The Leaf Detective Flashcards
She admired their different shapes, colors, and textures.
How did they survive?
How long did they live?
Why did they die?
But looking at leaves from the ground gets a rainforest scientist only so far.
We had already been to the moon and back and nobody had been to the top of a tree.
It pained me if I was ever called upon in class.
Instead, she found comfort and friendship and quiet excitement in plants.
I was literally the only one in my town like myself.
One professor refused to let her in his class, because she was a woman.
Still she stuck like sap to her passion and followed it to graduate school and the tropical rainforests of Australia.
In the dark, damp forest the trees rose up to distant rustling, squawks and screeches, shadows in the treetops.
How could she get up there?
From a metal rod, she welded a slingshot.
Pull, aim, release, fire….
Upside down, right-side up.
The steamy forest painted her with a coat of sweat.
Swinging and twisting, she dangled like a worm on a hook.
I was frozen with fear.
What is the branch breaks?
Will my sewing hold up?
Will a bird peck through my rope?
At last, splashed with flowers and sunlight - the canopy!
Lizards lingered.
Sweat bees landed on her arm for a lick of salt.
And the jungle’s music danced all around her.
From then on, I never looked back…or down!
Large and small, shiny and prickly, tender and tough.
To scientists it was a new frontier - mysterious and unexplored.
They wanted to cut them all down.
You can’t do this, people said.
She climbed the red cedar, the Antarctic beech, the sassafras.
Plant chemicals can be used as medicines for humans.
We have learned how to use only a very small number of the world’s medicinal plants.
She monitored and traced them to find out how long they lived.
I found these times alone to be very strengthening as they encouraged me to develop confidence in myself.
Noises swarmed around her - munching…crunching…chewing…
To my amazements and delight…most herbivores fed at night.
Herbivores are animals that eat plant material.
She had to find a better way.
She brainstormed with other scientists.
What if I fly up in a balloon?
Or work from the edges of hillsides?
Or train a monkey?
They sketched the plan on a napkin.
Now she could research day and night, in good weather and stormy, alone and with others.
It had three suspension bridges and reached a height of one hundred and ten feet.
The heat drained her energy, and she drained her water bottles.
The climb seemed never ending.
Plants gave me a voice!
Now they could sell crops and plants instead of trees.
Now, first and foremost, I ask “How can we save it?” so that later I can return and ask “What and Why?”
It is shelter for animals and people, a recycler and provider of water, a creator of food and oxygen, an inventor of medicine, a soldier against climate change.
It is essential for life on earth.
If only I could have achieved as much as the tree!
I have whittled away at relatively small goals in comparison to the grander accomplishments of a tree.
