Chapter 5. Bread and chocolate

Where we learn about the social life of a rainforest and discover a tree that makes bread

For those arriving here outside email, you might be wondering why the month-long gap between Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. As with all good things, there is a perfect explanation. December was the month we had our Holiday Tour here at The Cacao Muse! It was a month-long party, with lots of chocolate, great newsletter writers, and a few cats and dogs. We never closed down the party space so you can take a peek anytime.

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Note: Author commentary at the end of the chapter. This commentary is exclusive to the Cacao Muse; you won’t see it on Amazon, my author site, or printed inside the wrappers of my favorite chocolate bars.

Old-growth rainforests have a way of impressing their soul into your heart; and once they do, they’re forever a part of you.

His grandfather’s words playing in his head, Max followed the painfully brilliant light of the sun as it pierced the tips of mighty canopies all around him, flooding down through miles of winding branches and vines. He recalled the diary entry from his grandfather’s old leather notebook from his travels in South America, which he had asked to keep after his grandfather’s death. He had read the notebook cover to cover at least a hundred times, late at night, under the covers, and imagined himself weaving his way through the dense jungle with old Grandpa Redwood.

If you follow the light of the sun as it winds down along trunks thicker than elephant hides, sliding along the bulging bellies of dewdrops and the glistening backs of beetles, dappling the smooth curve of a black jaguar’s back as he slips into the humid darkness deep below, you may feel the very marrow of your bones sigh with a strangely familiar longing. For here breathes the long-term memory of evolution, here diversity frolics carefree and wild, here the organic chaos of life forms the prototypal bonds that link the smallest, simplest organisms to the alpha species in charge of our planet: Homo sapiens.

Max felt that strangely familiar longing now. The rainforest his grandfather had written about so poetically so long ago was somewhere far away in another land further south, but it felt just like the rainforest Max had entered now. His footstep after moist footstep fell quietly in with those of the children walking behind him in single file, twenty or so strong, carrying hand-woven baskets. Itzel was just in front of him, at the head of the line, and her brother Juan just behind. Doña Victoria led the group with a confidence that would have given the biggest jungle cat a fair amount of pause. Instinctively, Max put his hand against his shirt to make sure the jaguar figurine was there.

In contrast to the peals of laughter that had just moments before bounced off the palm thatch of the Great House, the children walked in a hushed silence, heads semi-bowed in reverence and respect for the grandest elder of them all—the rainforest. Only Itzel looked up, way up to the tops of the massive canopy trees. Max followed her gaze—and nearly swooned. The trees were so tall, the vines so intertwined with branches and trunks, and the rays of light so dazzling he became momentarily disoriented. He faltered in his step and felt someone bump into him from behind.