Canopy Crane

At dawn this morning I went up in the canopy crane. The air was loud with the calls of birds as I entered the forest but died down as the grey light of the new day started to filter through the leaves. The crane was in use as the science team were doing some pre-dawn leaf measurements. I caught glimpses of the crane arm passing silently over my head and  heard the occasional low voice. Then with a quiet clink the gondola landed and Nate and Adam disembarked clutching jiffy bags with leaves ready for processing in the lab.

It was time for me to go up. Andrew, the crane and tree specialist, put a harness on me clipped to the gondola so he wouldn’t lose his passenger to the forest floor. He also advised that any equipment or camera is also tied on. The gondola itself is a bit like a square metal balloon basket, with a roof and open above waist height on 4 sides.

Andrew has the controls in the gondola with him, so that he can talk with the scientists and take them to any tree they want. The crane is  47 meters high with an arm radius of 55 meters,covering a hectare of forest  .  It is the largest , and oldest canopy crane in the Southern hemisphere. It can access all the trees within the circle, each one identified by species and having a unique number, so you can match its top with its trunk from the ground. 
With a sigh the gondola rose and we ascended up between the dark trunks and then past gloomy swags of indistinct hanging vines and smothering branches and at last rose above the canopy, just as the sun flushed pink at the edge of the Coral Sea on the Eastern horizon.

Everything was transformed in that moment. Mount Sorrow, looming above us, was changed from a grey and featureless mass to a gigantic wall of green dashed with cream Silky Oak blossom and Silver Palm, like a great waterfall, that rioting down from far above, is caught midway outside of time.

Yet at second glance, it was not like a waterfall, nor comparable with anything else on earth. The perspective of a forest visited from above for the first time was so different that it was like entering a world made new, visiting a landscape so intricate it was not imaginable beforehand.  The canopy was at once the crowns of many individual trees, each taking on a height, form and area of its own and also a single entity of green undulation bound together by the shawls of vines, climbers, and rattans.  At one instant the gondola was floating over the hilltop of a forest giant, then following down a trough passing innumerable galleries to a lower level, within touching distance of a wall of green leaves on both sides. The forest floor, glimpsed only occasionally as a dark and shadowy chasm seemed quite remote and of no importance compared with the vitality of this green sunlit complex world; who would have thought that there could be such infinite variation of leaf shape, texture and pattern and that the sum of these myriad green parts could be so much larger?

Even as I took photographs I knew that they would only be a dead copy of the reality of the place. There were so many life processes going on simultaneously on so many levels it was overwhelming. Following internal cycles matched with the seasons, flowering, fruiting, constant leaf death, constant shoot renewal in the striving for light. The whole forest pulling nutrients and water up innumerable trunks and tendrils in a huge hydraulic pump to leaves creating their own climate transpiring under tropical sun. Constant competing tree against tree, each with its clambering shawl of hangers-on and epiphytes.  And the greenness! All that energy being created from sunlight and chlorophyll. And the scent of growth, and the water filled Pacific wind rising, turning the Palm fronds silver and topping the Mountain white with cloud. All this without touching upon the myriad creatures living there. Football sized nests of green ants, flashing azure winged butterflies, the deep transcendental ‘oomm’ of the wompoo pigeons.

 A 1000 years would be too short a time to comprehend it. I wanted to stay up there forever – but coming down again was a relief in a way.  Its spirit was too rich to take in for long before the barriers that shield us from the searing touch of the otherness of our world come into play and the moment is lost. Hopefully, C S Lewis is right, and death is the necessary factor through which we will be able to move ‘farther in and farther up’ interface with the universe through being as well as thinking and doing. That’s something to look forward to I think.