Entry # 4: Living Fossil

Wednesday, February 23, 2017
Carolina Beach, NC

It is twilight, the time of "twin-lights," when the essences of day and night blend into a silver sheen. The magnolia's trunk stands in shadow, wearing a cloak of dark green. I look up through the canopy, to the brighter sky holding the sun's last rays. During twilight, one senses the fusion of diurnal and nocturnal elements. A mockingbird sings his repertoire of spring melodies while crickets and other insects begin a long night of fiddling. This dim hour between light and dark encourages journeys of the imagination. The door of day slowly closes as the door of night creaks open, allowing a moment of time travel. As I stand beside the grand magnolia between these doors of twilight, I am thinking about the passage of time. I wrap my arms around the trunk as we hurtle back to the Cretaceous Period during the evolution of magnolias when flowering plants first appeared on earth.

Magnolias and their relatives have lived on our planet for more than 100 million years. The order Magnoliales includes an ancient race of flowering trees. At the time of their evolution in the middle of the Cretaceous Period (144-65 mya), the continental masses were closer together than their current positions. India had already broken off from Antarctica and was slowly cruising towards it collision with what is now Asia. Water inundated the land masses creating inland seas. Iguanodons, Ankylosaurs, Tyrannosaurs and Ceratopsians stomped around in the warmer climate. My front yard, where the grand magnolia grows, was buried underwater in an ocean that reached more than 100 miles inland from its present shoreline.

About 66 million years ago, magnolias witnessed the catastrophic impact of the six-mile wide asteroid that struck an area near the Yucatan peninsula, unleashing a global storm of earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis. In the aftermath, a rain of fireballs likely sizzled some dinosaurs in their tracks. Scientists speculate the resulting explosion created a tremendous cloud of sulfur-rich dust and vapor that blocked the sun, causing an "impact winter." The amount of sunlight striking the earth may have been reduced to 20% for several decades. Dinosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, large numbers of bird species, four-fifths of all snake and lizard species, two-thirds of mammal species, and a significant percentage of bivalves became extinct. In her book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us that "forests were decimated...diverse plant communities were replaced entirely by rapidly dispersing ferns." In spite of the dust, heat, and low levels of sunlight, the magnolia family survived.

Although we southerners like to think of magnolias as rightfully ours, fossil evidence suggests the birthplace of the magnolia lineage occurred in what is now southeast Asia. Over millions of years, while the continents were still relatively close together, magnolia species colonized North and Central America. Continental drift eventually created what taxonomists call a disjunct distribution of wild magnolias. The fossil record reveals that magnolias have thrived in widespread tropical and subtropical environments, retaining their primeval features. Writing in his book, The Natural Gardens of North Carolina (1932), B.W. Wells calls the magnolia a "'living fossil,' for it has come down little changed from the original type." Today more than 200 species in the genus Magnolia occur in the Old and New World.

It is nearly dark beneath the grand magnolia. I am safely back in the Anthropocene Epoch. Standing in the quiet of a warm night, I imagine the grand magnolia will soon respond to the changing season, replacing the old winter leaves with bright new growth. Just as magnolias have been doing for millions of years.

Entry #3: Sixty Feet Above Sea Level

Carolina Beach, NC
6:46 AM, Fifty-two degrees, F.

The "Snow Moon" sets at dawn.

Early Saturday morning and I'm standing in the crown of the grand magnolia. I have climbed to see the sunrise-- and also the moonset. I turn to view the full moon of February, the "Snow Moon," sinking into pink clouds along the western horizon. Now I look back to the east where a brightening smear of tangerine light spreads across the lower sky. From my treetop perch I have a 360 degree view of my neighborhood gradually coming into focus in the gray light of dawn.

My feet balance on the last sturdy branch before the pliable twigs take up the sky. Any higher and I won't have a reliable handhold. As it is, my position could be considered precarious. But I don't mind. The view is worth it. At about sixty feet above sea level, I have enough vertical height to glimpse the blue ribbon of ocean out of which the sun will slide. Ten minutes to go. A bossy breeze rattles the thick leaves, causing the tiptop to sway. I wrap one arm around the thinning trunk to secure my position, leaving one hand free to take pictures. I am waiting.

Now the crows begin to caw. Get up and get moving, they seem to say. Their raucous shouts identify them as American crows unlike the nasally-voiced fish crows that frequent the ocean shore. The crows fly around my tree; their black bodies flicker past the small windows of light between the leaves. I don't think they see me hiding behind this veil of green. In the distance I hear the softer song of a Carolina chickadee. Sweet-sweet, he sings like a creaking seesaw. From across the southeastern corner of my yard, an Eastern bluebird warbles chu-wee. The first singers of the morning. Soon other birds will add their voices to the growing chorus as males establish territories for spring breeding. Above my head I watch a lacewing, an insect with intricately netted wings, flutter and land on a leaf before flying away. The insects, too, are stirring.

Since childhood I have been a tree-explorer, an arbornaut, a seeker of high secret places. When I was younger, I could wrap my arms and legs around a limbless trunk, and shinny on up to the top. As anyone knows who has ever climbed a magnolia, they are one of the easier trees to ascend due to the close spacing of their radiating branches. As a child I climbed my family's front yard magnolia and many others in our neighborhood. Now in my mid-fifties I climb the grand magnolia with care, thinking about the placement of each hand and foot, showing kindness to each branch. It's a form of meditation. Breathing in, reaching up for a branch, breathing out, resting. Up and up and up as high as I can safely travel.

The canopy of a tree is another world. We know this from research conducted in the great forests of the world. Whole hosts of organisms live out their entire lives without ever touching the ground. I am an earth-bound visitor, a Jill-in-the-Beanstalk ascending towards the sky. Unlike Jack's adventures in the clouds, I am not trespassing in a giant's castle. But if I visit here long often enough, I'm sure to discover arboreal delights as valuable as the gold coins Jack stole from the giant.

A view of the sunrise from the crown.

The moon is setting, as the sun begins to rise. While watching these apparent movements, I remember that I am actually spinning away from the moon and towards the sun. I am perched in a tree anchored at latitude 34 North on an oblate spheroid that is rotating eastward at more than 800 miles per hour. Like riding a merry-go-round where planets and moons and stars and comets are spinning past my field of view. I squint through the leaves to catch the yellow rays as they splinter around a line of stratus clouds. A burning ball of light sits on top of the ocean like a giant egg yolk. Then the sun frees itself from the grasp of the sea and glides up the sky.

Before climbing all the way down, I stop to wedge my body between two angled branches. My right foot braces against a lower branch as my left knee hunches up to serve as a make-shift desk for my journal. As my pencil moves across the page, I hear more birds begin to sing: cardinals, Carolina wrens, house finches, robins. A red-bellied woodpecker trills from a dead tree in my neighbor's yard across the street. Over my head, the broad wings of a turkey vulture swoop past with a rustling sound. For a few more minutes, I am safe in the branches of the grand magnolia as the world awakens around me.