Invasive Bouquet
Homage to the plants that ate Machu Picchu, and the ones that will eventually eat my house
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When Machu Picchu was “discovered” by Yale history professor Hiram Bingham in 1911, the massive 15th Century Inca structure had been completely consumed by the surrounding flora. It took decades to excavate the one-million-square-foot site, which includes 200 buildings, a series of farming terraces, and a grand temple, all constructed of massive interlocked granite stones, and nestled atop an 8000-foot-high mountain. Despite its size, elevation, and magnificence, this city in the sky was virtually unknown to the vast majority of early 20th century Peruvians, even those living within walking distance of it. How?
The jungle had eaten Machu Picchu, and eaten it fast. That’s how.
I trekked there with my brother in 2015. Surrounded by fellow tourists, we walked the whole thing in a constant state of awe, gulping the thin air. I’m still trying to wrap my head around so many aspects of Machu Picchu. Its temporary disappearance particularly fascinates me.
Perhaps because I live so close to Nature, I fixate on how expeditiously the greenery concealed Machu Picchu from the descendants of those who designed and built it. And because I’m a morbid, compulsive storyteller, I think: Could such a thing happen here? In Phoenicia, NY?
The whispering leaves and murmuring root systems of the Catskills respond: you better believe it.
On returning from Peru to my Catskills home in June of ‘15, I was changed. Not just due to Machu Picchu, but also because I’d experienced a profound connection to some ineffable force at 16,000 feet on the Vilcabamba Trail, some 50 miles or so from Machu Picchu, and considerably higher up. And no, hallucinogens were not involved. Just exhaustion, dehydration, an unquiet mind, and altitude sickness. It remains the closest I’ve ever felt to 1) death, and 2)“something bigger than me.” Something sentient. It emanated not from the sky, but from the soil.
For months, when trying to describe what happened, I would cry, tears ambushing me like a sneeze.
The scales had fallen from my eyes. Plants in my yard, surrounding trees, vines and shrubs, and thriving weeds looked, and felt, quite different. They still do.
Five years later, the revelatory, mini-apocalypse of Covid would ground me in my backyard, where I would finally learn the names and proclivities of the flora I’d been living amongst for almost twenty years. Lockdown would engender in my bones the certainty that, like their Andean kin, these plants could – and probably will – consume everything human-made around them at some point. Respect.
Will a future explorer like Hiram Bingham excavate from plant life and sediment our civilization of steel, wire, and plastic? I can imagine it. The good news and the bad news is I can imagine anything. What’s unclear in my reckoning is who, or what, that explorer would be.
Hiram Bingham (inspiration for Indiana Jones, btw) had heard rumors of “the lost Inca city” for years. He returned multiple times until he finally stumbled on Machu Picchu. He was actually inside it, being led by a Quechua boy through a tangle of vines, when he realized he was somewhere special. Even then, he possessed no concept of Machu Picchu’s grandeur. All would be revealed. (Well, not all.)
The Inca had built Machu Picchu around 1450, without the aid of the wheel. To this day, no one is certain how they did it, or what, exactly, this architectural marvel was. Palace? Fortress? Weekend estate of the king? Way station for aliens? All of the above? None? (Our Peruvian guide, Arturo, was partial to aliens. For real.) In any case, the Inca abandoned it a little over a century later, when the Conquistadors arrived. The inhabitants fled into the Andes, holding out in the mountains for decades before succumbing to imperialism.
Subsequently, as the foliage spread unchecked over the decades and centuries, no one intervened. Due to the Inca’s absence of writing – amazingly, all was oral tradition, memory, no alphabet, no numbers – and the Spaniards’ genocidal skill, combined with rapacious Nature, Machu Picchu faded from both sight and collective memory incredibly fast. The wickedly efficient Conquistadors had no chance to make note of it in their record books. Needless to say, no one had time to do any weeding.
Machu Picchu slipped into legend. Its story was passed orally around the fire, morphed and faded, secreted by the indigenous people. Had it really existed? That question would not be definitively answered until the insatiable curiosity of post-Industrial Revolution humankind, manifested in Hiram Bingham, unveiled physical proof.
But Machu Picchu, the surrounding terrain, and the entangled root systems below managed to keep a few secrets anyway.
3,800 miles and a few years away, when I gaze upon the rapidly expanding weeds at the edge of my driveway, I think about that Andean forest, now aggressively maintained. Like custodians of the Machu Picchu site, I repeatedly wield tools and cut back some very enthusiastic plants, lest they consume my home. Unlike those Machu Picchu employees, because of my grudging respect for the deep-rooted fortitude of these plants with whom I share space (steal space?), and because I have felt their sentience, I allow a patch of green adversaries to exist unmolested by me. While I cut and uproot and pile their fellows in piles to be burnt, I allow these neighbors to twine around themselves – invasives strangling (or hugging?) invasives.
I call this my Invasive Bouquet.
If I fled into the mountains like the Inca, and no one bothered to cut back the thicket of Oriental bittersweet, Japanese barberry, Japanese knotweed, et al, how long would it take these life forms – and others – to consume my four bedroom Victorian house to the point where you couldn’t see it from the street?
Combining what I’ve learned as both traveler, and Catskills resident watching humans wilt while greenery explodes towards the hazy sky, I’d wager twenty years.
You better believe it.
Hi Robert, a lovely piece that intersects all over the place. I have three intersects come to mind:
1) In 2016, we visited the UNESCO WOrld Heritage site of Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, the city of a former kingdom that was lost to the forests until the British dug them down to build tea plantations and found the lost city. It's an astonishing site, with doctor's offices and temples, and, supposedly, the resting place for the Buddha's tooth (now in Kandy). It was burned by invaders in the 13th Century and quickly grown over.
2) I am reading The Forest People by Colin Turnbull about the Pygmies he lived with, and how the non-Pygmy tribes that the Pygmies traded with (to keep it simple) lived on 'plantations' they cleared from the forest that required absolute constant work to prevent being immediately recovered by that forest.
3) And on my recent One Step Beyond podcast, talking to travel writer Shafik Meghji, he discusses "the unlikely tourist destination of Canvey Wick," on the Essex estuary coast in England, where. "Located just 30 miles east of London, an abandoned oil refinery on the edge of the Thames Estuary has become an unlikely wildlife haven." Which I think answers your question about what could happen if Phoenicia were abandoned as suddenly as Machu Picchu.
Cheers,
Tony