There's an old story in the history of currency, how one
group of people inhabiting an island traded with gold, while the other used
dates from palm trees. When foreign tradesmen stopped coming to the island
following a series of tempest storms that also
happened to wipe out the island's entire fleet, the two conflicting groups
decided to trade with each other. Here it was decided that gold had zero value.
You couldn't eat it. You couldn't drink it. And you couldn't wear it. The date
tribe won this economic war hands down.
On our property, we have lots of trees, among them more than
a dozen palm trees. Although most of them are maybe ten feet, baby palms
really, one of them is huge, maybe a story taller than our own house. When the
breeze comes slashing in from the ocean, those leaves get rattled. This palm
tree bears coconuts…big coconuts.
When these are ripe, you don't want to be anywhere near that tree. That is
quite a drop for a coconut.
The palm tree has the trademark chinks in its bark that I have seen everywhere in Tanzania. This enables the more nimble footed to scurry up and down the tree at will. In Zanzibar, I saw people using monkeys to climb up the trees to retrieve the coconuts. Clever, I would say. Nothing quite like free labor. Of course, I decided to give it a go myself. What was the worst that could happen? I climbed up the tree for twelve feet until I realized that I am actually a husband and a father, and that I might be better off serving my family at home than from a bed in a hospital. This meant that I would have to hire somebody to do the deed.
Morton, my faithful gardener, found a climber and agreed to pay him…in coconuts, should he be able to shake the tree and harvest the fruit. Brilliant. I have seen these climbers everywhere. Some people just climb up bare footed, others use a cloth tied around their feet to negotiate the bark more easily in case they should slip. It almost looks like they are slip sliding up and down the tree, as if it were some 80's arcade game.
Good deal, I am thinking. Morton gets the climber, we all get the coconuts. There were dozens up in that tree. Not only were they ripe and begging to be eaten, but they were also warning, in their own sublime, sneaky way, just what would happen if they weren't picked: an untimely bungee jump to the ground below, minus the gear, possibly on some kid's head playing in the yard.
While I was at work, Morton called to say that the coconuts were all picked and neatly aligned on the ground, waiting to be distributed. What I didn't account for is that he would need a gate pass to get them out.
Okay, then. I filled out a gate pass that stated place, date, time, quantity, and item. 50 coconuts, to be removed from the property. Signed by me. So the guard assigned an actual value to the coconuts.
In the end, we all made out like bandits. Free coconuts. Love it.
The palm tree has the trademark chinks in its bark that I have seen everywhere in Tanzania. This enables the more nimble footed to scurry up and down the tree at will. In Zanzibar, I saw people using monkeys to climb up the trees to retrieve the coconuts. Clever, I would say. Nothing quite like free labor. Of course, I decided to give it a go myself. What was the worst that could happen? I climbed up the tree for twelve feet until I realized that I am actually a husband and a father, and that I might be better off serving my family at home than from a bed in a hospital. This meant that I would have to hire somebody to do the deed.
Morton, my faithful gardener, found a climber and agreed to pay him…in coconuts, should he be able to shake the tree and harvest the fruit. Brilliant. I have seen these climbers everywhere. Some people just climb up bare footed, others use a cloth tied around their feet to negotiate the bark more easily in case they should slip. It almost looks like they are slip sliding up and down the tree, as if it were some 80's arcade game.
Good deal, I am thinking. Morton gets the climber, we all get the coconuts. There were dozens up in that tree. Not only were they ripe and begging to be eaten, but they were also warning, in their own sublime, sneaky way, just what would happen if they weren't picked: an untimely bungee jump to the ground below, minus the gear, possibly on some kid's head playing in the yard.
While I was at work, Morton called to say that the coconuts were all picked and neatly aligned on the ground, waiting to be distributed. What I didn't account for is that he would need a gate pass to get them out.
Okay, then. I filled out a gate pass that stated place, date, time, quantity, and item. 50 coconuts, to be removed from the property. Signed by me. So the guard assigned an actual value to the coconuts.
In the end, we all made out like bandits. Free coconuts. Love it.
