The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (30 page)

From there, the conversation swerved wildly from employment to football to women to ancestry. Joe, unmarried and somewhere in his mid-twenties, was of uncertain profession, but after finding out that I had spent considerable time in Glasgow, told me that he was a big supporter of the Celtic football squad. Although he wasn’t
absolutely clear on the matter, Joe implied that he was of Romany descent. Jim the painter explained that he was currently working on a retirement complex. He had a thirteen-year-old daughter who wanted to be a dentist, and an eight-year-old daughter who had properly put off major career decisions until after she had all her permanent teeth.

We were soon joined by another local, Brian, who, despite making a late entry, seemed entirely more inebriated than anyone else. He steered the conversation toward the relative merits of various Kent communities. He described Faversham, west of Canterbury, as “Chaversham,” which I gather is some sort of insult. Brian went on to explain that the worst place in all of Kent was the Isle of Sheppey, north of Faversham. In a just world, explained Brian, the British government would blow up the bridge to the Isle of Sheppey. Then it would blow up Sheppey. He also wasn’t very nice to the Isle of Thanet, source of many of my genes, but I let this slide.

When Jim was ready for another pint of Guinness, he also got in a pint of Fosters for Joe and a pint of Spitfire for me. He wisely avoided getting Brian anything further to drink. Jim asked, “So you said that you were a biologist?” I confirmed that I was. He went on to explain that his elderly father was suffering from pernicious anemia, and asked if I knew what that was. I explained that his father’s guts were not absorbing sufficient vitamin B
₁₂
,
so he was having difficulty creating red blood cells. As is so typical, physicians and nurses had told Jim about his father’s treatment, injections of B
₁₂
,
but had not told him what was actually wrong or why treatment was necessary.

“Michael” the barman was not officially working at The Three Tuns, but helping out a friend and taking his pay under the table. Michael claimed that he hadn’t done well at his first go at college; I suggested that he have another go at it when he felt the time was right. When he heard that I was interested in Roman Britain, he gestured in the air, indicating that the stage of the Roman theatre had been about here, and that the audience would have been seated
over there. Despite my entirely unsubtle hints, Michael did not invite me to go down to the cellar to see the foundations of the amphitheatre. Even after I bought him a drink.

It was just a bit early to return to my hotel room, so I walked down Castle Street to Canterbury Cathedral. It was closed for the night, but the few attendants didn’t seem to mind as I walked through the gates and stood looking up at the cathedral’s west end. I stood staring until my feet hurt.

I
F
you t
HOUGHT
that the ancient Romans got up to a lot of mischief after dark, they were nothing compared to molluscs. Members of some species are both male and female at the same time, which must make them doubly disappointed when they spend Saturday night alone. Many start life as males, but go through a transformation as they age, changing into females or back into males. Some spend years in therapy.

When it comes to sexual shenanigans, creatures like the Roman snail really know how to make things complicated. Even though individuals are hermaphrodites, when it comes to copulation, one acts as a male and the other as a female. This is usually based on which one likes chocolate more. The pair then dance in a circle, kissing and touching tentacles, before intertwining their bodies. In the vagina is a sac that makes a bony harpoon. The individual acting as the male pierces the body wall of its partner with the spicule to stimulate her/him/it. Ensuing copulation involves a lot of mucous.

I was working my way from west to east, following the River Stour downstream, and back in time to the earliest days of the Roman presence in Britain. In essence, I was looking for the origin of my snails. I might have started at Deal, where Caesar had first landed, but that effort had been an aborted attempt. I might have gone to France to meet the snails on their home turf, but I took it as given that edible snails existed there. Instead, I hopped on the 112 coach that took me out of Canterbury and east along the A257, following the track of the Romans to the origin of Watling Street.

During their time in Great Britain, the Romans had constructed 13,000 kilometres of roads. The very first, Watling Street, started at their coastal base at Richborough, proceeded west through Canterbury and past The Three Tuns, on to London, and then ran northwest to Wroxeter. I wanted to see the oldest end of that street.

The double-decker coach took me through Littlebourne, Wigham, Shatterling, Brambling, and Ash backward in time to 43 CE. Much as it had been two millennia earlier, this was agricultural land, rich in hay and grain, stubble and rapeseed, potatoes, and ornamental nurseries. Each town had a church, a chiropodist, a butcher, two florists, three pubs, four cottages with thatched roofs, a chemist, an Indian takeaway, a Chinese takeaway, 712 sheep, and a brick coach shelter. I got off the coach in the historical town of Sandwich, one of the few communities in Great Britain without a sandwich shop. Closing in on my target of Richborough, I walked down a pleasant lane lined by modest homes all down one side. The lane became a little less pleasant when the sidewalk ran out. The few passing lorries had me scrambling up into the verge.

My trek was about three kilometres, but the walk made me feel a little more authentic. To the best of my knowledge, the Romans never travelled by coach. My attention was diverted by a squawky chirp, and I looked up to see a Ring-necked Parakeet. Native to India, this species has been a popular cage bird since Victorian times. Escapees have been breeding in England’s southeast since the late 1960s and now number over 5,000. I continued past high bordering hedges, under the Sandwich bypass, and over the railway line between Sandwich and Broadstairs.

Just before getting to Richborough, I pulled out the hand-drawn map I had been given by an employee of British Heritage. It instructed me to turn at the remains of a stone railway pillar and tramp through a grazed field. I pushed on through a small woodlot, past a palisade of nettles, and into a field of thistles and horsetails. I was looking for the remains of Richborough’s Roman amphitheatre. Some sort of semi-circular depression in the ground, I guessed. Waiting for a “Eureka!” moment, I wandered around and around. I
could see some semi-circular depressions, but honestly, I have seen more convincing alien crop circles. Perhaps the whole thing looks great from the air, or after several pints. I retraced my steps back to the road to Richborough.

As part of Britain’s millennium project, 1,000 milepost signs had been erected across the nation. One outside the site at Richborough cleverly indicated:

There were only three vehicles in the parking lot at Richborough, including an electrical repairs minivan. “You have the site to yourself at the moment,” said the fellow who sold me a ticket.

Richborough, or Rvtvpiae, as it was known at the time, was the site where as many as 40,000 troops set down in 43 CE. The soldiers immediately dug steep-walled ditches and erected defensive wooden ramparts, allowing the site to serve as the harbour and base camp for the Roman invasion of Britain. The region was occupied for the entire period of Roman Britain. After two decades as the gateway to Britannia, a twenty-five-metre-tall triumphal arch was erected, built in flint and chalk, clad in fine Italian marble and decorated with statues in bronze. The arch was later pulled down, but its base remains. The rich civilian community of Richborough grew up around the fort. Two centuries later, the threat of invasion required great stone walls to be added to the fortification. So well constructed were these walls that major portions still dominate the landscape more than 1,700 years later. Watling Road exits the fort at its west gate. Or rather, a narrow dirt and gravel road exits at the west gate. Humble today, it was the spot where the great Roman invasion of Britain began.

By the time I got to the “Supply Base” part of the tour, a group of seven developmentally delayed adults arrived with their three
minders. As they passed me, each of the minders apologized, presumably for disturbing my peace. Each time, I said that no apology was necessary. I hoped that everyone was enjoying their day as much as I was. And after all, we eleven visitors were not the most intrusive invaders that Richborough had ever seen.

Low clouds obscured the towers of the electrical power-generating plant in the distance. The breeze blowing from the east was just cold enough to make my back ache a bit. I sat on a section of ruined wall and contemplated the end of my journey. The Romans had left behind snails. They had left behind a significant cultural influence that, according to Monty Python’s
Life of Brian,
included sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health.

And after more than three centuries of occupation, it seemed a fair bet that the Romans had left behind a substantial quantity of genetic material in Britain. No one can keep their genes in their jeans for that long. A good chunk of my heritage comes from that part of England, and of my 40,000 genes, I suspect that a portion of them could be traced back to Rome. Perhaps my ancestors ate snails.

REASON NUMBER TWELVE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE I HAVE RUN OUT OF FIREWOOD.

“D
O YOU FEEL EIGHT YEARS YOUNGER?”
Having been awake for thirty hours, I felt dizzy and slightly nauseous, but in the nicest possible way. I was in a cool, dimly lit cinder-block room at the offices of Galaxy Express in Addis Ababa in central Ethiopia, trying to avoid nodding off. The question about my age had come from one of the firm’s junior employees who was keeping Lindsay Eller and me company while our guide, Legese, and our driver, Hassen, completed paperwork and packed a white Toyota Land Cruiser for our trip. Lindsay and I had boarded the airplane at Heathrow in June but had stepped off at Bole International Airport in May, eight years earlier. It had been more than 400 years since the rest of the world had adopted the Gregorian calendar, but Ethiopia had refused to give up the Julian one—hence the eight-year jump.

While we waited, Lindsay and I were served mind-blowing coffee, easily the best of my life, but this brought on the need to pee, which came with its own difficulties. Ethiopia was in the midst of a drought. Because the country is almost totally reliant on hydroelectric
power, each community had to deal with a series of rotating blackouts. Three to four days a week were spent without electrical power, and it was the capital city’s turn. It made for a very curious trip down an unlit hallway to a bathroom with no windows.

I had met Lindsay at a biology conference two years before, and soon after hired her to teach biology laboratories part-time while she pursued graduate studies in kinesiology. Lindsay had done a lot of travelling, was slight but hale, and appeared to be a genuinely happy person, and so seemed the ideal companion on my latest quest. Perhaps most importantly, she didn’t object to sharing a series of hotel rooms with me.

Neither of us had ever engaged a professional to get us around a foreign country, at least not for more than a couple of days, but Ethiopia was a different matter. I could muddle by in Russian or German when called on, but printed Amharic looked like so many squiggles to me. Guidebooks made travelling through Ethiopia unescorted sound like a challenge. It seemed that if Lindsay and I were to make the best use of our time, a search for introduced eucalyptus trees, we were going to need help. I chose Galaxy Express because it seemed the most uptempo of the firms working out of Addis Ababa and they answered their email messages most promptly.

It is not possible to understand our Ethiopian quest for eucalyptus, or indeed understand modern Ethiopia at all, without knowing a bit about the life and times of Emperor Menelik II. He was born Sahle Miriam in 1844 in Ankober, in the Showa region of what is now Ethiopia. His father, Haile Malakot, was king of Showa and married Menelik’s mother, a court servant, shortly after Menelik’s birth. If the family is to be believed, Menelik’s heritage can be traced all the way back to King Solomon and Queen Sheba, who had a son named Menelik I. Not at the time, of course; they probably just called him Menelik. And, according to historians, he probably never existed.

Menelik II took over the reins as king of Showa at the age of twenty-one but had to wait an additional twenty-four years for the deaths of Tewodros II, Tekle Giorgis, and Yohannes IV to become
Emperor of Ethiopia. Menelik was reportedly an imposing figure, with a dark complexion and good teeth, but his face had been pitted by smallpox. From 1889 to his death in 1913, Menelik worked to amalgamate a series of smaller states into a single Ethiopian empire, expanding the country to nearly its present limits. He captured the attention of the world by turning back an Italian invasion in 1896. Menelik went on to institute a system of ministries, modernize the education system, install telephone and telegraph systems, and bring the railway to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s new capital city.

Menelik’s modernization of Ethiopia was all very well and good but resulted in a rapidly growing human population and far greater urbanization, particularly in and around the country’s new capital. Native forests were cleared in the pursuit of fuel and building materials. Menelik attempted to deal with the tree shortage by forbidding the cutting and burning of trees without permission, but his edict was largely ignored. Being a clever fellow, he asked for the help of the international community to find a replacement. He needed a tree that would thrive in a hot, dry environment. It had to grow fast for a quick harvest, and burn with a hot flame.