. When we got to Benzilan both Grace (who never complained or said anything disagreeable) and I, without speaking to each other, immediately went to a store and bought aluminum pails in which to piss during the night. They were such handsome buckets; they cost about twenty-five cents each and I wished to bring them home even at the same time that I knew I never wanted to see them in any other situation besides the countryside of China again. That night after dinner (pork, pork, pork, no fish, the flesh of something that was a mammal other than pig, vegetables, rice, and beer) we sat on a balcony and drank beer and Scotch and watched a planet (Venus) come up and then stay still a little way above the ridge of mountains. We went to bed and awoke the next morning to the sounds of an animal being murdered for our breakfast and trucks taking on fuel and water. Benzilan was a town far from anywhere; it is a place where you stay on your way to somewhere else. I deeply loved Benzilan just for that, and in my mind all places of transition should be called that: Benzilan.
I was by then getting closer and closer to the edge of my world, that is to say, if the world as I had imagined it had a horizon beyond which I would fall and no longer know myself, I was then, in Benzilan, approaching it; after Benzilan I did not know myself, I could not speak to my family, I slept in a room with Dan (in separate beds), I saw Paul and Ozzie and Laura Lu and Hans and Frank and George and Pierre and Grace for breakfast and then again for dinner. When we got to Deqen, the evening of the morning after we left Benzilan, I came down with the monthly calamity that is my menstrual period and took to my bed for all of the following day. And so I began feeling the loss of my family and the comforts of every kind that I associate with them.
One morning (again, one morning!) coming down the stairs of the Duo-wen Hotel in Benzilan, I fell and sprained my ankle. Two days later, when collecting the seeds of a clematis not far from the Beimashan Pass, in excitement I turned too quickly and twisted the very same ankle. I fell, I cried out, no one answered me; I then followed the path along a fiercely rushing stream; I unexpectedly came upon Dan and Ozzie lying on their stomachs adoring a begonia they had longed to see in the wild and were now seeing in its natural habitat. On that same day (the day of respraining my ankle) Dan was certain that he had come upon Rheum davidii (a rhubarb with leaves the size of a half dollar), and he collected seeds from it and was happy for an hour or so, before deciding that he had not collected Rheum davidii at all but only a pesty polygonatum; he was much depressed by this, even though he already had this same rhubarb davidii growing in his garden; it had been given to him by that great gardener in Ireland Helen Dillon.
And after three days we left Deqen to go to Weixi, meaning to take a road that ran along the Mekong River and of course stopping along the way to collect seeds. Dan’s friend Daryl, a specialist in epimedium, had told Dan of areas along this road where different species of this plant, epimedium, would be abundant; but one hour out of the city of Deqen, the road had collapsed (some of the mountain above had just rolled down onto the road), and so we had to retrace our path, going back to Deqen, back to Beimashan, back to Benzilan, back to Zhongdian. We went back the way we had come as if we had never seen it before, with enthusiasm, with happiness; we collected again, things we already had and things we had missed; we ate a delicious lunch of pork, pork, pork, pork, vegetables, rice, and beer in Benzilan, in a restaurant right next to the Duo-wen Hotel. We got back to Zhongdian way before dark, and Dan took a taxi to a place out of town so he could collect the seeds of a special birch; he had meant to collect it when we were first in Zhongdian, had forgotten then, and was very glad to have the chance to do it again; he had already collected and grown this plant in his nursery, but by mistake he had sold them all and had not kept any for his own garden.
We got to Weixi after a whole day of sitting on the bus, stopping only for lunch, delicious as usual and in just the way we had come to expect, and one stop for collecting (I collected a particularly large flowering St. Johns wort); in Weixi we bathed in the kind of bathrooms we were accustomed to (the kind of bathrooms I had become accustomed to), ate a delicious dinner of pork, pork, pork, pork, noodles, beef, vegetables, rice, and beer; I walked back to my room with my arm linked through Paul’s; I saw a rat, screamed, and Paul did not make fun of me. My twice-sprained ankle had begun to look like an unusual garden implement: from my ankle to my toes was such a huge swelling that my calf looked unusually thin, as if it were the handle of the tool that was the rest of my foot. I bound it up with a bandage I had bought at Wal-Mart in Vermont, stamped Made in China, but I could not find any bandages like it in any of the stores I frequented in that part of China.
In Weixi I stayed in bed nursing my ankle, went to lunch with Pierre, walked around and met a woman selling coins that had been in circulation in Indochina in 1918; I bought one for about twenty-five American cents, I did not know if it was authentic and I did not really care. By that time in Weixi I had become used to walking around among ordinary
Chinese people and causing a sensation; they had never seen a person with my complexion before; mothers and fathers would draw my presence to their children’s attention and they were not discreet about it; I did not mind, I was in their country. I did not forget my own family then, but I did not miss them, nothing I saw reminded me of them, not the children, not the husbands, not the wives, not the houses, which do not have sloping roofs, not the market where I could buy a chicken whose neck had been just partially cut or an aphrodisiac made from the ground-up penis of a mammal. In the mountains near Weixi, Dan found a climbing Solomon’s seal and some other plants, but everyone was very excited about the climbing Solomon’s seal, and he immediately agreed to share his collection of its seeds.
My Garden (Book) Page 16