The woods behind the fields are guarded by a crumbling stone wall and a maze of pricker bushes with thorns an inch long. It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure. Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.
They instantly reminded me of a favorite book from my younger years, The Lost Years of Merlin, and how the trees have their own language. The wind moaning, branches creaking and shifting…it isn’t hard to imagine them speaking to each other, wondering what intruder has entered their canopy of twisting vines and groping roots.
J.R.R. Tolkien also imagined trees speaking their own tongue in Lord of the Rings. The Ents protected tree-spirits and could speak many languages, but mainly used Quenya and Entish (The Complete Guide to Middle Earth, pg. 156). Many people are familiar with Treebeard (known as Fangorn in the Sindarin language), who roused his fellow Ents to defend Fangorn Forest against Saruman.
Trees are often referenced as wise creatures in literature and movies (think of the recent Avatar)–but why? Is it because of their great age and strong stature? There is a mystery that surrounds trees, in that they are so beautifully alive and yet so confined to live for hundreds, even thousands, of years in one spot. It’s so easy to think of trees having souls, of being aware of their surroundings, even having emotions.
Methuselah, nearly 5,000 years old. A bristlecone pine.
The trees I photographed aren’t thousands of years old, but their character is still obvious, and they are breathtaking. How long have their roots dug deep into the ground? And how much longer will they stand, until some force of nature (or human hand), causes them to fall?
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am terrified of boats (mainly because of sea monsters. Yes, for real). Unfortunately, my brother is getting married on a cruise come August, so I have no choice but to attend the ceremony…I’m tempted to just say “Screw you,” and run away, but apparently being present at your brother’s wedding kind of a big deal, so I’m putting my life in danger, instead. At least I’ll have a room without a window so I can’t look out and see the giant tentacles trying to tear the ship apart.
We can't say we weren't warned...
Anyway, it’s important for me to know what superstitions sea-faring folk believe in, because I can’t make any mistakes on this trip. So I read up on them a bit, and found some of the usual ones…a woman on a fishing trip is bad luck (unless she’s naked. Then she’s actually good to have around), dolphins are good omens, never start a voyage on a Friday or you’re doomed, never kill an albatross…you know, the normal stuff everyone knows.
Then I read this title in a book: “The Evil of the Banana.”
That's a lot of evil.
Apparently having bananas on a ship has been a big NO since the early 1700s. This was when Spain’s South Atlantic and Caribbean trading empire was big, and “nearly every ship that disappeared at sea was carrying a cargo of bananas” (Pg. 195 of Breverton’s Phantasmagoria). It was also thought that bananas on slave ships would ferment below deck and give of methane gas, killing anyone who breathed it in. The scariest reason (for those with arachnophobia), is that a certain poisonous spider would nest in the bananas. If a sailor was killed by a spider bite while bananas were on board, all of those bananas might be thrown to the sea because of the bad omen.
So the next time you’re on a cruise, tanning on deck and about to enjoy that strawberry-banana smoothie…think about the danger you’re putting yourself in.
If you’re interested in reading other sea superstitions and making yourself too paranoid to ever step on a boat again, click here.
It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure. Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.
The Junk Drawer 