CHAPTER VIII

THE FOREST AND THE TREES

Alzatea verticillata

“Trees are stunning,” Miles Silman was saying. “They are very
beautiful. It’s true they take a little more appreciation. You walk into a
forest, and the first thing you notice is, ‘That’s a big tree,’ or ‘That’s a tall
tree,’ but when you start to think about their life history, about
everything that goes into getting a tree to that spot, it’s really neat. It’s
kind of like wine; once you start to understand it, it becomes more
intriguing.” We were standing in eastern Peru, at the edge of the Andes,
on top of a twelve-thousand-foot-high mountain, where, in fact, there
were no trees—just scrub and, somewhat incongruously, a dozen or so
cows, eyeing us suspiciously. The sun was sinking, and with it the
temperature, but the view, in the orange glow of evening, was
extraordinary. To the east was the ribbon of the Alto Madre de Dios River,
which flows into the Beni River, which flows into the Madeira River, which
eventually meets the Amazon. Spread out before us was Manú National
Park, one of the world’s great biodiversity “hot spots.”
“In your field of vision is one out of every nine bird species on the
planet,” Silman told me. “Just in our plots alone, we have over a thousand
species of trees.”
Silman and I and several of Silman’s Peruvian graduate students had
just arrived on the mountaintop, having set out that morning from the
city of Cuzco. As the crow flies, the distance we’d traveled was only about
fifty miles, but the trip had taken us an entire day of driving along
serpentine dirt roads. The roads wound past villages made of mud brick
and fields perched at improbable angles and women in colorful skirts and
brown felt hats carrying babies in slings on their backs. At the largest of
the towns, we’d stopped to have lunch and purchase provisions for a
four-day hike. These included bread and cheese and a shopping bag’s