City of Trees Page 6
On our last morning we got up at 3 a.m. to arrive at Machu Picchu. This was partly so we could get there as close to dawn as possible, and in part to avoid other tourists, who numbered upwards of 2500 a day, despite efforts made to reduce them. Machu Picchu was never intended for mass habitation. Built around 1450 for the Incan emperor Pachacuti, it is in fact not so much a city as an estate. Now the millions of visitors have unwittingly led to Machu Picchu, like the condor, being classified as endangered: a UNESCO world heritage site in danger of being trampled to death by the numbers who visit it.
I didn’t think of that as I walked, so effortful was the journey. Then I stood at the Sun Gate and looked down upon Machu Picchu and all the popular stories came to life: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tintin in Prisoners of the Sun. Grey stone buildings and terraces sat against vivid green jungle in the clefts of several mountains. The precision of the layout reflected sophisticated agricultural and irrigation systems, nuanced astrological understandings. Houses were a mix of the humble and the grand, alongside temples dedicated to the sun, the moon and the condor. It was a shock to realise that, despite such impeccable planning, the estate was inhabited for only a century before it emptied out and was claimed for several hundred years by the forest. Not because it was discovered, nor because it was attacked. It was smallpox—introduced by the Spanish—that destroyed much of the population.
On our last day in Peru we walked around Saqsaywaman, a ruined settlement above Cusco. Monumental boulders too heavy for colonists to remove and use for other purposes formed the base of walls that jutted this way and that for hundreds of metres. Some said the zigzag represented lightning bolts, others that the walls suggested a puma’s teeth. I walked across a plain to the hill opposite to decide for myself. As I stood there, I tried not to think of the Andean condors that had had their wings savagely clipped, nor the de-clawed pumas we’d seen at an animal rescue centre earlier that day. The walls, I decided, were lightning bolts, but it was hard to get a proper perspective. In Incan constellations, as in Indigenous Australian ones, animals are found in the negative space: the black between the stars. When the Incas first saw the Spanish, they believed they were part-human, part-animal because they arrived on horseback and the man and horse were seen as one creature. I carry these ideas with me: that there is meaning in the space between, that we and the creatures that carry us are one.
I joined the throngs once more that year, this time at the Grand Canyon, which has around five million visitors a year. I first visited in the early nineties and I’ll never forget the moment of getting out of the car in a bog-standard carpark and walking towards the north rim. Despite the canyon’s size—more than five thousand square kilometres—it comes upon you suddenly as you approach the edge and look down into this extraordinary ravine that plunges deep into the earth. It was late afternoon and the canyon walls were adorned with striated purples. The rocks and the light—it was hard to distinguish one from the other—shifted from grey to lilac to dark purple to black. The visit was so brief that when I left the next day it was as if I’d dreamt it. The sign at the gate warned us there would be no refund if weather conditions precluded a good view. Virginia and I looked at each other. Did people really do that? Demand refunds if the canyon didn’t display its extraordinary dimensions, its dramatic shifts of light? Apparently so.
This trip we planned to hike down into the canyon, something I hadn’t had the time to do on that first brief visit. Only one per cent of the canyon’s visitors ever make it below the rim and each year around 250 of those need to be rescued. Worse still, a not inconsiderable number of them die: the average over the not-quite-a-century the park has existed is twelve people a year. It’s easy to see how this happens. If you’re not an experienced walker you’d be hard pressed to imagine how demanding the descent to the river and the return will be. You won’t know what it’s like to bake in temperatures as high as 49 degrees Celsius, or how much drinking water you’ll need. Signs everywhere warn against overconfidence in your own endurance. The same signs discourage you from hiking from rim to river and back again in a single day, which is the undertaking most likely to result in heat exhaustion. I’d read reports of Spanish explorers in 1540 who returned after several hours having covered only a third of the distance to the river, reporting that ‘what seemed easy from above was not so’. They were correct, both in their assessment of difficulty and in pointing out that it was hard to get perspective on the matter. The descent (and ascent) along the trail is so sheer that you can’t see what’s in store for you when you look down from above.
The trail we chose was the popular Bright Angel Trail, which a much younger, fitter friend had told me was ‘kind of challenging’. This was alarming to my old ears. There we were. Four adults, two kids under thirteen. The first part of the walk, down to Indian Gardens, was easy enough and the zigzag of paths, the sheer walls of the canyon, the mule trains, were hypnotic. The day was cool. The gardens, when we got to them, were an oasis, sitting on what you first think is the floor of the canyon until you realise you are still four hundred metres above it as the crow plummets. Cottonwood trees lined the creek and leaves glittered gold, brown and pale yellow in the autumn light. The grass was green and the harshness of the canyon’s sheer walls faded away.
In 1928 the Native Americans living in Indian Gardens, the Havasupai, were told to move to the reservation at the bottom of the canyon, an area eight kilometres long and twenty kilometres wide. Curtailing their seasonal migrations between the canyon floor and the plateau above created enormous difficulty for them, and at one point government-restricted boundaries had taken away nearly ninety per cent of their land. In 1975, 185,000 acres (75,000 hectares) was returned to them. National parks are on land that is taken, at the government’s pleasure, from the indigenous people who have lived there for millennia. The intention is to protect nature in perpetuity and preserve that landscape for the pleasure of tourists. We’ve been given, or perhaps I should say we’ve stolen, a gift. (Australia’s Kakadu National Park was the first national park in the world to talk of protecting ‘living culture’ and to prioritise the relationship between human custodians and the land. Since the late 1970s Kakadu’s traditional owners have leased their land to the Director of National Parks and continue to jointly manage that land.)
After Indian Gardens the walk became easier and we walked through flatlands populated with thousands of purple cacti. The bright, direct light of midday flattened everything out. We walked in silence. Time stretched out. Walking on and down into a landscape bonds you to place. Even if—especially if?—that walk includes an eight-kilometre hike back up the canyon during which you ascend close to a kilometre; an incline that at first leaves you cursing but soon reduces you to speechlessness. Over the eight hours it took to walk only twenty kilometres, we became sensitive to the moods and light of the canyon. The shift from shade to gentle morning sunlight to harsh midday sun, then back towards those purplish hues I remembered from my first trip.
The following day we cycled further along the rim to get some perspective on the canyon. We rode through a stand of tiny conifers bonsai-ed by the wind. We saw mule deer that looked, to my Australian eyes, like inelegant moose. Best of all, we saw a Californian condor. Back in 1987 the Californian condor was declared extinct in the wild. The twenty-three that remained were caught and encouraged to breed in captivity. In 1992 scientists began to release them back into the wild and there are now more Californian condors living in the wild than in captivity—though with a population of around 440 they remain one of the rarest birds on the planet.
By the time we left the canyon, four nights after we arrived, we’d been there long enough to get down into it, travel around it and see it in every kind of light. We were sated. We certainly had no expectations of our final morning. Then at dawn, as we packed the car, half-asleep, Virginia gestured at the canyon: ‘Look at that.’
I looked. What I saw was a great ocean of dense white cloud that pulsed and shimmie
d below the canyon’s rim. It throbbed as the rising sun played across it. Day broke in a series of pale greys and blues then pink with golden flashes. The tips of the peaks scattered through the canyon floated like tiny islands. Later I learned that what we had seen was a cloud inversion. It was rare—though probably not in the same league as a Californian condor.
We stood just outside the lodge for some time. There were dozens of us lined along the rim, standing in silence, with the exception of a woman I heard muttering that the clouds were ruining the view. (Would she ask for her money back?) There is a word to describe this sense of giving over to some greater force. Numinous. Some use the word to mean religious ecstasy but for me that was not quite it, though the feeling was a reminder of why we seek nature out and what we are losing as the wilderness is driven into increasingly remote pockets of the earth.
In 2016 a female polar bear was shot in the northwest of Iceland. There have only been a few hundred recorded sightings of polar bears in Iceland. Earlier encounters, from the time before history was put into written words, have passed into folklore. It’s assumed this particular polar bear had floated across on ice from Greenland. The national policy is to kill bears on sight, despite the fact they’re an endangered species, on the grounds—no doubt accurate—that they tend to be hungry and dangerous after such a hazardous voyage. The version of the story I heard was that that the bear was shot while still on her ice-float but I’m sure there are other versions. Whatever the truth of the matter, the polar bear, one of only about twenty-five thousand left in the wild, is now dead. Jón Gunnar Ottósson, CEO of Iceland’s Institute of Natural History, was impatient at suggestions she could have been safely moved elsewhere. ‘These are dangerous animals, not some cute teddy bear,’ he said. After she was shot she was, to quote the BBC, to be ‘stuffed and displayed in a museum’. My point? Well, it’s more an observation, really. Humans live in perilous times but things are much, much worse if you’re a polar bear.
I visited Iceland in 2017. More gloaming. More tourists. That year some two million of us were expected—six times the number of people who actually live there. Friends warned me that it would be a difficult place to find a #treeoftheday. This was ironic (though perhaps only to me) since I was in Iceland to give a paper on river red gums. When the island was settled almost 1150 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered twenty-five to forty per cent of it but only the birch survived the Vikings and their axes in reasonable numbers. Grazing led to many more trees disappearing over the next three centuries. Regular volcanic eruptions and relentless winds whip the soil away. Despite the planting of three million trees in recent years, the area of forest—estimated at about one per cent at the turn of the twentieth century—has barely increased.
I did find some very lovely old squat, downy birches and a few tough little cypresses. I asked Virginia to stand next to them, for scale, and took photos.
Iceland, like all of us, will be severely impacted by climate change in the years to come. Indeed, they might fare worse than most if the warm currents of the Gulf Stream flip, as some scientists have predicted, and plunge the country back into another ice age. Pepijn Bakker, a climate scientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, has been working on the figures.1 If carbon emissions decrease after the year 2040 the collapse of the Gulf Stream is unlikely. If they keep rising over the next century there is a forty-four per cent chance the Gulf Stream will collapse entirely by 2300.
When William Morris rode around the country on a horse in 1871, near the seashore he came across a huge waste of black sand all powdered over with flowers, ‘tufts of sea-pink and bladder-campion at regular intervals, like a Persian carpet’.2 He asked himself, Why do we long to send forth through the length and breadth of a land, / Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire?3 I didn’t see fields of flowers but did see expanses of woolly fringe moss. The moss takes centuries to grow and hugs the coal black flow of the lava fields. It’s impossibly inviting. Travellers walk on it and lie on top of it as one might a doona. These passionate attentions are killing the moss and the government is scrambling to manage the footprints, literal and otherwise, left by all these visitors.
I assume Morris ate fermented shark, as I did, and found it similarly disgusting: the explosion of ammonia in the mouth, threatening to choke you, before you throw the schnapps down. But an experience Morris and I couldn’t have shared was visiting the Glacier Lagoon in South Iceland. It has formed as the Breiðamerkurjökull and Vatnajökull glaciers melted over recent decades. The Icelandic government’s Committee on Climate Change has warned that if melting continues at its current rate, Iceland’s glaciers will be gone by the end of the next century.4
When we visited the lagoon at 11 p.m., small icebergs of blue ice, clear ice and sometimes dirty-snow-covered ice drifted past the shore. The bluer the ice, the more oxygenated it is. Eider ducks swam around cheerfully. Arctic terns soared and swooped through the light night sky. On another night we stood on a black beach under a heavy grey sky, in the strange glow of late evening. The light in South Iceland did something to my brain. The space between conscious and unconscious thoughts blurred. Looking into a tunnel of grey cloud settled over a glacier had a similar effect. Background loomed into foreground, volcanos lifted into the clouds and the flash of ice blue in the centre of that strange glowing light looked like an eye. I’m not a formally religious person but I did wonder, for a moment, if looking into that landscape was like looking into the eye of God.
This collapsing of visual boundaries seemed to coincide with my general collapse into anxiety and indecisiveness. Things weren’t making sense. I wondered if this was a physiological effect, the darkness of stormy weather competing with the endless day to create this impossible, counter-intuitive light. During painting classes I’d been encouraged to make background colours recessive and cooler to suggest perspective but the sky that roiled above me was neither recessive nor cool: it throbbed, alive with a glow that was not quite an aurora but was otherworldly nonetheless. As for the wind, it swept down and off the glaciers, no trees to break its fall. One morning as we drove, a gust slipped under the four-wheel drive we’d hired and lifted it slightly before dropping us gently back onto the road. A warning.
I wanted to see a puffin. I’d seen only one on the trip and that one had been dead, its beak and feet connected by a few bones and entrails lying in a puffin-like shape. Towards the end of our trip we stood on Reynisfjara beach, surrounded by signs warning of rogue waves and columns of lava that formed cathedral-like domes, buttresses, struts. It was about 10 p.m. and hundreds of us were milling about. A man stared at the control panel of his drone, which he was trying to navigate through the wind gusts up the side of the cliff. In the hope, I suppose, of filming a puffin.
We moved on from there to the next peninsula, Dyrhólaey, which was joined to the land by a spit no wider than the road we were on. The winds, expected to reach gale force by morning, were starting to pick up and I could feel them hit the side of the car, buffeting us, threatening to push us into the sea. When we got to Dyrhólaey the gates on the point were closed. No puffins for me. The disappointment turned suddenly into a deep shame. Why did I need to look at these rotund, self-contained little birds with their big flappy feet? Why couldn’t I, can’t we, leave them alone? I imagined the puffin looking down at us from high up on the cliffs where they roosted. Humans blundering around, ridiculous, on the sand below.
For me 2017 was a year in which physical changes, private anxieties and global catastrophes collided in a way that felt paralysing: hot flushes, sleeplessness, plummeting confidence, Trump, Brexit, a dying Barrier Reef, bombs and cars being driven into crowds, earthquakes, hurricanes and eruptions. #MeToo and the Australian equal-marriage debate just made a toxic year worse. The recurring threat on Game of Thrones (filmed right here! In Iceland!) was that winter was coming. And we talk about climate change like that. It’s coming. But it was there in Iceland that I understood, deep in my bo
nes, that it’s not coming, it’s here. The unravelling. It’s begun.
No trees. Black sand. Wind. A melting glacier on the horizon covering a smouldering volcano. Our plundered planet could, if it chose, shrug us humans off with not much more than a twitch. A dull green-grey glowing sky. Such extraordinary, such incalculable beauty.
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1 ‘Greenland Ice Melt Could Push Atlantic Circulation to Collapse’, Rebecca Boyle, Hakai Magazine, January 3, 2017.
2 ‘Icelandic Journals’, William Morris, Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 8, 1911.
3 ‘Iceland First Seen’, William Morris.
4 glacierguides.is
EUCALYPTUS
Tree e working with your body, my body, E working with us.
While you sleep e working.
Daylight, when you walking around, e work too.
BILL NEIDJIE
WHAT did the white men of the Endeavour see when they arrived on Australia’s east coast? Hills covered ‘with large trees and very thick, growing to a great height before they branch off…the leaves of one are long and narrow, and the seed (of which I got a few) is in the shape of a button and has a very agreeable smell.’1
Eucalyptus are often called gum trees but not all gums are Eucalyptus. They refuse easy categorisation, resist answers. There are more than seven hundred species of eucalypts and endless variations. The process of naming them has taken centuries and remains incomplete. Twenty-five years ago more than a hundred trees we thought of as the genus Eucalyptus were recategorised as Corymbia or Angophora. As Ashley Hay documented in her wonderful book Gum, the time it has taken to come up with forms of classification that the taxonomists are happy with was not helped by the enthusiasm with which Joseph Banks—one of the Endeavour’s passengers—collected thirty thousand botanical samples then left them to sit in a drawer until he died fifty years later. Colonial Australians did not have the authority to name trees without reference to the mother country, and the mother country relied on Banks’ neglected collection. Catch-22.