THE GOBLIN AND THE GIANTS

A story about a human being's affinity to Nature and the meaning of living and dying in search of her secrets.

By Carlos Rivero Blanco

This brief essay is dedicated to the memory of Andy Field, to the Rancho Grande cloud Forest, a place I admire as being the essence of nature itself, and to the Henri Pittier National Park, where I was introduced to the secret life of the jungle when I was still very young.

THE FOREST

The fog, still thick and wet, prevented us from seeing the sunrise. It was still early and the outlines of the jungle barely sketched a subtle design on the still dark background. Relative humidity was 100 percent, and ... Why shouldn't it be? After all it was the month of August, during the wet season, when the cloud forest shows off to the visitor its maximum splendor. Because of this, my son and I had climbed the mountain and, at the break of day we wanted to feel it as our own.

The forest, all disheveled, as though just getting up, showed its profile against a misty background. It was the eternal outline: dark, thick trunks joined together by an irregular network of the silhouettes of leaves and vines; palm trees with slender trunks and long stemmed ferns, their heads drooping over themselves and over us their symmetric filigree-like leaves. It reminded me of the paper dolls cut out by children which, when opened out, repeat an endless pattern of figures joined together.

The jungle profile did not remain still. Gently, a soft breeze moved the white mass of clouds which enveloped the mountain. On passing, it would stir the leaves, which would vibrate before our eyes. It did not remain silent, either, for the dew condensed on the leaves, would keep falling, producing a constant rustle over the layer of dead foliage covering the ground.

With a small effort, in the increasing and more revealing daylight, you could follow the course of one of these droplets. Looking at the branches overhead, you could catch a particular drop on its first motion. It was like a slow, lazy "dropping down", almost unwilling, letting the wind and gravity make all the effort.

The drop, with all its sluggishness, would take its first jump over the void falling on a broad, thick leaf of climbing malanga, the kind that so profusely cover the tree trunks in these cloud forests. Surprisingly, our dewdrop turned into four or five, as the denticulated malanga leaf, on impact, let loose the drops that had been forming on the ends of its long fingers and were merely waiting for a small push.

We could continue to follow only one of these droplets, which fell into a small puddle formed in the middle of one of the "tree pineapples" or bromelias, the flashy plants with spiked and star-like leaves forming large tufts over the wet branches in the darkest spots of the jungle. It was the drop that overflowed the puddle and also scared away a tiny frog which had spent the night there. The frog, as well as another drop, fell on a giant taro leaf, very close to the ground. The tip of the taro leaf then let a small quantity of water run on the jungle floor, and the frog quickly fled from our sight.

Gradually, the sounds of the jungle kept changing. The twittering of the crickets and other night insects was stilled and, simultaneously, on the distance we could hear the low guttural drone, revealing the presence of the brown and red howling monkeys. The first birds made swift passages through the foliage, which now delineated the clear outlines of a jungle, over a nebulous background of water vapor condensed to form a dense mist. A large bird, the olive sparrow, was trying to catch a butterfly resting on a lichen covered trunk of a trumpet wood tree on the edge of the ravine. A querrequerre, that beautiful yellow breasted, green-winged, long-necked and blue-headed bird, also jumped from branch to branch in search of an unwary insect.

By daylight, though still shrouded in clouds, we saw the jungle at its full splendor. We could see and admire the soft cushions of moss covering the tree trunks, the branches and leaf patterns of the plants closest to us. A few were in bloom, such as the casupo, whose inflorescence is enclosed by orange-colored bracts and sometimes show small, yellow corollas, or carmine-red tubular ones, so small that only the thin beak and long tongue of the hummingbird can extract its nectar. Thus morning light brought out the colors that imparted variety on the jungle.

Meanwhile, on a leaf the size of a human hand, a spider was examining the web it had delicately spun over it in order to trap its food. It had been somewhat damaged by the prior evenings rain, and the spider was busily repairing it.

THE GIANTS

Drops were still falling from the roof of the jungle and my son, still intent on following their downward course, was looking up, and suddenly exclaimed, quite impressed:

"How big! How tall!" He was referring to the giant trees before and above him. They were really colossal, their tabular roots looked like triangular walls that seemed to support the weight of the massive trunks. You could scarcely see the branches, so very high up, and far away from us, distant even from the tops of the other jungle trees.

"Gosh! How big they are! Makes you feel so small!", he exclaimed amazed by the hugeness of those jungle giants, undoubtedly impressed by the portly majesty of the growth projecting itself far above the roof of the cloud forest.

This scene reminded me of a similar experience I had several years ago, when I first saw a "Cucharón" or "Niño", the tallest tree in the cloud forest of the Coastal Mountain Range. Those awe-inspiring specimens reached a height of more than 170 ft., and formed the layer of emerging stratum on these mountain jungles. I don't recall exactly the place, though it is not far from here. What I do remember is that it was a group of five or six immense and impressive trees.

The tops of these giants showed digitated leaves, like hands with extended fingers. The only remarkable thing about it is that the "fingers" are seven. The petioles are long and thin, hard to appreciate from the floor of the jungle. The large white flowers are barely discernible from a distance. The fruit is a sort of large, chocolate colored capsule, which on maturing sheds its walls, drops its seeds to the ground from a hanging bag which swings with the wind like a pendulum.

The red-brown seeds, the size of the end bone of your thumb, show a wing-like flatness on one end. It looks like a half of an airplane propeller which, on falling starts turning and slowly flying away from the mother tree. Its scientific name Gyranthera caribensis (from "Gira" = to turn and "anthera" = stamens) is quite descriptive of the way the flower stamens are entwined.

Undoubtedly, these trees impress everybody. Their size is something that definitely attracts attention of whoever ventures into the heart of the places and can look up towards the ceiling of the cloud forest to admire these wonders of nature.

ENTER ANDY

When dawn at last appeared, the gray outline of an impressive, old and partly built structure, showed itself amidst the vegetation. It was a steel and concrete mass, with a sort of dual personality. On the one hand it has a facade with giant glass windows, inviting the sky to come within, and conversely, it showed three unfinished stories, with dark and lugubrious cubicles whose moisture-covered walls sheltered a diversity of jungle creatures.

I had always been impressed by those compartments. In them I had observed the myriads of bats that slept during the day between the walls and ceiling, as well as tiny swallows that made their nests in little holes and cracks. A few geckos had made the walls into their permanent home, which afforded them shelter as well as food, as many insects swarm in those nooks. From time to time, a whitish tree frog would appear, and clinging to the moss-covered walls, would see time pass by on a rainy day.

The sight of these small rooms brought us back several years on the history of Venezuela. A long time ago, in this place then called Rancho Grande, near the Portachuelo pass, there was a very rustic inn, which offered shelter and provisions to the mule drivers who plied their trade between Maracay and Ocumare, on the Coast. By 1915 many bridges had been erected, thus permitting the passing of horse-drawn carts. By 1933, all was radically changed when Juan Vicente Gómez, the dictator, had a wider road built, over which automobiles could travel.

During those years, the inn was torn down and, on its site, Gomez ordered the building of a great 120-room hotel. When the dictator died in 1935, the Rancho Grande Hotel remained unfinished, its main structure only partly built. In 1937, the Venezuelan government decreed the protection of these jungles, establishing the Aragua National Park, which later was renamed "Henry Pittier Park" in honor of the famous botanist.

As time went on, the building was transformed into a science lab. Sitting in the middle of the cloud forest at Henri Pittier National Park, it was used as a shelter for researchers of the flora and fauna of the region.  William Beebe, one of the world’s most celebrated zoologists and scientific minds, lived there between 1945 and 1946, and for almost a year he studied the lives of the jungle creatures. Many more came later, some from abroad as well as many young Venezuelan researchers who were gradually being educated in our universities. After a time, Rancho Grande became world-famous as a place for studies, and attracted many naturalists to its soil.

A few years ago, on the corridors of the mysterious building, I met someone who seemed to be one of the many naturalists I had encountered at Rancho Grande.

He was a young man, about 20 years old, of British origin. Of slight build, blond hair, bluish eyes, the cloud forest exerted a great fascination on him because of its life diversity, and the surrounding tropical atmosphere were so different from the lugubrious English fog.

Andy was a botany student, and precisely that was what had brought him to Rancho Grande. To study the plants of the forest and be able to understand and explain some of their ecological relations was his most cherished goal. Some three years of research in these places would enable him to gather sufficient data to write his thesis.

MEETING THE GIANTS

The jungle surrounding the building at Rancho Grande was truly exuberant. Its flowering composition varied a lot, depending on how far or how near you got to the Portachuelo pass. Close to it, the moisture condensing on the plants was notorious, coming from the clouds pushed by the trade winds toward the mountain, and managing to get across the gorge, or mountain pass and cover the jungle with its grayish presence. As you got farther away from the pass, there was less humidity condensation and the plants were of different species, which tolerated a somewhat drier environment.

In the more humidity-exposed places there was an amazing profusion of epiphytic plants (that is, plants living on other plants) such as malangas, vines, lianas, lichens, mushrooms, orchids and bromeliads. In less humid places the epiphytes were scarcer but it was no less tangled and sometimes confusing. It gave the impression of a large shroud covering everything, while at the same time giving you a visual sensation of the complicated relationships between the plants and other living organisms of the forest.

Walking there was difficult, through narrow footpaths and sometimes over the delicate shoots and sprouts of the woods scions of the great trees, which were waiting there for an opening in the tree tops which would give them a chance to have more light and thus grow faster and eventually reach the jungle roof. Many times I explored with my pupils those inner forest footpaths. But our progress was slowed and made more careful by some red and yellow strings, laid out in squares by Andy, to mark off an area of about two and a half acres in that part of the jungle flanking the mountain behind the Rancho Grande building. That fine network of colored strings enabled the researcher to measure exactly the position of each plant on a squared plane, and transfer the data to a squared paper chart that would show spatial distribution of each species and the relationship between diverse species.

In the course of time, and perhaps because of so much looking upward, Andy's fascination with the cloud forest became centered on one particular, very prominent, element, but nevertheless very distant, that very much attracted his attention: the giants of the forest, the "Cucharones" or "Niños", those trees of colossal dimensions that break out above the jungle's roof as a sort of "horizon watchers".

This is how Andy and the giants met and how their relationship began: he in the role of the typical researcher, fascinated and mesmerized by his subject of study, and they, as living beings, endowed with the most interesting natural gifts and faculties, worthy of being discovered and recorded by whoever could reach their heights.

From then on, the squared terrain marked off by red and yellow strings became a map of the distribution of the giant trees. Now he had to find a way to somehow climb to their highest point. It was no longer enough to look at their tops from the ground up, from a distance of 100 to 170 feet. He had to investigate what their flower buds and blooms looked like, what sort of animal species pollinated them and how they were fertilized, how their fruits grew, how their seeds were dispersed, and many other things.

That is how our friend learned to climb and come down from the giants, using the special gear and nylon ropes employed by mountain climbers. Thus it was that Andy managed to satisfy that dream of all children of having their very own "tree house", or at least a sort of wooden platform from where he could be "master" of the jungle's roof.

There he used to spend long hours watching every sort of creature that approached "his" trees. From close contact, he familiarized himself with the giants' "life styles", to put it that way, and probably learned the time of the year when they put out their blooms, or fruits, or let their seeds drop. He used to spend the nights there, specially during the flowering season and in pitch darkness, surrounded by the chirping of the hundreds of insects forming the nightly jungle orchestra, and the choirs of the tree frogs. Andy documented in minute detail the nightly visits of the long tongued bats, the perfectly adapted pollinizers of the giants' flowers.

ANDY, THE GOBLIN

It was almost total darkness, except for the small hand flashlights that allowed us to see the creepers and vines obstructing the footpath. It was a dark night in May, during the rainy season, when, accompanied by some twenty of my pupils, we ventured out with Andy to visit his favorite giants.

In our field excursions I used to visit the interior of the jungle at night and, once we found a place where we could sit comfortably, all lights would be extinguished so that we could experiment total darkness for about half an hour. The only lights visible in that environment were those of the fireflies or the small water spiders, which shone as tiny jewels on the stones of the brooks.

After walking for quite a stretch, we climbed down a side of the mountain, and constantly slipping over the wet dry leaves we reached the foot of a clump of giant trees, on one of which Andy had built a platform. There he told us about his experiences as a researcher and spoke about the biological marvel that were these trees. Then we extinguished our flashlights and in the most complete darkness enjoyed our silence and the sounds and melodies of the nightly jungle creatures.

Andy's stay in this nook of the woods was going on three years. He lived on the roof of the old building, with the small amount of money he received from teaching English lessons in Maracay, and he used to spend some time at the home of his friend Carlos Bordón, an engineer, a dedicated student of insect life who discussed about science and conservation with the British young man.

Andy had been very active in making the jungle and its secrets known to others. Whenever we talked he expressed his concern about the lack of interest that city dwellers had in the cloud forest. He said his countrymen did not have the privilege of having that natural wonder so near-by, and that the people here should be made conscious of it, and that in order for the forest to be protected it should first be known and appreciated.

His thin figure, an eccentric researcher, interned in the jungle over long periods of time, living alone on top of a ghostly building, gave Andi’s personality a most peculiar air. People who knew him eventually came to think and talk of him as "The Goblin of Rancho Grande".

His anxiety and concern finally reached the Aragua Conservation Society. His eagerness to build an observation footpath leading park visitors to the place where the giant trees grow was the crowning of his research efforts. For months he worked on such a project, backed by some of the young people in the Society, who actually helped in the building of the interpretive trail which led visitors to his trees.

  

THE GOBLIN BECOMES A SEED

The trail to the Niños or Cucharones was half finished when I last visited it. I walked the route with my pupils while "the Goblin" explained to us how the giants succeeded each other. The seeds, tumbling in the air, descended slowly from on high, flying away from the mother tree to fall on the floor of the jungle as far as possible from another of its own species. The oldest individuals, when they died and fell down, would make large clearings in the woods, their immense weight bringing down other smaller trees.

When additional light was thus admitted to the depths of the jungle, the young saplings waiting for a chance to grow, would succeed their parents, and would once again close the jungle roof with their tops. Occasionally, Andy would point out one of the scions of the giants which was waiting its turn to begin growing.

He specially called my attention to several young trees growing directly on the stilts of the tubular roots or buttresses. They were sort of vegetative children, that would grow rapidly if the huge tree mass which fed them with its own sap would ever tumble down and let some sunlight in. It was difficult to make Andy speak on any subject other than his friends, the tallest living beings in the cloud forest.

The last time I saw the young Englishman was when he brought me some fruit and seeds to photograph for him. His camera had become rusty from overexposure to the mountain high humidity. It was very important to document with clear pictures the form and seed-dispersing mechanism. Showing off his knowledge, he explained to me just exactly how it worked.

It all appeared to be so finely designed by Nature: a large fruit, a capsule whose cover dries up and falls off. This causes some thin and slender sacs full of seed, to hang suspended like so many pendulums, exposed to the wind at a great height. The seeds start dropping from the sacs, slowly gyrating until they reach the jungle floor, where they will try to recommence the life cycle of the species.

Andy was euphoric. The moment when his project would come to an end and he would be returning to England was very close. He had great plans in mind, one of them to come back and see his giants, when he made some money and could travel again.

I was astonished as I red the sad news. A month later, a somewhat imprecise newspaper account told of the death of a young Englishman who had been researching the life of the plants on the mountains at Pittier National Park.

Andy had fallen from the top of one of his giants. So much had he harmonized with them that he had become one of their seeds; like them, he had gyrated in the air, to plant himself beneath the layer of dead leaves and humid earth, as a message of love to Nature and an example of dedication to the study of the living beings of the cloud forest. Strange as it seems, his remembrance took root there, forever, beside his most beloved friends.

ANDY THE GOBLIN, IS NOW A GIANT

Today, while accompanied by my son I admire those three huge trees, real wonders of nature, I realize time has passed and I evoke the memory of my friend. I believe it is a symbol, an example, for any nature lover.

The young researcher's audacious thirst for knowledge about the lives of the giants; his intimate relationship with them and their ways of life; his teacher's attitude in showing off his trees to anyone who came to look at the cloud forest and the fact that he dedicated his life to knowing them better, all make us see Andy as one more tree in the forest.

That is why I believe Andy is a giant: a symbol of unity between man and the cloud forest; an important link having much meaning for those who believe it is a noble thing to learn about and protect our natural environment.

Perhaps those drops of water we saw this morning falling from on high, are the tears shed by the great trees in an effort to water with them the roots of their friend, to make him become one more of the giants of the cloud forest.

THE END? or,... perhaps not yet!