Oro Verde
A year ago, when I began to use my computer to work and not to write essays, I left some ideas unwritten. My notes show that I still had ideas about wild fruit, the names from another era of how the land was used:
Write about rambutans and maman chinos and guavas
Write about bananas and Chiquita
Isla Colon, Isla Bastimentos and Bocas, pirates, and Oro Verde
These legacy ideas from the trip to Panama still linger.
The large odd abundant fruit of Costa Rica with the age of Great Mammals long gone, creating a great eureka from Dan Janzen, one of the seminal ecologists alive today and working from Costa Rica. His idea: the evolutionary or “ecological anachronisms.” This idea is unmistakable in the urban North American decidious forest where I live. It is hard to ignore the honeylocust’s red giant thorns right at eye level, or the volumes of large electric-yellow inedible fruits called hedge apples that litter the ground around Osage Orange fenceline trees.
walkabout, October 2024
Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, February 2024
I also wanted to write about the fruit imported, grown in monoculture, starving the soil, neighbors to the natural, flavorful and local but smaller and poorly suited to travel in container ships. At a Nordic bakery near my home, I learned that banana flavors are a relatively recent arrival to Scandinavian culinary culture, and so banana is still experimentally shoved into foods (and teas!).
The way places are named. Bocas del Toro with its Isla Bastimentos, the island of supplies, from when Columbus resupplied his ships with timber. As though the archipelago is nature’s 16th century shopping mall.
The way place names are erased in homage to unimportant patrons, leveled from the local and contextual meaning into a name owned by many, easy to forget.
Here, it is Beargrass. Beargrass is the original name of a community at the mouth of a creek at the Ohio River, located just upstream from the Falls of the Ohio, the only impediment to boats traveling downstream. The community supported travelers requiring portage across the sandbars and perhaps an overnight restock. As is common of that era, it became a fort, the community “founder” a military leader. Before the fort and community, it was one of the few places to ford the river for buffaloes and even earlier, migrating mammoths and other Great Mammals (there they are again). The creatures who are big enough to move across the water.
The newly reopened Interpretive Center for the Falls of the Ohio
Then the community grows, the fort becomes a town named after a French king. In the 1820s, a lock and canal system is first built, improved into today’s navigation infrastructure for boats to pass through unimpeded. Electric power is created at the dam, the falls now dry enough to expose fossil beds for schoolchildren.
Conch corals at the Falls, February 2024
Mammoth skeleton at the Interpretive Center
At the mouth Beargrass Creek was for decades neighbors to a highway and an enormous trash heap, used to channel surface wastewater into the river. Today, efforts are made to give the creek a way to breathe, green space on its banks, a trail, a marker on the bridge. It still greets the Ohio.
Oro Verde, the green gold.
Beargrass.
Cycles of thinking.
