The "Beware The Mystical Silk Cotton Tree!" Story

The Silk Cotton or Ceiba tree.

It was an ordinary day.  Looking at a photograph of the Silk Cotton or Ceiba Tree.  The tree is a rapidly growing deciduous tree that can reach heights of 80 feet or more with a diameter of five to eight feet above its buttresses.  The buttresses themselves can be up to ten feet from the main trunk.  The tree has a broad, flat crown of horizontal branches.  The compound leaves have five to eight lance-shaped leaflets that are three to eight inches long.  

The bloom of the Silk Cotton tree.

The tree blooms from December to February with five-part whitish to pink flowers which occur in dense clusters and bloom before the leaves appear.  Now that, my friends, is a BIG tree.  The fruit it produces is about three to six inches long with an elliptical shape to them.  The fruit contain many seeds surrounded by a dense mat of cottony fibers.  The tree gets its name from the fibers which rain from the tree when the fruits ripen.  The tree fibers do not lend themselves to spinning, but can be used for insulation, padding in sleeping bags and life preservers and for stuffing mattresses and pillows.  

This tree has grown over top of a building.

It's a great shade tree.  But, its also considered by some to be the most feared and notorious symbols of the spirit world in the West Indies.  You are warned to avoid the tree if you happen to be in the vicinity of it during Halloween.  Tales of people refusing to cut down the silk cotton trees for fear of releasing the spirits inside are not uncommon across the Caribbean.  A few years ago the Guyana East Coast Highway was scheduled to run right through where a rather large silk cotton tree was located.  The highway planners needed it to be cut down.  

The tree dwarfs this young man.

It is said that the engineers who dared to try remove it were struck dead!  The highway was completed, but it ran around both sides of the tree.  The other name for the tree, the "Ceiba tree", is a Taino or Arawak tribe word.  It is said that Christopher Columbus and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo were both impressed by the size of the the canoes that the Indians in the West Indies and coastal Central and South America made from the Ceiba tree.  The canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks all in one piece.  Some were eight to nine feet wide and could carry more than 100 men.  They are still used today to make dugout canoes.  That's provided you have the nerve to cut one of them down.  Many of these beliefs about supernatural spirits of the silk cotton tree came to the West Indies from African enslaved peoples in the 16th century.  And, I'm sure many still believe in the spirits that surround the Silk Cotton Tree.  And, who's going to challenge a gigantic tree?  Not most people!  Certainly not me!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.  

The "The President Is Almost Older Than Dirt" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading the free publication "The Fishwrapper" which is published every couple of weeks and found in restaurants and local supermarkets in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  It is published by Little Mountain Printing and features a few true stories as well as a few fiction, some with a religious tilt to them.  It usually is about 20 pages with a few advertisements in both color and black and white, but most of the rest of the publication is black and white.  I love to pick up a copy every other week when we shop at a local supermarket and check out the variety of stories.  

"The President"

One that caught my eye in the December 10 edition was titled "3200 Years In One Photograph."  Story about a giant sequoia tree that is growing in Nevada's Sequoia National Park that is called "The President."  The tree is allegedly 3,200 years old, has 2 billion leaves and stands 247 feet tall.  Now, that folks is a big tree!  You would have to get pretty far away from it and use a wide angle camera lens, holding it vertically to take the photograph of the tree.  But, the photograph in The Fishwrapper was created by "National Geographic" photographers taking 126 photographs at different levels of the tree and morphing them together into one great photograph.  The photographers had to climb the tree with pulleys and levers to take thousands of photographs.  When you look at the black and white photo in he publication, you will notice a large black dot in the foreground that happens to be an image of a man.  Tough to image just how large this beautiful tree might be.  

The red dot in the first photograph is actually this man
seen here next to the trunk of the tree.

But, it is only the second tallest giant sequoia tree in the world as measur- ed by the volume of its trunk and third largest in trunk circum- ference.  "The President" contains about 54,000 cubic feet of wood and bark.  It is considered a snow tree, since it has adapted for long winters in the Sierra Nevada.  But, it's also a fire tree with thick bark that protects it from burning in lightning-caused fires.  Tough to believe that this tree was growing in the Sequoia National Park during the height of ancient Greece's civilization and 1200 years old when Jesus lived while Rome was well into its rule of most of the western world and points beyond.  Now, that's unbelievable!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.