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La gran ceiba
Aug. 26th, 2022 08:10 pmThe kapok tree--Ceiba pentandra, ceiba in Spanish, is one of the three tallest types of tree in the rainforest. I have always dreamed of meeting one because...
When my kids were little, we were given The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry. Gorgeously illustrated, it's the story of a woodcutter in the Amazon who falls asleep by a huge kapok tree he's been asked to cut down. While he's asleep, all the creatures (including a human child) who depend on the tree visit him and whisper in his ear about what its loss will mean.
( from The Great Kapok Tree )
I loved that book so much that I apparently translated it into Japanese--something I forgot I'd done until Wakanomori discovered my manuscript, prior to our trip:
(I don't know if it had been translated at the time I did that--which would have been in the mid 1990s--but it's probably been professionally translated since.)
During our one day-long excursion, we spent some time on Lake Tarapoto (an offshoot of the Amazon--it's connected), and as we came near a massive strangler fig, I thought I saw a kapok behind it--the tree I saw had the same buttressed roots. "Is that a kapok?" I asked in my halting Spanish. "No, not that," the guide replied. "You want to see a kapok?" I said yes please, and we headed off to a different stretch of shore, where we scrambled up the mud and into the Actual Forest. We hopped from more-solid patch of ground to more-solid patch of ground, and after about 10 minutes, came to la gran ceiba.
Here's our guide by one of the buttress roots:
Those roots! In Aventura en el Amazonas, I learned that you can hit them to make a loud, carrying sound, and that's a way of communicating in the forest. Better than smoke signals, the mother of the main characters says, because smoke can't make it through the canopy, but the sound will travel.
Me, so happy
As it turns out, the supermarket that I went to every morning to buy yogurt drinks to take our malaria pills with was called "La gran ceiba." Like a fool, I failed to take a picture of it, and the only one on the internet (taken by Jerson Santiago Ramos, so I'm told) shows it all closed up:
Do you see, though, how the central pillar is the trunk and the crown of the tree has been painted overspreading the store? When I would go there, there would always be a woman sitting to the left of the store as you face it, selling bananas and other fruits and vegetables. The little panaderia to the right as you face it was great too; I got empanadas there a couple of times.
La gran ceiba es un verdadero árbol de milagros, a thing of beauty, sustaining multitudes.
When my kids were little, we were given The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry. Gorgeously illustrated, it's the story of a woodcutter in the Amazon who falls asleep by a huge kapok tree he's been asked to cut down. While he's asleep, all the creatures (including a human child) who depend on the tree visit him and whisper in his ear about what its loss will mean.
( from The Great Kapok Tree )
I loved that book so much that I apparently translated it into Japanese--something I forgot I'd done until Wakanomori discovered my manuscript, prior to our trip:
(I don't know if it had been translated at the time I did that--which would have been in the mid 1990s--but it's probably been professionally translated since.)
During our one day-long excursion, we spent some time on Lake Tarapoto (an offshoot of the Amazon--it's connected), and as we came near a massive strangler fig, I thought I saw a kapok behind it--the tree I saw had the same buttressed roots. "Is that a kapok?" I asked in my halting Spanish. "No, not that," the guide replied. "You want to see a kapok?" I said yes please, and we headed off to a different stretch of shore, where we scrambled up the mud and into the Actual Forest. We hopped from more-solid patch of ground to more-solid patch of ground, and after about 10 minutes, came to la gran ceiba.
Those roots! In Aventura en el Amazonas, I learned that you can hit them to make a loud, carrying sound, and that's a way of communicating in the forest. Better than smoke signals, the mother of the main characters says, because smoke can't make it through the canopy, but the sound will travel.
Me, so happy
As it turns out, the supermarket that I went to every morning to buy yogurt drinks to take our malaria pills with was called "La gran ceiba." Like a fool, I failed to take a picture of it, and the only one on the internet (taken by Jerson Santiago Ramos, so I'm told) shows it all closed up:
Do you see, though, how the central pillar is the trunk and the crown of the tree has been painted overspreading the store? When I would go there, there would always be a woman sitting to the left of the store as you face it, selling bananas and other fruits and vegetables. The little panaderia to the right as you face it was great too; I got empanadas there a couple of times.
La gran ceiba es un verdadero árbol de milagros, a thing of beauty, sustaining multitudes.
