socialguides

The Chinese, precursors in culture and technology, were the first to appreciate the beauty and usefulness of bamboo. Their ancient dictionary, the Erh Ya, written a thousand years before Christ, referred to bamboo as ts’ao, a grass. My own interest in bamboo arose many years ago when I was moved to attempt to make a fishing rod of split-and-glued bamboo, and became fascinated by the virtues of the material I was using. A long time ago some nameless genius had the idea of splitting a Culm of bamboo into strips, tapering them, then gluing them together to make a strong, slender, and superlatively springy implement that could cast an artificial fly a great distance, even against a stiff breeze. Here, as in so many other things, the Chinese were fax in advance of the West; one book tells of them splitting and gluing bamboo long before the birth of Christ. Though now largely supplanted by glass and carbon fiber, the best split-bamboo fishing rods are made from Tonkin cane, which, despite the name, comes from southern China. It remains the world’s most valuable bamboo species for a variety of purposes. Dr. F. A. McClure, who at the time of his death in 1970 was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution and the world’s greatest authority on bamboo, traveled to China as a botanical explorer in the 1920s. There he sought the home of Tonkin cane. Years later he described his search to me: “I began by recalling a jingle common round Canton [Guangzhou]: Wait sap muk, Kwong Ning chuk,’ which is to say in Cantonese: ‘For wood go to Wait sap [Huaiji], for bamboo to Kong Ning [Ganging].’ Both are places on the Sui River, which flows toward Canton from the northwest. I started upriver, inquiring as I went. As I neared Wait sap, the bamboos on both sides of the river changed. Unlike the graceful, nodding bamboos farther downstream, these were stiff, erect, and spiky. From a distance the plantations looked like young fir trees.” The farmers called it ch’a kon chuktea stick bamboo. Now, bamboo has a peculiarity. Most of it flowers only at long intervals-30, 60, or even 120 years apart. At about the same time, all plants of the same specieswherever they are in the worldwill burst into flower. Then the drooping branches look like heads of wheat (page 514). When this happens, the culms die, but the groves survive because some rhizomes live on and the fallen seeds take root. For a bamboo seedling to reach full growth and maturity may take five to ten years; meanwhile the growers face economic disaster. The farmer’s misfortune was the scientist’s good luck. McClure found whole areas of tea stick bamboo in bloom, and he was able to collect flowering specimens, which, together with branching nodes and sheaths from young culms, the botanist needs to make scientific identification.

“Security” is a word deeply etched into the Israeli psyche. The country has lived for 30 years as an armed camp, always on guard against PLO raids and terrorist bombings. Whenever such incidents occur, the response is quick: even greater retaliation. In Jerusalem I met with David Eppel, an English-language broadcaster for the Voice of Israel. “We must continue to build this country. Israel is our lawful home, our destiny. We have the determination, and an immense pool of talent, to see it through.” His cosmopolitan friendsa city planner, a psychology professor, an authorgathered for coffee and conversation at David’s modern apartment on Jerusalem’s Lei Yaffe Road. Amia Lieblich’s book, Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach, studies the debilitating effects almost constant war has had on life in the Jewish state, a nation still surrounded by enemies. As she and her husband kindly drove me to my hotel in Arab Jerusalem afterward, some of that national apprehension surfaced in the writer herself. “We don’t often come over to this part of town,” she said. “Especially at night” 1 DROVE OUT of the Old City in the dark of morning and arrived a few hours later at the nearly finished Israeli frontier post, whence a shuttle bus bounced me through no-man’s-land to the Egyptian terminal. As a result of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, it was possible for the first time since 1948 to travel overland from Jerusalem to Cairo. An Egyptian customs man opened my bags on a card table set up in the sand. I took a battered taxi into nearby El Arish, a sleepy bank that, took 45 minutes to convert dollars into Egyptian pounds Then I hired a Mercedes for the 200-mile run across the northern Sinai desert, the Suez Canal, and the Nile Delta. By sundown Cairo was mine. Despite official government optimism, I found many in Cairo worried that President Sadat’s bold diplomatic gestures might fail. The city was noticeably tense as Israel officially opened its new embassy on Mohi el-Din Abu el-Ez Street in Cairo’s Dukki quarter. Black-uniformed Egyptian troops guarded the chancery and nearby intersections as the Star of David flew for the first time in an Arab capital. Across town, police with fixed bayonets were posted every ten feet around the American Embassy. Others were posted at the TV station and the larger hotels. Protests were scattered, mostly peaceful. None disturbed the cadence of the city.