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By Root 401 0

days and the dawn of humankind, forests like this covered the whole Mediterranean basin; now they have receded to a few green dots on the map in the Madeira and Canary Islands. A friend of mine, an ecologist who studies the laurel forest, had warned me to watch out for sleek black rats in the treetops. At certain seasons the laurels accumulate in their leaves a powerful toxin the rats crave, against their own and the trees’ best interests. The local park ranger confirmed this—his advice was to watch for gnawed twigs in the path, then look up, and I would spot the little drug addicts up there. (The colorful Spanish word for drug addiction is toxicomania.) Eventually, he told me, they get so drunk they fall and lie trembling on their backs.

I hiked into the forest, which, like everything else on this island, seemed enchanted. The laurels are old twisted things with moss beards on their trunks and ferns at their feet. Green sunlight fell in pools on the forest floor. I felt drugged myself. I watched the path closely, where I saw tiny white orchids and fallen leaves but no toxicomaniac rats.

Climbing higher, I broke out of the cloud layer into treeless highlands on a bald mountaintop called Pico de Garajonay. The peak is named for the legendary lovers Gara and Jonay, the Guanche equivalents of Romeo and Juliet, who flung themselves with picturesque fatality from this mountaintop. A keen wind whistled over the peak’s stone lid, and in the afternoon brightness I could see all but one of the other Canaries. Beyond them to the east lay a long bank of clouds signifying the coast of West Africa. That close. The easternmost Canary Island is only sixty-seven miles from the Saharan sands of mainland Africa. Spain can claim this land all it wants, but geography still asserts itself from time to time, as a reminder that the islands will always belong to Africa. Strong, dry continental storms bring over hot dust and sometimes even torpid, wind-buffeted locusts from the Sahara; Canarians call this dismal weather by its West African name, kalmia.

But today the air above the clouds was clear as glass, and I felt some electric liquor replacing the blood in my veins. The last time I looked at that long, pink curving flank of Africa, I was seven years old. I’d sat up all night, thrilled and tightly strung in a Pan Am jet, traveling with my family toward the village in central Congo that would be our home for a time. My father pointed at the cloudbank and told me it was Africa. I couldn’t begin to imagine the life that was rolling out ahead of me. But I did understand it would pass over me with the force of a river, and that I needed to pin the water to its banks and hold it still, somehow, to give myself time to know it. I could think of only one way to do it, and I’ve thought of no better way since. I cracked the spine of the diary I’d received as a Christmas present and began the self-conscious record of my life with this block-lettered sentence:

“When I first saw Africa I thought it was a cloud.”

Now I have a desk drawer filled with those diaries, brightly and flimsily bound, with their effete locks and minuscule tin keys. And I have a long bookshelf of the spiral-bound notebooks to which I graduated, once diaries suddenly seemed juvenile. I am still trying to pin the river to its banks.

I left the forest for the dry, windy side of the island, a terrain with the mood of North Africa. Date palms waved like bouquets of feathers. These were the trees tapped for miel de palma, and I could see that it doesn’t kill the tree outright but it doesn’t do it any good, either. The new leaves that spring up after tapping are dwarfed and off kilter. I pulled over, stood beside the road, and looked down into the gorge below, at groves and groves of palms with bad haircuts. The North Africans had saved the trees, but made them ridiculous. The Guanches have survived to whistle a secret life among drug-addicted woodrats. And but for a sneeze of history, Columbus might have stayed forever in the boudoir of Beatriz de Bobadilla. There was nothing at all