Day 1

Talk about a quick panic! Kathy and Mike L were designing their strategy and prepping materials for mapping when they realized they had nothing to take notes on. I don’t think Kate or anyone else had thought about that problem. Here Kathy and Mike L were about to set out to survey the area and they had to remember everything! We all brainstormed. How soon could the paper be ready? I started thinking about options. Some bark can be written on, as can some leaves. They all come from plants with lots of latex (milky, sticky sap). Most of the plants I’ve used in the past for sketching were from interior rainforest. As I scanned the beach, looking for other options, I remember that I’d read one time that the conquistadors had made playing cards by writing on the leaves of seagrape trees found on the beach. Kathy tried it. It’s a good thing we didn’t give up when it didn’t work immediately. When you first write on the leaves, you can barely see what you are doing. After a while, however, the writing turns bright white against a green leaf. Cool.

We started off the day well. I thought I felt great but by 10am we were all dragging. By 2pm we had to take a break. We just sat down for an hour and did nothing. It was as if the air carried a malaise bug. One of the directors went out and bought us cookies (biscuits), chips (crisps), and soda (fizzy drinks) to pep us up.

I like this challenge. It is much harder than it probably appears. So what’s the big deal about making paper, ink and a pen?

An ink pen, the dipping kind, is quite easy because seed pods of Acacia species have great points at their ends for nibs. No modification is needed. You have to dip them frequently but that’s okay.

Ink is a significant challenge because one has to find plants and/or other products that will produce a dark ink that will last - lots of fruits stain, but can you control the stain? We are choosing logwood as our "guaranteed to work" ink. When mixed with iron salts such as iron sulfate, which Mike B can make, logwood makes a great black dye for cloth. The color starts off as a dark maroon but changes to black as the ink oxidizes with the air. Logwood is not typically used for an ink. I don’t know why not but hopefully it will work well enough for us. I need to take off the outer bark and the wood down to the heartwood, which is a rich brownish-red color. I’ll chip the heartwood and boil it. The liquid is the dye to which we will add the iron sulfate.

We plan on adding a thickening agent, such as sticky cherry, so the ink does not smear all over the place. This should also keep it from flowing too quickly.

As for the paper, most today is made from soft wood pulp, like pines. Pines are not an option for us for several reasons:
1. there are no pine trees here
2. it would be too much labor to chip wood and then pound it into useable pulp.

So we have to find other plants that are strong, yet flexible and absorbant. The plant family, Malvaceae, which includes cotton and hibiscus, is often used to make paper. The leaves of these plants have appropriate fibers. Unfortunately, the mealy bug wiped out most Malvaceae plants on this island several years ago. So we have to use something else. All plants have fibers, so finding fiber itself is not hard. Finding the right kind of fiber is a different story.

Wood is made of fibers. These fibers in hardwood trees are often short and brittle, however. Imagine a bunch of teeny-weeny toothpicks piled up. This doesn’t make good paper. Paper needs relatively long fibers that are somewhat soft, so they spread out and overlap well. This makes thin, strong, flexible paper.

Plant leaves have fibers. Some, like agave leaves, have long, strong fibers. These are great for making rope, but they are too thick and hard for paper-making. They don’t form a smooth surface. Imagine piling little rope pieces up and trying to write on them.

So, what am I left with? I wandered around for a couple hours and found two potentials: a shrubby tree in the milkweed family (Asclepidaceae) and the towering kapok tree (Bombicaceae). Milkweed plants have a lot of sticky latex in them, but as I peeled off the bark, the fibers were soft and pliable. If Mike B can make me a good alkali solution, the milkweed plant might just work. It means a lot of banging to get the bark off, though.

I’m also going to collect the fruits of the kapok tree. Kapok trees are the stars of many children’s books about the rainforest. They are immense, emergent trees with huge branches and leaves that remind me of jaguar paw prints. I once saw a kapok tree that took 26 people holding hands to circle it.

The fruits of the kapok tree are big, blobby, and teardrop shaped. When they ripen, they split open and all this fuzzy fiber blows in the wind, with little round seeds attached. There is a huge kapok tree behind the lime factory. We had to watch out for cow dung as we got there. We filled my backpack several times as I was not sure how much stuff we would need in the end.

Kapok fiber was used in the US as mattress, pillow and life-preserver stuffing. The fibers are naturally waterproof and they float. This is good for a rainforest tree whose seeds and fluff may get blown into the river and travel before hitting dry land. This is not going to be good for me because the first thing I’ll have to do is to remove the natural waterproofing so the fibers can be broken down - softer and able to overlap to make nice, smooth paper. Then I’ll have to re-waterproof them somewhat so the paper does not act like a paper towel, spreading the ink everywhere.

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