Word: forester
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...hand on a rock, but eventually I turn clumsiness to my advantage by forcing everyone to slow down. I am seeing the jungle for the first time. Here alone are 300 species of trees. They are at once the pillars and the superintendents of the rain forest, the frame of the house and its chief occupants. The spiny understory palm trees make baskets from branches growing out of their trunks, which become compost machines for falling leaves, which in turn sustain the trees. Since the soil is not deep enough for roots to penetrate, the larger trees like the ceiba...
...tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, according to Mittermeier, he would be better off. He tells me that the scariest sound he ever heard in the rain forest was the explosive crack of a dead trunk, followed by a rush of plummeting branches so loud it might have been a storm...
...fully awakened by the mournful and menacing wail of the howlers--large red monkeys that make a new-day announcement that they are in charge of all the forest's primates. The collective howl begins like a low siren in a fire station, rises to swallow the sky, then ebbs again. It makes you feel alone in the world, like the first human being ever to hear...
Mittermeier is introduced, and he asks if I may put a question to the granman. I ask what the forest means spiritually to the Maroons. The granman passes my question to a captain, who says that it goes to "the heart of our society." Their whole existence, he says, is a result of the integration of the physical and the spiritual. Then he offers me a parable. If you go into the woods, he says, and you look for a new plot to farm, you have to put a marker down; otherwise you won't be able to find...
...watch Mittermeier watching everything. He is wholly comfortable here, and one sees why. There is nothing to be uncomfortable about in the villages, or in the surrounding forest, except some physical inconveniences. One calls this the wilderness, but it hardly seems wild to its residents. Pilgrims to America used to fear places like this; now people fear what has replaced them. I ask Mittermeier how all this affects him personally, apart from his sense of mission...