Robert Root

 

I recently toured "Seeing the Invisible," billed as "An Augmented Reality Contemporary Art Exhibition," at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens' Spanish Point campus on Little Sarasota Bay. We'd walked its 30 acres of varying historical and environmental sites several times over the years—entered its "Window on the Past" archaeological exhibit within an ancient shell midden; checked out the pioneer history also preserved there, a few buildings carefully restored; and strolled well-maintained formal gardens and lawns. A twisting walkway extends partway out a wooded peninsula (the Spanish point) and bridges a cove to further historic buildings and gardens. Spanish Point is rich in botanical variety, small signs identifying plants and trees everywhere, and the landscape abounding in butterflies. It felt odd this time to walk around Spanish Point and not pay ardent attention to the landscape.

 

"Seeing the Invisible," which will run until August 2022, features works being simultaneously displayed in five other countries—Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and South Africa—and five other states. Developed by the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, it highlights works by thirteen artists of varying international heritage. At each site visitors who have downloaded the exhibit app (preferably before arriving at Spanish Point) can stand near a numbered sign to open up a scan of an artist's presentation and hear audio accompaniment. The first site opened on Daito Manabe's "Morphecore Prototype AR," showing, the online guide tells us, "an endlessly dancing digital figure, continuously morphing into new shapes." All the while I could see the wooded garden behind him. Juno Enoch, the box office attendant who helped me activate my app, had led me to that site and when she indicated something behind the contortionist, her physical hand entered the digital image.

 

Out on the point, in a sunken garden with a pergola, I opened "Dawn Chorus," Sarah Meyohas' presentation. A player piano appeared in front of me from which birds "seem[ed] to trigger a series of musical phrases . . . Watercolors bloom[ed] across the surface of the piano, visualizing the movement of the birds as well as the sound waves that emanate[d] from the vibrating strings." I stepped away from the piano, then nearer, then from one side to the other, occasionally glancing away from my phone to assure myself that no piano or birds were actually in front of me.

 

Not far from the sunken garden, on an open lawn, other visitors investigated Ai Weiwei's "Gilded Cage," appearing as a huge circular wooden structure with open entrances on either side. One woman trying to walk through it disappeared when she reached the wall. I moved my phone up and down to scan the height of the walls, then circled the cage, confirming that it was fully three-dimensional. Weiwei had made his augmented reality project from an earlier physical work he had constructed. On site it seemed fully real. Further out the point, at the end of the walkway, I tuned into a 3-D scan of "a snake-like creature entwined with a dry cactus," Jacob Kudsk Steensen's "Water Serpent," and watched it writhe for several minutes as its global eye turned toward and away from me.

 

Before my iPhone overheated and shut down (exhibitors recommend bringing a charger on your walk—I didn't), I viewed two works on open lawns. Timor Si-Qin's "Biome Gateway" displays "a temple cave that connects the biotopes and organisms of the botanical garden to a parallel universe," part of the artist's "long-term meta-project" reacting to "climate change, global pandemics, and biodiversity." An open portal invites entrance. Sigalit Landau's "Salt Stalagmite #1 (Three Bridges)," a tall, sprawling structure that made me back ever further away to take it all in, "derives from Landau's original idea of building a floating salt bridge over the Dead Sea to connect Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan." Until I opened those scans, I found myself in the midst of lively large butterflies and moths, reminding me that I'd previously come to Spanish Point for the natural environment, the woods and the gardens and the views of the bay.

 

I shut down the app and un-augmented Spanish Point returned to view, the small AR number signs barely noticeable. I'd been only slightly uncomfortable walking through a garden looking at my phone, pleased to have had the reality of a familiar place modified in the way it had been, impressed with the quality of imagination in the art, and uncertain how to feel about their impermanence. How much of the digital future should I be willing to accept as a permanent addition to the past? When I visit Spanish Point again next year, after the exhibition has ended, I wonder how many of those images I'll still be able to visualize, and how often in the future we'll accept having reality augmented.

 

Note: "Seeing the Invisible: An Augmented Reality Contemporary Art Exhibition," Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Historic Spanish Point Campus

 

"Augmented Reality" was, for me, an unfamiliar term. I only seen it for the first time online pursuing some connections that started out in my reading. My youthful self once had contemplated a career as an archaeologist until a hot afternoon digging with a spoon in a small square patch of dirt at a historical site made me think the career might not be much like it was in movies like King Solomon's Mines and Valley of the Kings. But interest in ancient sites stayed with me and I enjoyed occasionally being a history tourist. I took in Fort Niagara in my home county, Fort George across the Niagara River in Ontario, and Forts Ticonderoga and William Henry in the Adirondacks (also enduring my siblings' preference, Santa's Workshop in North Pole, NY). Visiting relatives in Cooperstown, I fantasized about the setting for The Deerslayer and made sure to visit Natty Bumppo's Cave and Leatherstocking Falls whenever I could. Where I lived, history seemed only to go back a couple centuries.

 

Many years later, in the summer of 1982, Sue and I traveled into the southwest where we explored the ancient Anasazi sites of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. It took ten years to complete my essay "Anasazi" in time to publish it in an anthology recognizing the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas. Somewhere in those years our wanderings took us to Aztalan State Park in Wisconsin, a National Historic Site that flourished between CE 1000 and 1300, and also to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Cahokia and Aztalan both centered around earthen mounds, Cahokia's scale far more massive than Aztalan's, and clearly they were related. I've gone out of my way to visit midwestern mound building sites—Effigy Mounds in Iowa, Serpent Mound in Ohio. Wisconsin has the most abundant mounds in North America and over the years here we've tracked down many of the most prominent sites still surviving.

 

In all that time I've only written that one essay about such ancient cultures, but I've read the writing of others about them, most memorably Reg Saner's Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi, Elizabeth Dodd's essay "Cahokia" in Prospect: Journeys and Landscapes, and her writing about Chaco Canyon in Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World. So it shouldn't be surprising that Annalee Newitz's new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, caught my attention. It recounts the author's visits to four significant archaeological sites: Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which thrived from 7500 to 5700 BCE; Pompeii in Italy, 700 BCE-79 CE; Angkor in Cambodia, 800-1431 CE; and Cahokia in North America, 1050-1350 CE. The chapters on each site open with a map drawn by Jason Thompson that I find myself turning back to often as my reading progresses.

 

The book is fascinating, drawing on a breadth of knowledge about each city that has accumulated over years of on-site research. When I started the section on Pompeii, I paid attention as if this were a class in archaeology. The book cover colorfully offers strips of illustrations but, other than those maps, no further images appear to help me picture what I'd see if I were accompanying the author on those visits. Because I'd once been to Cahokia, the location that drew me to the book in the first place, I went online to see what images I might find. Surely that historic park would have undergone changes in the decades since I'd first seen it.

 

And that's where the idea of "augmented reality" comes in. In any number of museums and historic sites, I've rented audio guides to accompany my viewing, but when I entered the Cahokia Mounds Website, I was immediately informed about the Augmented Reality Project, a video guide to elements in the park. At carefully mapped locations visitors can link on iPads or iPhones to digital sites that will allow them to view the landscape in front of them and then transform it into a visual reconstruction of the site as it might have appeared seven to nine thousand years ago. The images alter—augment—the reality before your eyes, so that you might have the sense of being at Cahokia as it once was, simultaneously seeing it both now and then.

 

Another trip to Cahokia, about 5 hours away, means taking close to a full day to augment reality as thoroughly as I possibly could. I wouldn't simply be sight-seeing—I'd be engaging in time travel, visiting not only the remains of a lost city but experiencing it, on one level, in its own time. Given the times we're living in, I'd very likely feel like a visitor from the future arriving in an augmented present.

 

Notes: Newitz, Annalee. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. New York: WW Norton, 2021.

 

Cahokia Mounds Website—Augmented Reality Project

 

Something came into my head about distance, circled around vaguely, and then evaporated, leaving a barely perceivable image or nearly inaudible echo to remind me that I'd somehow thought about it. From time to time over the course of the day I'd hear and/or visualize that word and hope to recognize more distinctly what it originally alluded to. It might have been prompted by the realization, growing increasingly constant, that we would be leaving Sarasota around the end of week, returning home to southeast Wisconsin. That would certainly put distance between where we had been for over a month and where we would be throughout the end of the year and most of the following year, until we almost certainly would come back again.

 

The physical distance between the two locations is around 1,329 miles, at least on the highways we used to take when we drove back and forth—we tend to fly now—but I doubt that's the distance I was thinking of. Those are just miles, mere spatial measurements that my old AAA maps and my current iPhone GPS could readily help me track. I suspect that physical space wasn't what brought distance to mind.

 

The thought of distance possibly arose after a Sunday evening FaceTime conversation with our son in California. Since we were calling from Florida, we added one more time zone to the complication of getting in touch, mid-evening on the east coast lining up with his workday's end on the west coast. We had a good conversation, chatting mostly about the challenges of negotiating recurring computer problems, laughing about his momentarily aligning with our generation in regard to technology while distancing himself from the generation of his nieces and nephews. When we called, he was physically 2,591 miles away from us and from his sister and her family in Sarasota and 2,068 miles away from his other sister and her family in Wisconsin, the ones 1,329 miles north of where we were calling from.

 

The call ended and distance immediately became less tangible, if communicating face to face through the internet can be considered tangible. We wouldn't talk again for days. He would turn his attention to his daily life, as we would, he to screenwriting and program production, we to Sue's tutoring schedule and my doing—well—this sort of thing. In Florida and in Wisconsin, our daughters and their husbands and their children would be preoccupied with schooling, extracurricular activities, employment, household chores, and time together. We would visit with the Florida gang one more evening and the next day see them in the morning on the way to the airport; we hoped to see the Wisconsin gang when we got off the bus from O'Hare but likely would have to wait a few more days. Close personal distance briefly experienced and enjoyed before we all return to separate preoccupations in our own houses and renew the physical distances we're accustomed to.

 

Somewhere, probably in something that cropped up in our interactions with everyone over the past few weeks, I started to let go of my sense of distance in terms of where everyone was and recognize it more in who everyone had become—or was becoming. When you live with someone daily, you barely notice the changes in them, not simply physical alterations but also modifications in personality, in their—and your—sense of their identity. Distance in terms of time tends to offer revelations of various kinds when, after long absence, you reunite once more. Children now have clearly become adolescents, their preoccupations and interests have expanded beyond their family lives, their conversations—their very vocabularies—are more mature, more grounded in deeper present knowledge. They rely less on the wisdom and knowledge (and approval) of their parents and grandparents. And the grandparents discover that they can turn for advice or guidance or relevant information to their own children who have become reliable masters of their own fields, their own environments, their own lives.

 

I used to think of life as something like a solar system: As an infant you are at the center of the system, aware only of the moment you're in, your own identity, your dependence on your parents; then you become an independent adult, a parent yourself, and your parents orbit more distantly as grandparents; then your children grow up, are independent, and become parents and you become a grandparent, often aware of the distance you've come from where you started out and what you used to be. Talking to my children about their work and their lives and observing my grandchildren engaging in their encounters with all of us and the outside world, I recognize that distance is in all of us and has been since we first began to exist.

 

 

Self-isolating during a pandemic well into its second year often makes you feel as if time has stopped moving forward. Each day is like countless days before and will predictably be like days to come, if other days actually come. During our weeks in Sarasota to escape allergy dangers back home, I sometimes struggle to recall what we did before we came here, whether our secluded life there differed from our secluded life here. We frequently ask one another what day of the week it is, and later I check the calendar on my watch or laptop to make sure it's still the same day.

 

But time itself has not been quarantined. The sun now rises a little later each morning, shifts its position in the sky a tad further south, illuminates our lanai at a slightly different angle. And because we have other family elsewhere in Florida whom we crossed the state to see last weekend, we've had to acknowledge that time is still passing, has passed, will keep passing.

 

We hadn't seen my sister-in-law—my brother's widow—for over two years and, like many distant relatives avoiding contagion, had missed my brother's funeral a year ago. We met Linda for lunch at a Coral Springs restaurant, the three of us the only customers entering masked. Her daughter and son-in-law and their children, except for a son in graduate school, were militantly unvaccinated, and though I'd known my niece all her life—had subbed as godfather at her christening—I'd worried about transmission if we met them. But only Linda was there, very much thinner now than when we saw her last. She mentioned her many siblings, whom we'd met decades earlier, and reviewed for us the ones still alive and the spouses surviving the ones who had passed. We tried to speak about my brother's death but choked up during our attempt at shared consolation. She knew that her present time was radically different than it had been over a year before; no matter how similar each day now seemed, she was always conscious of the past she carried with her.

 

That afternoon we drove to Daytona Beach, where our oldest grandchild had started her freshman year of college. At her parents' home in Sarasota, we had been alert to Zola's absence, of course, but her teen-aged brother was often out and about and only her younger sister was there to amuse us—or have us amuse her—with various board games, and so we didn't think too much about where she'd gone until we set off for her college. We went directly to the campus to meet her and her three roommates and treated them to dinner at a good organic restaurant. The girls were chatty and funny and we enjoyed their company. On the following morning we met our granddaughter alone—her roommates slept in—and she gave us a campus tour before we took her to breakfast. On the restaurant patio, we three unmasked and mostly alone, she relaxed for personable conversation. She knew where she was and who she was and whom she was confident she would become. She could fully inhabit the present and was confident of where it would take her into the future.

 

We returned to Sarasota that day, dropped off our seven-passenger rental car that temporarily replaced the four-passenger Honda Fit our granddaughter drove before college—the coeds all joked at length about learning to drive both stick and automatic and the order in which they'd learned them and in what country—and drove to our daughter's house to share our experiences on the east coast. The grandson was out with friends, and the young granddaughter set up the Herd Your Horses Game (which she won). Her parents enjoyed hearing our impressions of Zola's campus and roommates but were very conscious of having initiated the first stage of Empty Nest Syndrome, that inevitable period when children reach the end of childhood and launch themselves into adulthood—I saw my daughter tear up once after a cheery phone call. There was some comfort in thinking their daughter was handling growing up well.

 

Memories arose. When my daughter had been her daughter's age, we'd visited her on campus at Penn State her freshman year. On our return home to Michigan, three empty bedrooms and quieter meals reminded us that all our children were now college students. Since then, time has passed steadily, consistently, relentlessly, and now it was passing inexorably again. We would soon be back in Wisconsin, relying on FaceTime to provide a disembodied way to keep in touch with how our children and grandchildren were spending time in the present and moving into the future. We are well aware of how much we needed to remember the past.

 

 

The lanai in the ground-floor condominium we're renting opens to the east, towards golf course fairways. The daily sunrise comes a little later now that seasons have changed, and we expect our mornings to grow slightly darker daily. I usually work at the dining room table, facing the lanai, where Sue sometimes works if she rose earlier than I did, but with curtains open along that glass wall of our living area, the sun glares directly at me once it clears the stand of trees in the center of our view. I often move into the kitchen if no clouds dull the sun's intensity and I can't avoid its brilliance. Once the sun ascends high enough to be hidden from direct sight, I return to the dining area, distract myself by noticing the high arc of the golf course sprinklers—at least four rotating in the distance this morning, two of them dueling with one another—and then try to settle into some project in progress.

 

This morning, once the sprinklers turn off, the fairway is nearly devoid of motion of any kind. I see no birds, only an expanse of green grass interrupted by occasional gray patches of crushed seashells, the largest below five trees, four of them close together, the fifth a little way off. I don't know why the gravel needs to stretch so far to include the fifth tree or, for that matter, why the gravel is there at all when trees closer to the stream and to our condo complex have none. Six trees in another group aren't the same species as that group of five, but three widely spaced singles in line with that half dozen and a lone one like it are. Standing at the entrance to the lanai to check all this out I spot an isolated third quartet of trees, possibly a third species, clustered further into the course.

 

Gazing out of the lanai, I realize that each day I chiefly look for birds, as if nothing else would be visible in that landscape, but today I see all those trees. And, in my second autumn viewing them, I'm only now aware that, other than deciduous or coniferous, I don't know what kind of trees they are. Looking for any tree guides possibly stashed in a drawer or basket somewhere, I notice on the coffee table Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard, the book we finished reading aloud together last night. Perhaps it alerted me to the presence of the trees.

 

Simard chronicles her decades-long effort to understand relationships among forest trees, starting with studies of interchanges between Douglas firs and birches and the impact of clear-cutting and competitive logging practices on forest restoration, tree growth, and climate change. One of the richest elements of the book is her growing recognition of systems of communication in the natural communities that echo those in human communities, including personal dimensions of her own health. She makes us aware of the underground networks of interaction in neighboring root systems and brings readers to a deeper appreciation of the lives of trees. As she made clear in an earlier TED talk, available online, "Forests are not simply collections of trees, they're complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedback and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient [. . .]" She changes the way we comprehend the life of forests.

 

I'm not seeing a forest beyond my lanai, only intermittent small groups or starkly single trees. Virtually none have any plant growth around them where a golf ball might disappear, and that conifer cluster's brown ground cover likely is an accumulation of fallen needles. Only those few groups of trees are likely to be interlinked underground. Given the sand or seashells beneath them, the trees in bunkers may not be able to communicate with each other, let alone other species. All that relentless sprinkling, even in the midst of rain, is principally for the benefit of the grass on the fairways and greens; nurturing the trees is more of a necessary collateral effort—dead trees don't make an inviting golf course.

 

The course posts videos showing what fairways looked like stripped of grass, how uniformly green they'll be when the restoration is over. The abundance of powerful sprinklers suggests a vast network of pipes and hoses under the replaced grasses. I wonder what kind of soil subsurface there is for roots to reach.

 

After reading Simard I'm not just more attentive to the trees—I'm feeling a great deal of sympathy for them. At least when the golfers come back, the club will be sure to keep the isolated trees alive.

 

Notes: Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

 

Simard, Suzanne. How trees talk to each other: TED Talk, YouTube, August 30, 2016

 

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Talks at Google, YouTube, May 7, 2021