Greece – Evil Vegetation, aka Maquis (The phrygana was actually quite nice)
May 11th 2006 07:42 am
As requested (Hi Sach!), I have some final stories from Antikythera 2005 to wrap up, as I am going back there this summer (I hope the permit goes through!) and it’s a good idea always to wrap up loose ends before beginning a new tale. — Kate
When first hearing the term maquis, I immediately thought of the French resistance movement from WW2. Apparently, they did derive their name from the word maquis, in this case the original Italian ‘macchia’, meaning thicket. Macchia refers to the dense shrubland found in the Mediterranean, mostly arid rocky areas where only drought resistant tough plants can prosper.
On an island where goats have been king for a long time, smart vegetation knows that it must evolve or end up in a 4-chambered stomach. As a result, most of the flora on the island can be described, as, well…thorny.
We encountered lots of different plants that make up maquis during fieldwalking, here are some of the notables.
Hey, why are there little acorns on the ground?
Um, guys…? My legs are on fire!
Kermes Oak (Quercus coccifera)
This little beauty I didn’t encounter until later in the month.
James had told me about some maquis that made him break out almost in a rash, he would get shivers up and down his body, some kind of histamine reaction. I kind of nodded while I listened, not really understanding, but man, he was right.
The first time I encountered this stuff, I remember thinking I was walking through holly, but I kept seeing little acorn caps lying amongst dead leaves and rocks on the ground and I was puzzled, because I didn’t see any oak trees around!
This stuff doesn’t have overt spines, but the problem is that each edge of each leaf is covered in small spines, and there are many small leaves on one plant, so there is no easy way to avoid them.
This plant ranged from about a half-metre to two metres tall, so when it was over your head and you had to get through it, you had to delicately grasp the branches between thumb and index finger and kind of bend them aside so you could wedge your body through. The second option was to just kick and beat through with your legs, which then would amass thousands of little pinpricks.
I was walking back to the hotel on the second day of encountering Kermes Oak with the rest of my team, and chatting with Aaron. My legs had been pretty well worked over as most of the day we had been pushing through, so my legs felt hot and the little cuts were stinging as I sweated. All of a sudden, while we were walking, I started to feel really strange. I felt very hot, and then cold, and then horribly dizzy as I had waves of shivers up and down my body, enough to give me goosebumps.
Aftermath of Kate’s Kermes Oak exposure – Photo by James Conolly
We went swimming soon after and the salt water helped a lot, but ever since then when I encountered the stuff my skin started with the burning and the shivers.
This is the plant that broke me. I got stuck in a huge stand of this that was over my head on the side of a hill. My hair was entangled, clothing entangled, everyone had gone on ahead. I tripped and fell down into it, landing sitting on an outthrust of rock. I was so tired and frustrated that I just sat there and wanted to cry. I needed help to get out, I was only noticed to be missing because everyone had broken for lunch and guess who had the lunch in her backpack? Eternal thanks to Andy Bevan for extricating me.
Is it alive? It looks dead…it’s kind of…brittle.
Gah! It broke off in my leg!
Born-Dead (Genista fasselata?)
I just spent a good hour on Google trying to determine exactly what this plant was called. It was presented to us as Born-Dead, which is a name they devised during the Kithera Island Project. The reason for the name is quite clear. Imagine a large, circular mound of greyish thorny branches. It looks as though the plant has long been dead due to drought.
All the pictures I have found show it green, with yellow flowers and looking quite pretty. As we were only there during the dry season, I am assuming that this is the same plant based on the morphology of the branchlets and the thorns.
Born-Dead, during its active phase.
Born-Dead was a bastard. It was so brittle that if you stomped on a cluster (the only way of dealing with it), shards would explode out from it, and as your foot descended into the clump, the branches directly around your ankle would bend inward and inexorably be forced into your leg.
The worst thing about this plant is the dried hard tips of the thorns would break off in your skin, requiring surgery to remove them.
Sach had to conduct surgery to get a particularly nasty thorn tip out of his knee – Photo by James Conolly
Hahaha! You just flipped right on top of it and ran all Crouching
Tiger Hidden Dragon!
Juniper
I loved the stands of junipers we encountered. They often were the only tree-like thing we saw all day. Often they were only knee to waist-high but occasionally we stumbled across 6 foot stands of them. Then it got fun. They were so dense that you couldn’t go through them, so you had to go over them. I developed a technique that worked quite well in dealing with them. The first step was to reach up over your head and grab two giant handfuls of the branches. Then kick one leg up and jump, while hauling on the top branches. This would allow you to kind of flip up over in a roll on top of the mound of branches. Then you could stand up on branch vertices and basically walk over the tree. You didn’t even have to be particularly careful about where you put your feet, you could just step and trust that a branch would be there. It was way too cool. I loved tree surfing.
Aww, look at the little yellow flowers…GACK! Don’t sit there!
Various Spiny Brooms
I don’t know what these were really called, but they had almost fractal patterning to the branchlets, and were very low to the ground, and had very fine thin stems. These were stealth spines, as you would tend to look at the little yellow flowers that they were sporting and somehow ignore the fact that there were tiny small thorns that slipped through clothing like a hot knife through butter. These were often discovered as you sat down on a rock for a rest and accidentally sat a little too far over.
These little purple flowers are sooo pretty!
BbbZZZZZZZZZZZ! AHHH! Bees! Run!
Thyme
Ordinarily when you think of thyme, you think of that nice soft leaved aromatic plant that grows up through cracks in garden paths, yes? The thyme on the island was not like that at all. It grew in dense clusters, and was very tough and had little tiny spines and rough hairs down the length of each stalk. It was flowering while we were there, so there would be splashes of purple everywhere, and constant humming of bees. When you walked through clumps of it, the oil would end up all over your boots, gaiters and lower legs, so coming back after a long day, everyone would reek of sweat, dirt and thyme.
Occasionally, you’d piss the bees off enough that they would attack. I only got stung once, which I think is pretty good.
Oh, I think you can walk right across the top of that!
Look out! It’s got your ankle!
Thorny Burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum)
This was a dense spiny plant with small green leaves, big thorns and red berries. It grew in long low masses that were superdense. You could walk right over top of it and it wouldn’t move at all, the little branches would be so intertwined. Occasionally, though, your foot would fall down into the centre of the cluster and then the spines all around the hole would bend in and jab your ankle.
Oh my god, what the fuck was that?!
Organic Barbed Wire, Rough Bindweed (Smilax aspera)
Of all the plants, this one by far was the one I hated the most. I first encountered this beauty when I attempted to scale a terrace wall that had become overgrown by phrygana, possibly some kind of myrtle or something. So the wall in front of me was about 5 feet tall or so, and then there were scrubby bushes that were growing on top and hanging over. For once, these bushes didn’t have thorns, so I thought it would be rather an easy job to get up and over the top. I was in mid-climb, about 4 feet off the ground at this point, with one boot wedged into a crack and balancing by grabbing branches. This was a transition point, where I needed to jump up and grab branches farther ahead and then use that momentum to propel me up and over the top of the wall. However, when I reached up and over at the top of my jump, my hands closed over branches, and as I firmed my grip and my weight came down on my arms and hands, it suddenly felt like barbed wire was cutting into my palms. I somehow managed to keep my grip and barely made it up and over. I opened my hands and saw that mingled in with the branches I had grasped was a vine.
Smilax looks like a grapevine, but with giant rose thorns down its entire length. Smilax thorns in the palm of your hand = carnage. Smilax is sneaky. It would grow through other maquis, and lurk in the underlayers, so as you strode through it would wrap around your leg and cut into your inner thigh.
Smilax aspera – this doesn’t truly convey the horror. Also, ours wasn’t fruiting or flowering.
Hate.
Coping strategies
The equipment list we were given mentioned gaiters as potentially useful. I am SO glad I decided to bring mine. I wore them every single day I was out in the field, and the days I was not out walking, I lent them out. Definitely worth the hotness and annoyance factor.
Maquis Greaves, Mark I – Photo by James Conolly.
Sach decided to experiment with constructing body armour. His first prototype was cardboard cut and taped to shape, which he wore under his pants. These worked pretty well, although a day of sweating in them made them kind of soggy. His Mark II, pictured here, was constructed after I left the island, but it appears to be made from 1.5L water bottles, tape and cardboard. I shall have to ask how they worked and if there is a Mark III on the horizon.
Maquis Greaves, Mark II – Photo by James Conolly.
Other than that, the only defense, which worked surprisingly well was wearing long sleeves and long pants, as you can see below. You would get pricked and bruised but not too terribly badly. I most often wore a linen shirt and a cotton/nylon blend of pants. I didn’t rip my pants until almost the last day, and it was on a rock instead of thorns, so I think they held up pretty well.
Field Crew on a windy day (l-r) Sach, Kate, Libby, Katie, Brenna – Photo by Sach Killam
My poor boots needed stiffer soles though. I split both soles and by the end I babied them through my last two days with copious amounts of tape. It’s not nice to feel thorns poking into your heel as you stomp the shit out of the maquis in front of you.
My kingdom for a glove
One thing that I wished for more than anything else while on the island was a pair of gloves. For some reason it never came up that they might be useful. One day, I was on Sach’s team and we were taking out a National Geographic reporter to see what a typical field experience would be like. Sach somehow picked the nastiest maquis ever. It was incredibly dense, and looked like it was an even expanse of knee high scrub and rock. It turned out to be anywhere from knee to shoulder height and was absolutely exhausting. The reporter wore sneakers, shorts and a short-sleeved top, and was game to come try things out with us. We kind of tried to dissuade him, and told him to wait while he saw us start to get some pictures and a sense of what it was like. Sach waded in first, and ended up somehow kicking his legs up and over at almost shoulder height. There was no way to push through, you basically had to lift your legs up and over and stomp down each step to force the branches aside so you could gain purchase.
Having gloves would have made it so much easier.
Alternatives to gloves devised during fieldwalking:
Plastic sherd bags, wrapped 12-ply around each hand. Effectiveness rating: Minimal. Thorns go through plastic just as easily as skin.
Clipboard. Hold clipboard out in front of you and use it as a battering ram to muscle through the maquis. Effectiveness rating: Surprisingly effective. The thorns go through the plastic and embed themselves nicely into the cardboard, so there is a nice solid anchor to wedge them aside.
Maquis mamba. Lift your arms up over your head and kind of shimmy into the maquis, slowly and inexorably inserting yourself into the interface of plant and human. Effectiveness rating: Works quite well, although you have to think thin for this, that’s for sure.
Stick the boot to it. Instead of using hands, your shod feet replace your hands. Your knee and foot comes up in a high arc so you can slam into/kick the maquis aside long enough to slip into the hole you just made. This looks strangely like the changing of the guard at the Parliament building/Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Syntagma Square in Athens. Effectiveness rating: Good, although it is incredibly tiring after a while relying entirely on your legs with no brachial support.
I am SO bringing gloves this summer. My awesome brother has given me several pairs of hydro gloves, and I have a pair of goatskin gauntlets I think will be perfect as well.
|
A typical day fieldwalking… Kate: Ow! You should at least buy me dinner for that! (addressed to maquis that was being, how shall we say, overly familiar!) (Sach takes several strides ahead, pauses) Sach: Did you just…? (shakes head, laughing) |