The Forest of Original Growth
What would it be like to stumble across lands that no one else had ever been to, and how could you know that?
After reading Sir Conan Doyle's ‘Lost World’ about dinosaurs on a sealed off plateau of a volcano, I wondered if there were any more undiscovered places.
So, while at the Earth Day Summit in Rio last month, I forayed into the uncharted regions of Brazil, having chosen from a map the most desolate and remotest area. After various vaccinations and preparations, I trucked my one-man helicopter to the last way station, loaded the extra gas tanks onto it and flew into the heart of darkness, gliding down onto a field just as the gas ran out. From here I walked for tens of miles, always taking the most difficult path whenever there was a choice. This would insure that I could end up in some unvisited hard-to-get-at region.
After several hundred or so of these improbable choices, I came across acres and acres of Lady's Slippers flowers—very rare flowers that usually only appeared in small bunches, growing only in conjunction with a rare fungus, and, even, then, usually get picked. I was getting close.
I then, after taking one last really difficult turn, discovered entire fields of many flowers long though to be extinct. There were Eve’s Blossoms, not seen for thousands of years, historically valued for their life extending elixir, as well as the original, lost, strain of Pearly Everlasting, the flower that never dies, and so I suspected that I might be in virgin territory. How would I know? Well, for one, there were no paths, for even animals and their hunters had either long left or had never been here. Also, the flower colors were not like any that I had ever seen before, not new colors, mind you, but, just, well, colors of different intensities and hues that were not thought to exist in nature. I saw true-blue roses, legendary no more.
I had chanced upon a land of strange rainbows of elfin-hued flowers: Red Delphiniums, Black Tulips, Orange Fuchsias, White Marigolds, Bronze grass, Yellow Violets, and Adam's Apple, now growing from the ground.
Was this the original forest—the Garden of Eden? Was I the first to return? And then I knew that it was, for there, right in front of me, was a field of thousands of undisturbed golden nuggets on the forest floor. Surely no one had ever been here, at least not for a long, long time.
I reached up and put the apple back on the Tree.