the mangroves

The Mangroves

Palmar has the only mangrove in the province of Santa Elena and one of the few left in Ecuador. Until I came to this small seaside village I had never set foot in a mangrove or thought much about them and even now I am only just beginning to learn. I may not understand everything about this fragile eco-system but I know that each time I enter it’s muddy heart I am transformed.

I’ve always loved stories of children entering strange lands through magical books or wardrobes and the mangrove is just that for me: a strange and magical land.
To enter on foot you must trudge through narrow paths of deep mud that can reach as high as your waist and climb through a maze of twisted roots ( the mangroves are the only species of trees with roots that grow above ground). It is not easy. It’s beautiful.
Mangroves are incredibly biologically diverse: there are hundreds of species of fish, crabs, snails, birds and insects that live within it’s boarders. In recent years shocking numbers of mangrove forests have been destroyed in order to make room for shrimp farms and the eco-system is in serious danger- especially here in Palmar.

The story of the destruction of the mangroves is a very important one- but I am not writing about that today. I am writing about the cool of the black mud on my skin and the way tiny violin crabs feel as they crawl across my toes. I am writing about the strange growls of birds that loom below the deep shadows of green leaves and the damp, bitter smell of decomposition.
I am writing about Sunday morning on my knees, digging into the muddy earth to plant more trees so a new forest can rise.

Yesterday I hiked into the mangroves at low tide with Miguel, Marcelo, Salo, Juan, Milton and Luigi. We gathered about 100 seeds to plant inside the forest. There are four species of mangrove trees in our small sector and there are different seeds in accordance to the different trees. The majority of the seeds that we collected were for the red mangrove: the seed is roughly seven inches long and the shape of a thin carrot, the bottom is a reddish brownish that turns to a deep green at the tip. We carried the seeds through the forest to a strange vacant plot of land where years ago all the trees had been cut down for a shrimp farm that no longer is in business. Our goal is to reforest that entire plot of land.
It’s important to understand that planting requires a fair amount of effort: one must dig a hole about seven inches wide and 10 inches deep and that the top layer of earth is hard and dry while the mud below is thick and heavy clay and in that one hole, only two seeds may be planted. After the seeds are all planted the hole needs to be partially filled with water so that the seeds don’t dry out right away in the heat and die. The entire process took us about four hours and we re-planted less than 1/4 of the space. But we will be back.

After working, we all went for a swim to clean off the layers of mud in the tide pool that becomes a small lake as the tide fills in. It felt so wonderful to just let the water make us all clean again and I imagined the seeds taking root in the quiet dark mud and how years from now I will be gone but the trees will grow and become homes for all kinds of creatures and redeem the destruction and mistakes of the past. As we left the fisherman were just arriving in their wooden boats named after saints and women, filled with red plastic buckets of fish followed by streams of gulls and pelicans.

Walking the beach back home, salt on my skin and mud in my hair I felt content and alive. This is the life I choose.