Friday, November 17, 2017

Getting High

Imagine that you’ve never seen an object farther away than 100 yards. No satellite photos, images from airplanes or views from skyscrapers looking down with a heavenly perspective on the world below. It’s just not part of your experience. You are a Mayan, and you live 1000 years ago in a dense jungle on the Yucatan peninsula.

I have looked out over New York City from the viewing deck of the Empire State Building. Chicago is a surreal wonder from the top of the Sears Tower (now Willis) or the John Hancock building. I’ve flown over the Badlands of South Dakota, and crested the ridge of a dormant volcanic peak on Kauai in a helicopter. But none of these compares at a fundamental level to another elevated experience I had in Mexico.

You see, I stood on top of the massive pyramid called El Castillo located in the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, several hours by bus from Cancun. The area thrived from around 600 A.D. to the 1200s, hidden away in the Mexican jungle until restoration began in the 1920s.

At 98 feet in height, El Castillo is barely as tall as a ten-story building. But the Mayans were small in stature, and lofty in their dreams of reaching the sky like the Tower of Babel. They were also more astute in the engineering of a method less fraught with risk than the wax wings of Icarus.

El Castillo
We were among a number of other fortunate visitors in 2003 to be among the last to scale the front face of the mighty Mayan temple. In 2006 the site was closed to climbing after a woman fell to her death. Unlike contemporary stairs, with treads of about 10 inches and risers less than seven, the daunting ascent up El Castillo requires that the foot be placed on a narrow tread of perhaps 5 inches, with a rise of just over ten. There are only 91 steps up the side of the first 79 feet. It is the Stairmaster of the modern world, and also one of its seven wonders. It is quite steep.


The Rope up the Stairs
Walking up the pyramid was generally accomplished with the aid of a heavy hand-held manila rope to steady the climber. This resulted in a ski-lift appearance to observers from below and a single-file ascension by most. The return down was a more hair-raising experience, often completed in a slow seated crab crawl, inching down face first one step at a time, or retreating backward on hands and feet, leaning forward toward the structure to mimic the angle of the pyramid’s face. Walking down upright was an errand for fools or fourteen year olds.

At the top the successful climber was greeted with a breathtaking view of the surrounding jungle. The clear air allows for viewing in all directions above tree top height and for many miles. I can only imagine that the comparatively primitive people, with their somewhat claustrophobic world-view, would have felt like gods, or near to them. The bright sun, the strong breeze and the incredibly massive stone underfoot all contributed to the feeling of literally being king of the hill.

At the Top
The small square stone temple at the top has a spiritual quality that causes some to speak in whispers. It is unknown what went on here, or who was allowed the privilege of visiting the space.

But I mentioned fourteen year olds. As we were taking in the wonder of the temple, assessing and procrastinating our eventual climb down with a newly discovered fear of heights, the alarm went up from our son. It may have been the watermelon he indulged in earlier that day. Perhaps a careless drink of unsterilized water during the same time period. In any case it was Montezuma’s revenge (an Aztec, and much later). He had to leave. Now.

Certain bodily urges are great motivators. Diarrhea is a humbler of all mankind. It gets the clock ticking triple time and is both heartless and relentless. Our son proceeded to plummet down the face of El Castillo as if it were an escalator at Macy’s. We watched in horror as he sped down the deep and miniscule steps, flying past amazed and bewildered people, pausing to catch their anxious breath and contemplate the number of remaining stairs in their own journeys. His gate was not unlike a top-hatted Fred Astaire, sidestepping his way down a staircase on stage, positioning his feet to land fully on each step instead of landing and balancing only on his heels. We held our breath and prayed he wouldn’t fall. Ninety-one steep stone stairs is a horrific, unsurvivable tumble, with nothing to disrupt momentum once set in motion.

He made it to the open field at the base of the pyramid and just kept going. He knew that somewhere there must be a porta-potty. Buses of tourists demand such conveniences after a three hour ride. We saw his now tiny image from on high, scampering like an insect, zig zagging across the field until he disappeared into a blue phone booth marked “Men.”

A happy ending was had by all. It was an excellent and memorable adventure that may be lost forever in the future. Scientists have discovered a massive sinkhole beneath the pyramid, capped by 16 feet of limestone that is slowly dissolving. The Earth reclaims what man has wrought, slowly in our fleeting existence, but swiftly on the scale of time.


Saturday, November 11, 2017

Ginkgo Day in the Time of Thanksgiving

First, a little history: The Ginkgo tree is native to China and has been widely cultivated. It has resisted evolutionary change for approximately 270 million years. That’s why it is considered a “living fossil.” There are male and female Ginkgo trees (dioecious), with the female producing a fruit that smells horrible when it falls and decomposes. The leaves of these trees are fan shaped, a very distinctive appearance often reproduced by artists as design elements of all kinds. Each autumn, the Ginkgo is known to shed all of its leaves within a period of several hours on a day in late October or November, depending on location and weather.

We had a male Ginkgo in the back yard of our last home. We called the annual leaf drop, “Ginkgo Day.”

Gingko With Leaves
Gingko After Leaf Drop
I’m not sure what year we first noticed the Autumn behavior of our little tree. I distinctly remember looking out a window that faced our back yard one windless November morning and seeing its bright yellow leaves falling like rain, covering the ground around the trunk with multiple layers, like a heavy golden snow. By the time I got home from work that day the tree was completely bare, not a leaf left on any branch. I have included a short video here of a less spectacular leaf drop, but one that yielded the same results in 2015.


I began tracking the date of Ginkgo Day on our calendar. In Lincolnshire, Illinois the date ranged from November 8th to the 27th over a period of about ten years. One year a particularly severe and early hard freeze caused the leaves to drop while still green in color, but still within the confines of a work day. Ginkgo Day was not ruined, it was just different that year.


It got to the point that I started an office pool, offering a prize for the person who correctly guessed the date of the leaf drop. As I recall, no one guessed the exact date, but someone came close. I posed the same challenge on Facebook, with similar results.

In 2012, Ryerson Nature Center near our home hosted a lecturing botanist by the name of Peter Crane. Sir Peter Crane, mind you, knighted in 2004 and a member of the Royal Society in London. I’m not sure why he became so distinguished, but the dude had his Ginkgo on, and sold copies of his book Ginkgo, The Tree That Time Forgot, which he dutifully autographed for me.


During the question portion of his lecture, I commented on what I’d observed, and that I’d made a game of it. Was this just our tree, or a known characteristic of the genus? He smiled as I described the office pool and commented that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had done something similar. Yes, it was a known quality.

Linnaeus may have named and described the Ginkgo in 1771, but others like myself, in our admiration for our beloved Ginkgo later documented this behavior.

We have since moved to Florida and left our special tree behind under the care of strangers who may or may not be aware what a unique specimen they have on their property. As much as I would love to grow a Ginkgo at our new home, from what I’ve read it will not survive in this climate. So while we no longer have an object of our singular focus, we’ll amuse ourselves with the variety and splendor of the local flora. I’ve often commented that we now live in Jurassic Park. The Ginkgo and alligators have that much in common.