Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [8]
In 1861, Manuel Gomes Archer was named administrator of the Tijuca Forest project, and together with six slaves, he began to replant the forest. Archer had no formal training but was considered a local expert, and he decided to replant the area with native plants in roughly the same ratio he had seen in other Brazilian forests. Over the next twelve years, Archer’s six slaves planted 72,000 trees. The springs, according to a report Archer prepared near the end of this administration, regained and retained their former water levels.
Jean told me that our trail was called the Major Archer trail. On the way into the park, I had seen a sculpture at the visitor’s center of a man holding out a fresh, live bromeliad, and Jean explained that it honored the six slaves who returned Tijuca to the forest.
“Do you know what the word ecologia means?” Jean asked.
“Ecology? Sure. Why?”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. The study of ecosystems—plants and animals and the environment.”
“No,” Jean said, “what does it mean? What does eco mean?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Environment?”
“Eco is Greek for house, home. Logia is Greek for study. Ecologia, ecology, is the study of your home. And what does economia mean? Eco—home—and onomia means organization. I give this talk to our volunteers the other day. I explain to them, how can you have your home organized if you do not study it?”
Jean was clearly at home in the forest. He hiked at a blistering pace, nimbly dodging fallen trees and leaping over creeks and, all the while, prattling merrily about flora and fauna and the kinds of things that might be lying in wait behind the rotting tree trunk I was using to pull myself up the muddy trail.
“Oh, yes, many snakes here,” Jean said. “Only one very poisonous though.”
“Oh,” I said. “Ah.”
“But she is—she don’t like us. She knows we are more dangerous to her. She recognize the most dangerous animal on Earth.” He chuckled at this line, and its English delivery, rubbing his hands in self-satisfaction.
Jean mentioned jacarei—crocodiles—which used to live in the swamps around Rio but now were gone except for the huge natural area in southwestern Brazil known as the Pantanal. He was sad about this. “Jacarei, they not want to eat you. Jacarei, they are good people.”
And what about sharks, I wanted to know. I’ve long had a soft spot for the world’s most feared apex predators.
“I like sharks,” Jean agreed. “Sharks, they are good people too.”
After about an hour, Jean called for a rest. I was panting, sopping with sweat. Jean’s glasses had now fogged over completely. He indicated the ruins of a small brick house, buried in the jungle, and we wandered over there and sat down on the remains of a windowsill. Moss covered the outside, and the doors and windows were long gone. A landslide had pushed through the back window, and a banged-up refrigerator had taken root in the middle of the room. Jean told me that someone had lived in the house and had disappeared. His ghost supposedly roamed the forest. We looked out at the canopy.
“It’s just a story,” Jean said, misinterpreting my silence.
While he sprawled on the cool, mossy brick, I pulled out my copy of the Beagle diary and read out loud Darwin’s account of the road up to Tijuca. In his typical style he had written: “As a Sultan in a Seraglio I am becoming quite hardened to beauty. It is wearisome to be in a fresh rapture at every turn of the road. And as I have before said, you must be that or nothing.”
“Yes,” said Jean, nodding as I explained the word rapture. “Very beautiful.”
He pointed out some small lichens on a tree, little splotches of green with a bright pink outline. “They only grow where there is no pollution,” he said. “The air here is good.”
I told him that I felt suffocated by the city’s constant commotion within hours of arriving, and mentioned