High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [47]
The balcony of my room overlooked the tops of palms and tamarinds leaning perilously over the edge of the cliff, and far below, the harbor. From a rocking chair on the balcony I watched the ferry that had brought me here, now chugging back toward the land of white high-rises. I tried to read a botanical account of La Gomera, but in the midst of a day so bright white and blue, some crucial, scientific part of my mind seemed not to have made the crossing with me. A steady rattle of wind in the palms hypnotized me into the unthinkable thing for a chronic insomniac: an afternoon nap.
In my sleep I heard a conversation of birds. I woke up and heard it still: birds in the garden, asking each other questions. I shook my cottony head and leaned over the banister, looking down through the trees. From my hidden place I could see only a gardener with bristling white hair. As I spied on him, I saw him thrust a finger into his mouth and make a warbling, musical whistle. In a minute, an answer came back.
I threw on my shoes and hurried downstairs to the garden. It was as deep and edible as Eden: guavas, figs, avocados, a banana tree bent with its burden of fruit. Another tree bore what looked like a watermelon-sized avocado. I located the man I’d seen from up above, but I felt unaccountably shy. I asked him about the tree with outsize avocados, not so much for information as to nurture my fantasy that he would stick his fingers in his mouth and warble the answer. He explained (in Spanish, disappointingly) that the tree comes from Cuba, where they use the fruit as a musical instrument. I asked him to tell me its name in silbo. His mouth turned down in a strange pinch and he stood still a long time. Dragonflies clicked in the palms overhead. Finally he said, “She doesn’t have a name in silbo. She’s not from here.” And walked off toward the guava trees. A parrot in a wrought-iron cage behind me muttered barely audible Spanish words in monotone; I whistled at him, but he too held me in his beady glare and clammed up.
Breakfast was a sideboard loaded with fresh bread and jars of a sweet something called miel de palma, palm honey. I hated to get a house reputation for being nosy, but I was suspicious. It takes both bees and flowers to make honey, and a palm has nothing you’d recognize as a flower. (A botanist with a good eye would, but not a honeybee.) I mentioned this to the cook, who conceded that it’s actually not honey but syrup, boiled down from the sap of palms in just the same way New Englanders make syrup from maple sap. I was still suspicious: palm trees, ancient relatives of the grasses, have no xylem and phloem, the little pipes in a tree trunk that move the sap up and down through the tree. To tap a palm, you’d have to whack the head off a mature tree and let it bleed to death.
The cook was congenial about getting a science quiz at this early hour. He told me that what I’d guessed was partly true—in the old days miel de palma was a delicacy fatal to the trees, and therefore quite expensive. But in this century, North Africans had developed a gentler palm-tapping technique and introduced it to La Gomera. He said I should go see the palm groves.
I went. I drove up into the highlands of whitewashed villages, vineyards, and deep-cut valleys that rang with the music of wild canaries (ancestral species of their yellower domestic cousins). The island of Gomera is a deeply eroded volcano, twelve miles across and flat-topped, with six mammoth gorges radiating from the center like spokes of a wheel. Farms and villages lie within the gorges, and the road does not go anywhere as the crow flies. Often I rounded a corner to face a stunning view of cliffs and sea and, in the background, the neighboring island of Tenerife. From this distance, Tenerife showed off the pointed silhouette of its