As you move through history, history moves into you, more surely than if you read it. Writers mark the page, but walkers mark the earth, and the earth in turn marks us. I feel increasingly compelled to walk to random places, to know them through the soles of my feet. I am keener and keener to look into the eyes of animals that aren’t human. (What do they see when you look at them? Well. That is a whole other question.) But when I think of the horseshoe crabs I’m clear that my attachment to them isn’t entirely random. In their plight I recognise our own. It is not just the crabs that are being left to float aimlessly in ruined seas. It is not just the dogs we live with, poison, walk with, experiment upon, that are left to whine; to take the jolt.
____________________
1 Elizabeth Weil, ‘The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years’, New York Times, 25 September 2014.
2 ‘An Ocean and an Instant’, James Bradley, Sydney Review of Books, August 21, 2018.
3 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin Books, 2001.
4 ‘The Last Days of the Blue-Blood Harvest’, Sarah Zhang, Atlantic, May 9, 2018.
5 ‘Extinction: A Matter of Life and Death?’, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC, November 21, 2014.
6 ‘Why Are Some Depressed, Others Resilient? Scientists Home in on One Part of the Brain’, Meeri Kim, Washington Post, June 5, 2014.
7 William B. Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City, Princeton University Press, 2013.
8 Merlin Coverley, The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker, Old Castle Books, 2012.
9 ‘Extinction’, The Philosopher’s Zone, 2014,
GINKGO
(Ginkgo biloba)
The time comes when you know that, if you plant a tree in your garden, you will not be alive to stand beneath its branches.
LEONARD WOOLF
THERE used to be two ginkgo trees, a male and a female, growing on either side of the entrance to the Geology Department on the Parkville campus of Melbourne University. Only the female survives today. It is recorded on the City of Melbourne’s Exceptional Tree Register. I’ve also met a ginkgo in Tavistock Square, London. That was planted on December 16, 2004, to commemorate the centenary of Leonard Woolf’s arrival in Ceylon. I visited the tree because I was writing about Woolf, though I’d been much more aware of his love of elms and apple trees. He had two elms, one named Leonard and one named Virginia. His apple orchard at Monk’s House is full of hand-grafted and heritage trees that he laboured over for decades. So this ginkgo business, this was a surprise to me.
Ginkgo were, for some millennia of their long existence, confined to China, but now they live around the world. They have fan-shaped leaves that turn gold in autumn. They’re considered sacred in several Buddhist traditions and are cultivated in and around temples. It’s believed that the spiritual company the ginkgo kept was the reason it survived near-extinction. Ginkgo thrived in the Jurassic period, but the ice ages that came thereafter were hard on it. Luckily humans fell in love with the ginkgo and began to cultivate it. Slowly the tree found its way out from China back to the land masses it lived on some millions of years ago.
I was delighted, in Brooklyn, to see ginkgo all around me. Until autumn approached and I started to notice the smell of vomit everywhere. At first I assumed that humans were the problem—they usually are—but then I learned that it was the seed of the female ginkgo: a smell so strong that it’s speculated that it evolved to attract dinosaurs.
Many claims are made for the ginkgo. The internet tells me that an extract from the leaves ‘seems to improve blood circulation, which might help the brain, eyes, ears, and legs function better. It may act as an antioxidant to slow down Alzheimer’s disease and interfere with changes in the brain that might cause problems with thinking’. Male ginkgo, like cycads and ferns, produce sperm that actually swim. The trees are known as living fossils because they are the only one of their division, Ginkgophyta, to have survived and because they have changed so little over 200 million years that you can recognise them in the fossil record. A Shinan ship that sank in Quanzhou Bay in 1323 and was excavated in the mid-1970s was carrying not only a priceless cargo of porcelain, but also botanical specimens that included a single ginkgo seed. Antarctic explorer Robert F. Scott had ginkgo fossils on him when he died. In 1829 John Phillips published a two-volume treatise on Yorkshire geology, which included a list of fossils on the Yorkshire coast. Among these was a widespread Jurassic species that was, it turned out, the first fossil ginkgo discovered. However, despite a lineage that cuts through several geological ages, the ginkgo was not named until 1712 and even then the name we use today is thought to be the result of a misspelling of gin kyo.
Ginkgo were among the top ten trees to be found in New York City in 2015, the last time a tree census was done—there are about 21,000 of them. They’re not great for native fauna, though the eastern grey squirrel does eat the nuts. Survivors, selfish, they don’t pull their weight in the urban forest. An urban oak may provide habitat for more than five hundred species of caterpillar, a ginkgo might host only two. That means fewer birds, fewer animals. Before 2007 the boroughs that make up New York, New York, drew their street trees from a list of about forty species. These days they’re planting some 220, though some of these are struggling. The research is thin and various, but I read any number of articles claiming such trees were lucky to live ten years. The term ‘useful life expectancy’ of trees is one estimate used by arboriculturalists. It can be controversial as it’s a subjective assessment of the tree’s health, not an objective calculation. Some advocates for retention of European trees argue that ULE is being used as a justification to remove trees and replace them with native species. The most accurate reckoning I could find of the lifespan of street trees in big cities in North America was nineteen to twenty-eight years.1 And here is the thing about ginkgos: they are tough. The reason they have survived 200 million years is that gingko can handle most things you throw at them, which includes staying alive for centuries in urban environments. They were planted in nineteenth-century London because they could survive the terrible smog. In New York they endure poor light, pollution, vandals, meagre soil and, occasionally, being hit by trucks.They resist disease and fire. They are cheap to run because they have a branch structure that makes them easy to prune. Biodiversity issues aside, the smell is really the only thing counting against them. For a while cities around the world tried to deal with this by planting male trees, but it can be decades before it’s clear what sex a tree is, so that didn’t work either.
*
Akihiro Takahashi was a schoolboy when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived, horribly scarred, and by 1984 he was the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. When the novelist Ariel Dorfman met Takahashi he described his body as ‘a testament to that war crime and its aftermath. One ear was flat and mangled, his hands were gnarled, and from a finger on each grew a black fingernail’. After a long conversation Takahashi said to him, ‘You must see the hibakujumoku, the survivor trees. You must see the ginkgos.’2
Six ginkgo planted in Hiroshima survived the nuclear blast of August 6, 1945 and are still alive today. Their bark was scorched and some were deformed, but they grew new shoots and buds the very first spring after they were nuked. It was their deep roots, apparently, that allowed them to survive the blast, making their green shoots the first signs of new life in that ravaged city. As the city rose out of its ruins, temples were rebuilt to accommodate the ginkgo.
Sir Peter Crane, the author of Ginkgo: The Tree that Time Forgot,3 has spoken of the message inherent in the ginkgo’s existence. Not just ancient of lineage, individual ginkgo reach a great age. They teach us to think in longer increments of time, Crane suggests. They challenge us to think outside election cycles and human life spans: to encompass a notion of existence with roots that reach into the depths of prehistory, with branches that can reach out to a similarly expansive future.
&nbs
p; ____________________
1 ‘How Many Trees Are Enough? Tree Death and the Urban Canopy’, Lara A. Roman, Scenario 04: Building the Urban Forest, Spring, 2014.
2 ‘The Whispering Leaves of the Hiroshima Ginkgo Trees’, Ariel Dorfman, New York Times, August 4, 2017.
3 Ginkgo: The Tree that Time Forgot, Sir Peter Crane, Yale University Press, 2013.
TOURISTS GO HOME
CLOSE to nine million people visit Barcelona a year, and the permanent population of 2.5 million are sick of it. Residents of the old city are being pushed out—by the expense, the crowds (people like me) and the noise. Tourists Go Home is sprayed on walls and pavements. It’s harder and harder to find a place on the planet where the locals don’t want you to fuck off and go home. (More to the point, it’s harder and harder for people on the planet to find a home at all.) Countries around the world are beginning to cap the number of tourists allowed to visit significant sites.
When I visited Barcelona in 2013, tensions past, present and future were rising to the surface. Literally—as the graves of thousands of Franco’s victims were being unearthed by archaeologists in woods around Catalonia. Plaça de Vicenç Martorell, not far from our hotel, was home to nomads—perhaps they were Romani—who had no home, or jobs, and were, as far as I could gather, walking around Europe with their dogs and backpacks. They were young, dreadlocked, magnificent, trying to take charge in a world that had to all intents and purposes abandoned them. The youth unemployment rate in Spain at this time was close to fifty per cent. One afternoon I sat and watched police circle these kids. Go through their back packs. Threaten them. It’s okay to be a traveller if you have money, it seems, but less acceptable if you don’t.
I started travelling whenever I had the chance, by which I mean cash, after my grandmother died and left me a small amount of money. That money stretched to a few weeks in Europe and a few months in India and Nepal. A gift. Later in my twenties, my travelling intersected with my professional life. I wrote travel articles, researched my novels and, when I worked in publishing, I visited publishers and book fairs. For a short while these interests coalesced when I worked at Lonely Planet, the publishing house that specialised in travel. More recently my wife Virginia’s work life has contributed to the travel miles. From 2013–16 we lived in the US.
Over the decades I started to ask myself more questions. What does it mean to visit a city, a place, a landscape that is changing beyond recognition because of geo-political chaos, population explosion and climate change? To visit a country where there is extreme poverty? To visit a country where there is extreme wealth? I made decisions not to visit particular places on political grounds—by which I mean over and above how the politics affected my personal safety—but it’s fair to say that until very recently I loved travel so much that it never occurred to me not to travel; or to prioritise earning a living, saving and superannuation, over a trip.
I’ve been told that talking about all this travelling risks making me seem obnoxious. But when I first went overseas in the early eighties it was becoming a generational rite of passage. In 1971, Qantas acquired its first Boeing 747-400 and tripled the number of people that could be carried on an individual flight from one to three hundred. To not travel spoke of timidity, smugness, lack of curiosity; though clearly one can exhibit those personal qualities while being on the move constantly. Travelling on a tiny budget was part of the test though I can only (now) imagine what a strain it is to manage an endless stream of anxious, broke young adults turning up on your doorstep.
The numbers of Australians travelling just keep increasing and these days more than 10 million Australians head overseas to work and holiday each year. At the end of the nineteenth century the rich were appalled by the appearance of travel companies like Thomas Cook that specialised in providing tours to the middle classes. The jostling for a higher position in the pecking order has continued since then, and no small percentage of tourists like to think of themselves as ‘real’ travellers. It’s all a bit beside the point in the face of the numbers—an estimated 1.2 billion people travel each year. And while I don’t like to think that I am obnoxious, tourism’s effects undoubtably are, and not just because of the carbon footprint left by all that plane travel.
Let me give you an example. The finches that helped give birth to Darwin’s theory of evolution are in danger of extinction: both a distressing reality and an awful metaphor. In 2007 the Galápagos were listed as a ‘worldwide heritage in danger’. These islands are home to Darwin’s finches, a group of fifteen species that were observed by Charles Darwin in the 1830s. The finches, specifically their beaks, contributed to his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species. More recently a team of scientists have identified a gene that explains variation in beak shape within and among species. The finch’s common ancestor arrived on the Galápagos about two million years ago. Since then they’ve evolved into species that differ in body size, beak shape, song and feeding behaviour. Changes in the size and form of the beak have allowed them to eat food as diverse as insects, seeds, nectar from cactus flowers and blood from iguanas. These finch species are now threatened, and some have become extinct. Most endangered of all is the mangrove finch, which is now confined to three small mangrove swamps on Isabela Island. There are only around a hundred birds left. This drastic ecological change has been fuelled, in part, by the rise in tourism from 40,000 visitors in 1990 to more than 200,000 in 2015, a year in which the local population was only 30,000. The tourists include 500 introduced animals and 700 plant species, and they too are causing a severe impact on the native biodiversity.
In October 2014 I walked part of the Inca Trail in Peru with friends. On the second day the trail took us over two 4000-metre passes, a series of (for me) extreme ascents and descents. The first of these was called Dead Woman’s Pass. This was something to do with the silhouettes the mountains form, though as I trudged slowly uphill it felt more ominous than that. The issue wasn’t just physical fitness, but altitude. I chewed on dried coca leaves, which reminded me of oregano that’d been sitting at the back of a cupboard for ten years. I stood, vague, wobbly, by the edge of a cliff, and contemplated lying down to sleep. Finally a guide poured some oil from a small bottle and rubbed it into his hands before cupping them over my face. He told me to breathe deeply, and when I did I felt a sudden burst of enthusiasm. I was later unsurprised to be informed that the oil could not be taken out of the country. When I asked what it was made of the guide told me, with a smirk, condor wee; but given how rare condors are we both knew that wasn’t true. They’re in danger of extinction for all the usual reasons. Loss of habitat, hunting, competition for resources from humans, pesticides.
Andean condors mate for life. The males hold their wings aloft to dance when they are trying to impress a potential mate; they hiss and cluck while the skin on their neck turns bright yellow and inflates. They have a wingspan of close to three metres and they can use those magnificent wings to ride thermals for hours with only the occasional flap. To be honest I wouldn’t have minded if the oil had been made of condor wee, I was just very keen to get my hands on some more of it, so cheerful did it make me, so fleeting was the high.
When I got to an Incan ruin after about nine hours of oil-free walking and saw there was another hour to go before we reached our camp, I cried and swore. (‘I loved it when you said, “Fuck this for a joke,”’ an Irishwoman in our group enthused.) Of course the pain quickly receded, and what I remember now is: vertical gardens hanging from sheer cliffs, forests with their canopies in the clouds, hummingbirds so tiny that at first I thought they were colourful bumblebees, orchids growing between the cracks of stones in abandoned ruins and terraces, breathtaking in their scale, stepping their way down the Andes.
At first, ruins seem picturesque, but the more of them you walk over the more the specific details grab you. I found myself wondering how the massive granite boulders were carved so particularly. We asked, and were told that cold water was poured into na
tural fissures when the boulders were hot from sitting in the sun. This would cause the cracks to widen so that wedges could be inserted, and over time the rocks would split. How long would it take to build a city in this fashion? Not so long, apparently. Maybe ten years.
While I walked leadenly through the rain carrying a small daypack, porters sprinted past me with bulky loads strapped to their backs. I wore boots, they wore thongs. Only ten years ago it was usual for these men to carry loads of fifty kilograms or more, to be poorly fed, extremely underpaid and not provided with shelter. Things are supposed to have improved, with some companies fined for overloading and underfeeding their porters; but it was hard to get a fix on how much better their conditions have really become. They were so speedy it was not a stretch to imagine the young messengers known as chasquis who ran relays barefoot across what are now several countries.
I asked our guide if the Incans had a written language. He became frustrated as he answered me, because the ways in which his ancestors communicated were not recognised as language. This is one of the reasons the devastation of the Inca is not well documented, though it’s believed that after the Spanish invaded Peru in the mid-sixteenth century the Incan population was reduced from an estimated 10 million people to 1.5 million. The surviving population was enslaved, their culture and language banned. My guide explained that the chasquis carried ‘talking knots’: string arranged like a necklace with knotted strands that look like macramé. Because the knots didn’t relate directly to spoken language, the Spanish were quick to ban them on the grounds they could not interpret them. The Incas could, in effect, talk about them behind their backs.
City of Trees Page 5
