ALONG THE WAY

In a haunting soliloquy near the end of Moby Dick, Captain Ahab yearns, fleetingly, to be somewhere else than in obsessive pursuit of the white whale: "There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead to somewhere to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms."

It was winter. The closest thing to "palmy" in the library's undergraduate reading room was a bedraggled Dracaena marginata stuck off in a drafty corner, struggling against billows of blue cigarette smoke.

I suppose I should have been more deeply moved by the heartbreaking longing of that passage (I am now), but I was bored with Ahab's monomania, to tell you the truth, bored with daily quizzes, bored with libraries, bored with winter. So I conjured up a bit of palminess.

I pictured myself, bronzed and muscular, sprinting from the surf across white sands to a line of palm trees, fan-shaped fronds rustling upon zephyrs redolent of exotica. A brownskinned girl, sarong-wrapped, waited there to hand-feed me from a basket laden with the fruits of paradise, as I reclined in her lap.

Tahiti? Hawaii? Take out the sarongs and put in bikinis and it could have been the French Riviera. It didn't matter. It was "more palmy than the palms" at least in my fantasy.

I live in Tucson now, surrounded by palm trees. And, at an age when fantasies don't serve me as well as they used to, I content myself with a more studied view of palms.

What I didn't know in my eager youth is that had I been lucky enough to be transported to the Côte d'Azur, or even Hawaii, the rows of stately palms I would have found there might not have been native. They'd be desert palms, indigenous only to Arizona and California.

The common name is California fan palm, in scientific nomenclature, Washingtonia filifera, named, ironically, for George, the cherry-tree man. Hardy, easy to grow, it's one of the most widely planted of palms. In the U.S., it grows not only in California and Arizona but in all the Gulf states and as far north as South Carolina.

A southern cousin of this species is the Mexican sky duster, Washingtonia robusta. The fan palm and the sky duster are "petticoat palms." When left untrimmed year after year, their large fan-shaped leaves form a thick shag of dead foliage. Slender and brownish, the sky duster is a tall tree, as its name implies, soaring easily to a height of 150 feet when well nourished. The California fan palm is shorter, stouter, and grayish.

In the wild, fan palms grow in canyons and rincons in elevations up to 3,000 feet, always near desert springs or seeps. In one such oasis, Palm Canyon in Arizona's Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, wild trees, more slender than cultivated ones, are seldom taller than 50 feet. The other common Arizona palm, a nonnative, is Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm, which originated in the Middle East, in Egypt where the date is a dietary staple and where it is cultivated in groves of thousands of trees. Date palms have been domesticated for millennia, and there probably are no wild ones left anywhere in the world. To tell a date palm from a fan palm look at the frond. If it's pinnate, or feather-shaped, it's a date palm. If it's palmate, or fan-shaped, it's a fan palm or sky duster the tree height will tell you which.

Developers love palm trees. Anywhere palms grow you'll find apartment complexes dating from the 1950s with tony names like Royale Palms, Riviera Arms, and Kon-Tiki Gardens. Today, landscapers use palms to lend elegance to office buildings and shopping malls. They plant palms in neat clusters to mark the boulevard entrances to parking lots, or lean them rakishly against office walls, floodlighted to make pretty shadows at night. Native people who coevolved with fan palms in California's old Salton Sea Basin were experts in palmtree husbandry. They used fire to manage the trees, discovering that after their shaggy petticoats were torched, the palms became more robust. Palms don't have a true bark, so the trees were not killed, just charred a little.Like Eskimos who used every bit of a slain seal, from hair to gut tissue, the ancient palm managers used the whole tree. It gave them food, fibers for weaving, wood for shelters, fronds for thatching, and leaf stems for utensils.

Fan palms evoke images of adventure and exotic climes. PETER ENSENBERGER The other day, I measured the stout-bodied fan palm outside my study window. It's a mature specimen (they can live 200 years) and, just a couple of feet off the ground, its bole is an impressive eleven feet around. I'm guessing, but from base to crown, I'd judge it's at least 60 feet.

It isn't much to look at. It has no shag and most of the year appears denuded. Just about the time last year's fronds dry and shape themselves downward along the upper trunk, when the old tree starts to take on a shaggy palm character again, and the 12foot seed stalks droop toward the ground to discharge their small brown ellipsoidal seeds, the groundskeeper calls in a tree trimmer.

The birds don't seem to mind the trimming. When the chainsaws stop, they come back. Regularly, a group of flickers and Gila woodpeckers sails in to hammer uselessly at the trunk. Doves perch among the fronds. And, every once in a while, the neighborhood kestrel swoops in to scatter the doves although he's no threat to them.

House finches, too, return to rebuild their nests in the cozy little cups created where this year's uncut leaf-stem bases are layered against last year's and those from years past. One day after a storm, I found a wind-blown nest. It was woven of grass, bits of palm panicle, shredded Kleenex, a red-cellophane pull tab, dryer lint, a length of spun silk from a black widow's web, and a strand of dental floss. A more creative recycling of flotsam I'd never seen.

Palmy? Only the finches could say.