A while back a friend took me on a semi-strenuous hike up a mountain somewhere in British Columbia (where is secret). All she would say is the effort would be rewarded with a pleasant surprise.
It worked. After about a half hour of huffing and puffing upward along switchbacks and scrambling over boulders, we came upon this:
Well I’ll be damned. A wooden elephant!
This was especially fortuitous because we had just been talking about gathering some firewood.
More seriously, a logbook inside a tupperware container explained further:
Welcome to the Mastodon!
“Mourn" an American Mastodon (M. americanon). This sculpture is of an animal that has been extinct for approximately twelve thousand years, likely because of human pressures. These massive creatures were once widespread across North America. The American mastodon is the first species that scientists recognized as having gone extinct. In this way, they are fundamental to our understanding of extinction. I built this sculpture because I wanted to give myself, and others, the opportunity to see a mastodon in an environment similar to its natural habitat. I've kept its location secret: I like the magic of people knowing it exists but not knowing where: I also love the idea of someone stumbling upon it in the woods. Please help maintain the mystery: do not share its location online.
My hope for this sculpture is that if someone does stumble upon the mastodon, or sees images of it, they might reflect on the animals living today that could be lost due to human impacts. Just as the mastodon became a symbol of extinction.I hope that my sculpture can be a message of conservation. Please share your thoughts here and photos with #mournthemastodon
Here was some public art I could get behind. For one thing, the piece is visually arresting and expertly constructed (with the driftwood resembling a mastodon’s flowing hair). For another, it makes a larger point without being overly didactic. And of course, it’s in the wilderness rather than an art gallery, greatly amplifying the element of surprise. The artist must have made many hikes up the steep incline, hauling heavy pieces of driftwood, to construct it. That‘s both impressive and inspiring.
I’m going to link to the original CBC story on BC artist and conservationist Guthrie Gloag and his work, but out of respect for his desires, I’m NOT going to link to Mothercorp’s dumbass followup, which revealed the mastodon’s location.
This isn’t the first time an ancient pachyderm has surprised me up close. Back in 2016, BC’s Royal Victorian Museum had an exhibit called “Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age.” The centrepiece was the body of a 40,000 year old woolly mammoth, said to be the best-preserved specimen of its kind. Like Gloag’s wooden mastodon, it didn’t disappoint.
The baby woolly mammoth, about the size of a large dog and named Lyuba for the area in Russia where she was discovered, was a bit on the flat side after spending tens of thousands of years packed in permafrost. But otherwise she looked astonishingly untouched by time. I looked into Lyuba’s vacant eyes and wondered how she met her fate. On that point, scientists have an educated guess. She was found to have dirt far up in her trunk, and she possibly fell into a mud pit she couldn’t escape or be rescued from.
The extinction of mastodons, woolly mammoths, giant sloths and all the other “megafauna” that ranged across North America thousands of years ago has been blamed on Homo sapiens’ spring training as the planet’s alpha predator. But there are other suspects. The exinction of Late Pleistocene megafauna roughly coincides with archaeological evidence of impacts from fragments of a large comet or asteroid, 12,800 to 11,700 years ago. These impacts are not believed to have been anything like the Cretaceous–Tertiary disrupter that did in the dinosaurs, but they may have been big enough to take out a swath of large, warm-blooded critters, while leaving some bipedal troublemakers free to reproduce (Lyuba would have been spared this fate by living almost 30,000 years earlier).
When it comes to planetary upsets, Homo sap is a bit player. Throughout our galaxy, comets, supernovae, and gamma ray bursters are thought to be the big life n’ civilization enders.
Our days our undoubtably numbered, whether it’s in decades, centuries, or millennia. Who knows, perhaps the next virus to escape from a jungle, factory farm, bioweapons lab or wet market may transform half of the population into flesh-eating zombies and leave the other half as fast-moving lunch. Or perhaps there’s an asteroid on the way with our species’ name on it. But whatever joker awaits in our cosmic deck of cards, Earth is certain to keep heating up along an uncomfortable gradient, stress-testing our ability to adapt and dessicating the wood in the mountain mastodon.
Though the marvelously-monikered Guthrie Gloag meant his installation art to decompose over time, I like to think of it as outlasting us. After humankind bites the dust, I can foresee spindly beings descending from the skies and coming across it. “How odd,” they will chirp in their extraterrestrial argot, “they destroyed themselves and took most of the mammals with them…yet they worshipped elephants.”
They’ll revise this snap intepretation once they decode Gloag’s logbook. And because because they are wise, benevolent beings who like surprises, they will abide by the creator’s wishes, keeping the mastodon’s location secret from other civilizations so they can discover it themselves.
See more work by Guthrie Gloag.
The baby mastodon's remains made me feel quite sad. The wooden statue is remarkable. Great article. Thank you!