Oblivia Cracks the Case of the Rosewood

The Case of the Forest's Last Instrument

Honduras has a specific quality of green—not the dense, layered green of Borneo or the searing yellow-green of the African savanna, but a cloud forest green: wet and cool at altitude, shot through with mist, the kind of green that hides its interior. Oblivia stood on the trail above Copán and breathed it in and felt, with the certainty she always felt in places she had not been before, that she understood it. She had read about Honduras in a travel piece in a magazine that used words like 'undiscovered' and 'authentic.' She had booked the Resonance & Root Sound Healing Retreat based on its website, which showed photographs of indigenous percussion instruments being played at sunset over the ruins.

What the website had not said was that the marimba bars being played in those photographs were rosewood. What the rosewood had not said—because rosewood is not in the business of saying anything, having been cut from its tree and dried and shaped and polished until it rings at a frequency that serious musicians describe as the closest thing to the human voice that a percussive instrument achieves—was that it had come from a tree that had been felled illegally inside the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve at night, transported on an unmarked truck to a workshop in Copán Ruinas, and shipped from there to Austin, Texas, under a CITES permit that had been issued for a different shipment of wood entirely. The workshop had a name. The name of the workshop was Comunidad Resonante de Copán, which sounded like a community arts organization and was registered as one, and was in fact a shell entity controlled jointly by Resonance & Root LLC of Austin, Texas, and Harwood & Fox Percussion of Portland, Oregon.

Elena Vásquez had been tracking the trucks. She was a forest monitor with the National Forest Conservation Program and had been documenting illegal rosewood extraction from the Biosphere Reserve for two years. She had filed seventeen formal reports. Of the seventeen, four had been acknowledged. Of the four, one had resulted in an inspection. The inspection had found nothing because it had been announced in advance. The announcing had not been accidental.

Marco Ordóñez had not been announced. Marco had been a park guard working the night trails in the reserve, and he had found the stumps—fresh ones, three meters in circumference, sap still running—on a Tuesday in March, and he had found the truck, and he had photographed both. He had sent the photographs to his supervisor. Four days later he was found at the base of a hillside trail, sixty meters from the nearest footpath. The site inquest's report used the phrase 'working at night in difficult terrain.' It did not mention the photographs.

Marco Ordóñez, 44. Park guard, Copán sector. Found dead March 19th. His supervisor received the stump photographs at 23:14 on March 15th. The supervisor is also listed as a monthly stipend recipient in Comunidad Resonante de Copán's operational accounts, which Elena has obtained copies of. The photographs were not entered into any official record and Marco's phone was not recovered from the scene. Elena Vásquez has been receiving anonymous warnings to stop her monitoring work for six weeks. The most recent warning was hand-delivered to her home address.

Resonance & Root LLC (Austin, TX) invites Ms. Oblivia Appropria to participate in our inaugural Copán Resonance Retreat as our featured spiritual collaborator. Ms. Appropria will lead daily somatic practices alongside our master percussion artisans and is invited to document the retreat's sacred sound program for her archive. In addition, the retreat would welcome Ms. Appropria's energetic assessment of a recent 'atmospheric disturbance' at our partner workshop — the departure of a community member. No formal retainer is required; accommodation, private transport, and $30,000 in retreat sponsorship fees will be provided. All participants have signed our standard media and non-disclosure agreement.