The Lost City of the Monkey God

Okay, I know I just did a book review, but Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story was so good I can't help pushing it. It's Indiana Jones in the real world.

Preston is a writer and journalist (the two are not necessarily synonymous) whose work includes both nonfiction and fiction. He's had a lot of nonfiction published in National Geographic, New Yorker, and other major magazines, and he's written or co-authored quite a few books. His fiction falls into the techno-thriller or horror categories. The latter tend to have an anthropological or archeological connection: an expedition to explore a mysterious region of Amazonia meets with misfortune, people die mysteriously, crates get shoved into storage and are forgotten for decades, and then weirdness emerges. You know, the usual improbabilities that always result in lots of gore and general creepiness. Fun to read but not exactly Great Literature.

I had read several books Preston co-authored with Lincoln Child that definitely fall into the horror category. They were entertaining, but they had the effect of making me a bit skeptical about The Lost City of the Monkey God. One of my favorite authors, John Sandford, recommended it in a Facebook post a couple months ago, but I had a hard time believing it was actually nonfiction. Let's face it: The Lost City of the Monkey God is a cheesy title. It sounds like something you'd see on the cover of cheap pulp fiction back in the 1930s displayed on a rack next to some Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels. Tacking "A True Story" on to the title doesn't help much.

Then on a recent trip to the local public library there it was sitting on the New Books shelf. I couldn't resist. After all, Sandford had recommended it. Back before Sandford became a best-selling novelist, he was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist. He should know what good nonfiction looks like.

Photo from The Lost City of the Monkey God

As it turned out, good is an understatement. The Lost City of the Monkey God was fascinating. It has it all: a multi-year search to find a "lost city" that's been featured in local folklore and legends for several centuries, a remote tropical rainforest location that's considered so isolated and dangerous that it is one of the few totally uninhabited regions in Central America, horrendous working conditions (seas of mud, humongous poisonous snakes everywhere, clouds of sand flies and hordes of chiggers devouring expedition members in their sleep), a government in turmoil, mysterious diseases striking expedition members months after their return to civilization. It does read like the plot line for The Lost World or an Indiana Jones movie. Except it's all true.

The lost city in the title was supposedly located in the La Mosquitia region of Honduras. It's a mountainous, treacherous region that is so isolated and inhospitable (snakes, chiggers, heavy rains, thick vegetation, you name it) that humans simply do not live there. There are indigenous groups living on the fringes -- the Miskito, Pech, and several other native peoples have villages and farms on the edges of La Mosquitia but the interior is basically devoid of humans. Logging and cattle ranching are nibbling at the edges and drug smugglers have carved out a few landing strips, but there are no land routes into the interior. Anyone going into La Mosquitia does it either by air or by boat. Vegetation is reportedly so thick and the threat of snakes (primarily fer de lance, a species known for its nasty attitude and aggressive behavior) so bad that it can easily take a full day to travel less than a mile over land.

Photo from The Lost City of the Monkey God

The region had been the subject of speculation since the time of the Spanish conquest. When Spaniards entered what is now Honduras, they heard stories of cities back in the mountains that had fabulous riches. Depending on who was telling the story, it was either referred to as La Cuidad Blanca (the White City) or the City of the Monkey God, reportedly because there were numerous statues (idols) of a monkey-faced god. The Spanish conquistadors never got around to looking for the White City, and if it existed its location got lost in time.

Stories about the White City surfaced again in the 19th and early 20th century. Discovery of Mayan ruins loaded with artifacts fired up treasure hunting impulses. Several would-be looters claimed to have found the Lost City of the Monkey God, but serious archeologists who tried to follow the clues the looters left never found anything that qualified as a "city." Most never made it very far into La Mosquitia -- conditions were simply too rough.

Then filmmaker Steve Elkins became intrigued by the legends. Elkins produces documentary films, and has been quite successful. In the mid-1990s he thought the White City would be a good subject and mounted an expedition to find it. His approach at the time was to try going up a river, which was how most previous expeditions had tried to get into the interior. He didn't find any trace of something that could be called a city, but he did experience an epiphany: seeing a petroglyph depicting what appeared to be a farmer made him realize that what is impenetrable rain forest today might not have been dense rain forest a thousand years ago.

It strikes me as being one of those "no shit, Sherlock" moments. Anyone who knows even a smidgeon of history is aware that when the first Europeans arrived in the Americas there were a lot more people around before those Europeans introduced smallpox, measles, influenza, and a host of other diseases to the Native Americans. The pathogens spread faster than the Europeans could explore; the English, French, and Spanish all documented finding villages and towns completely deserted, empty except for corpses of the victims of disease. Even in temperate climates it doesn't take long for vegetation to rewild farm fields. In the tropics even a large city could go from obvious to totally covered with vines and trees in less than a decade.

Still, even though Elkins realized that the stories about the lost city were probably based on fact, he walked away from the search in the 1990s. He worked on other projects for a decade, and then he learned that the LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system that had been used to find the lost city of Ubar on the Arabian Peninsula had progressed from being satellite-based to being used in aircraft for mapping and exploration.

You know where this is going. Elkins managed to arrange for a LIDAR survey of four sites in La Mosquitia that had a strong probability of being the location of a lost city. Skeptics said that LIDAR won't work, the rain forest canopy was too thick. LIDAR uses lasers so anything that can block light is going to reduce its efficacy. The skeptics were wrong. Results from the LIDAR scans clearly showed an extensive complex of man-made structures. Elkins then spent a couple years putting together a team and getting the various permits required by the Honduran government. The government proved to be extremely cooperative. Not only did it issue the required permits, the government arranged for members of the military to accompany the expedition to help with logistical issues (setting up a base camp, for example, and bringing in supplies) and provide security against drug cartels and wildlife. The site selected for an on-the-ground survey turns out to be so untouched that animals, including jaguars, have no fear of humans.

Preston documents it all, from Elkins's initial interest to the aftermath of the expedition. He untangles the documented history of past search, finding both serious scholars and con men in the mix, and provides a context for the turbulent Honduran political climate. Rather than giving in to the temptation to wrap the book up triumphantly when Elkins successfully ground truths the LIDAR scans, Preston details the aftermath: health problems expedition members experience, the strange backbiting highly politicized world of Mesoamerican archeology, and what the Honduran government was doing to try to protect the site.

When National Geographic published a short piece describing the discovery of the lost city, for example, several prominent archeologists who specialized in Mesoamerican cultures basically flipped out, denounced the so-called find as a fraud, ranted about the terminology used, and claimed that the expedition was an illegal treasure-hunting scheme bent on looting. The phrase "lost city" came in for a lot of carping, although as Preston notes how else would you describe a place that for almost 400 years existed primarily in rumors? No one knew where it was, so was it really a misnomer to call finding it a "discovery"? And was it really being sensationalist to call it "the lost city of the monkey god" when that's how it had been described for decades? From the perspective of this reader, the complaints of the archeologists seemed to fall pretty squarely into the "I'm really pissed you guys didn't ask me to be part of this" category, i.e., major professional jealousy.and a bad case of annoyance that a non-archeologist (Elkins) was the person who put the pieces together.

In any case. the book is well worth reading, but if you don't think you'll ever bother looking for it, National Geographic Explorer did the Readers' Digest Condensed version last fall. If for some reason the video doesn't want to play, a quick search on YouTube will find it for you.: 

Coldest morning so far this year

Got up this morning and noticed it's 24 below zero outside. I think that's the coldest temperature we've seen so far this winter. It's not bad, especially when I'm observing it from the comfort of a warm living room with a hot cup of coffee in my hand. I have written before about the joys of living up here on the tundra, reminisced about residing in the Shoebox (aka a 12 x 60 mobile home) while relying on a homemade woodburning box stove. That's the stove that currently heats the Woman Cave when I decide to do some sewing. It does a pretty decent job of keeping the Cave warm, but back when the Cave was the back porch to that mobile home? Not so much.

In any case, if this is the coldest it gets this winter, things have been pretty mild. The week the Younger Daughter was born we were in a cold snap that had featured subzero temperatures for weeks on end. I think it was 30 below in the middle of the day when she finally decided to emerge. I went a full three weeks past my original due date. We started joking that the kid had heard the weather forecasts and decided to wait for Spring. The doctor ordered x-rays (this was back in the days before routine sonograms) and decided he'd guessed wrong on the projected arrival. When the kid emerged, however, she was 21 inches long, weighed almost 9 pounds, had a full head of hair and some really long talons fingernails, which were all pretty clear signs that, yeah, she'd spent more than the usual amount of time in the womb. The upper end of the "average" range for length of newborns in developed nations is 20 inches.

I'm not sure just how long that particular cold snap lasted, but I do recall going through amazing amounts of propane. We hadn't been able to get a bulk tank (neither dealer had one available when we set up the Shoebox that fall) and it seemed like the delivery guy was there every other day with a fresh 100-lb cylinder. It was before we built the back porch so the gas furnace was our only heat source. After we disassembled the Shoebox in 2006, it became clear why it was impossible to heat: the insulation in the walls was barely an inch thick and was not stapled in place. It was just loose batts with no backing paper stuffed between the studs. With nothing to hold it up, it probably started settling as soon as the aluminum siding went up over it at the factory in Indiana. There were gaps several feet high at the top of the walls when we pulled the paneling off. I guess the most amazing thing is that we managed to keep the interior as warm as we did back in the '70s.

The S.O. was reminiscing about the Shoebox the other day. He remembered that the first year we were in it. It got delivered and set up late enough in the fall that he didn't have time to get skirting on it. Instead, we bought a bunch of straw bales and stacked them around the exterior, Looking back and remembering what other winters were like, that may have been the warmest winter we ever spent in the trailer, probably because we didn't lose much heat through the floor.

And then, of course, there was the winter of 1993-94. I was working at Michigan Tech. We had day after day of subzero weather. We had a block heater for the car, not that it helped the battery at all. There was many a morning when I'd have to start the car (a '73 Scamp) using a battery charger. I'd be scraping frost off the inside of the windshield most of the 40+ miles to campus. The car had a decent heater, but when it's 40 below it takes awhile to get things warm. At noon, the parking lot would be full of people going out on their lunch breaks to start their cars to run them for awhile in the hopes the car would start again at quitting time. It was an adventure. In retrospect, I was insane.

So why am I reminiscing about cold, cold winters this morning? I don't know. After all, this is pretty typical February weather. It's often the month when we get the coldest temperatures, just like March is the month for really heavy snows. Maybe I've seen one too many climate change denial posts -- "the planet can't be getting warmer; we still have winter!" -- or maybe I'm just feeling relieved I don't have to go out into that frigid air if I don't want to.

Groundhog day

Politics

The election draws closer, Hurricane Sandy is all over the news, and I'm wondering just how long it will take for the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists to decide that President Obama and NOAA deliberately caused the Frankenstorm just to make the President look good right before the election. It would be totally in character for the wingnuts; they alternate between asserting that President Obama is an incompetent loser who hasn't achieved a single thing during his time in office and ascribing almost superhuman powers to him. I've always wondered how people can manage to function without their heads exploding when they spout two completely contradictory ideas simultaneously, but they do it. It's also pretty much guaranteed the same Tea Party fanatics who were working themselves into a frenzy over Obamacare and too much big government will be first in line looking for government help when the storm blows itself out.

On the local level, as the election approaches we're being buried under an avalanche of paper advertising. At least two print shops are doing very, very well this year. The Republicans are determined to convince us to vote for three specific candidates for the Michigan Supreme Court, and the Democrats are determined to convince us that Matt Huuki (our current state representative) is more interested in raping the environment and lining his own pockets than he is in the legitimate concerns of his constituents. I keep expecting the next flyer to denounce Matt as the Anti-Christ -- the graphics and text are growing more dramatic with each mailing. He does seem to be much too cozy with Rio Tinto for my taste, though, and was one of the legislators who basically handed the Upper Peninsula to the mining companies and said, in essence, "Rape away and don't worry about cleaning up the toxic mess you leave." He may not be the Anti-Christ, but he's definitely a corporate tool. He does a lot of cheerleading for mining interests, but doesn't seem to get it that extractive industries are never the route to long-term economic stability. It doesn't matter what the mineral is; there's going to be a finite amount of it. Sooner or later, every mine closes, the mining company moves out, and the local people are left with the sediment ponds, tailings dumps, and beaches black with stamp sand.

In any case, I really wish Michigan allowed early voting. I know there's going to be a line at the polls next week; I am looking back nostalgically at Georgia. There were lines there, too, even with early voting, but it definitely eliminated some of the congestion on election day itself. I know some politicians dislike the idea of early voting (it eliminates the effectiveness of last minute electioneering), but it's a boon to the voters.

Distractions

I've been neglecting this blog lately. Too many distractions at this time of year and I'm not talking about politics. Our garden's done reasonably well so I've been kept busy canning and freezing produce and trying out new pickle, relish, and jam recipes. It's been an unusual Fall (which matches the unusual Spring, I guess) in that it's staying warm later than usual. No frost yet, and in past years we could count on a hard frost right around Labor Day. The good news aspect of that is it means we've actually been able to enjoy a few vine-ripened tomatoes this year -- usually we end up picking them all green and letting them ripen in the house. The bad news perspective is that I'm starting to get really nervous. We're being lulled into a false sense that summer's going to last forever, and then winter is going to arrive with not much autumn weather in between. The potted plant on the front porch should not still be lush and green -- it's a potato plant. It's September. It's supposed to know it's time to wither and die. (That plant is the answer to the question "What do you do when you're planting the garden, get to the end of the last row of potatoes, and have one seed potato left over?") One of these days we'll go to bed thinking it's still summer and wake up to six inches of snow on the ground.

Maybe the Mayans were right

I saw a woman in L'Anse yesterday wearing flip flops. It's March. This is the U.P., the place the S.O. refers to as UP on the Tundra. No one should be able to wear flip flops in March around here. We're supposed to still be in our Sorels and worrying about shoveling snow, not rummaging in the closet for the high water pants and sandals. Granted, it was only in the 60s, but that's like summer weather for Yoopers. According to the Weather Underground, the projected high for today is 81. Up here we consider it an unusually warm summer if it hits the 80s in July!

It's been an unusually mild Winter in general. Ice never did form on Keweenaw Bay to the point where anyone was able to get out there ice fishing, and I noticed the last time we went to town that some guys already have their boats in the water. I also spotted a white pelican at the head of the bay. White pelicans do not winter this far north, so I guess that's another sign the usual weather patterns are truly out of whack this year.

We are so screwed

I probably shouldn't have brought Bill McKibben's Eaarth:Making a Life on a Tough New Planet with me on vacation because it's not exactly beach reading. McKibben points out quite cogently that we've already passed the tipping point, climate change isn't something that future generations will have to figure out how to prevent -- it's already happening, and what we need to be doing now is figuring out how to live with the consequences and maybe, if we're incredibly smart and lucky, managing to reverse some of the damage.

Personally, and I hate to be such a pessimist, I'm thinking more and more that the only thing that could cause a significant reversal would be a major plague. The biggest problem for the planet and the other lifeforms we share it with is too many people and not enough resources to go around: not enough food, not enough water, not enough "green" energy. I was watching the news the other day, and Al Jazeera had an interesting report on the food crisis in Mexico:  prices are climbing, and it's putting a real squeeze on the populace. Mexico's economy isn't exactly booming -- if it was, we wouldn't have undocumented Mexican immigrants picking onions in Georgia or hanging drywall in Omaha -- so people have become economic refugees. Now multiply Mexico's problem by multiple countries: for example, what got the Egyptians so fired up about getting rid of Mubarek? Rising food prices. The news media made a big deal about huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but the on-the-ground reality was a crap economy and the high price of bread. Desperate hungry people do desperate things.

And why are food prices rising? Climate change. Droughts, floods, and other weirdness. Wheat crops get wiped out in Australia, prices on the global market climb, and people go hungry in countries half a planet away and riot in Cairo.

I've never understood the people who want to argue climate change. What is the downside of behaving as though all those scientists who say it's happening are right?  We're stuck with a cleaner, more livable world? We end up with cities that make sense and have decent public transit? We become less dependent on foreign oil?

Good news

The tease actually refers to birds, of course, but what a great line.

This little gem is up on several sites this morning, but H/T to Kate Harding because that's the first place I spotted it.