Schulman Grove near Bishop in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California is home to several hundred Great Basin Bristlecone Pines (Pinus longaeva), the oldest non-clonal tree living anywhere on the planet. The oldest of them can be up to 5,000 years. And when they do eventually die, they stay standing for several more thousand years, so dense and resinous is their wood. They don’t rot, they weather away like stone.
These are really tough trees, only growing above 10,000 feet in a just few pockets of the eastern Sierras. They need cold, dry conditions because they evolved in the successive Ice Ages when the world was much colder and drier than it is now. Then, the Bristlecone grew widely across Southern California and into the deserts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Now the tree only grows in a very few cold, dry, high desert peaks, places that replicate the Ice Age.
Everything starts with one of these bristly seeds:
What can the Bristlecones Tell Us?
What can these trees teach us about survival or anything else? That’s what I came 7,500 miles from Australia to find out.
Making my way along the Discovery Trail, I found a bench beside one of the oldest trees in the grove. Clearing my mind and quietening the mental chatter I sat in a state of heightened meditative awareness. The only sound was that of snow-flakes pattering against my hood in a soft staccato. No bird song, no wind, only the muted voice of the wild.
Patterns of the Past
The first strong thought that came to me was ‘Respect the Past’ which I understood to mean that if I want to do something, I must first study the patterns of the past to understand how I got here. The future must flow on seamlessly from the past.
The Bristlecones respect the past. Their longevity is a sure sign. Each year of growth extends on the previous years. The tree’s slow growth pattern can repeat many thousands of times before its life force is spent. The harmony that the tree has with its environment comes from synchronizing it’s growth rate with that of the evolving environment around it – very, very slow.
Trees and other entities in the natural world all respect the patterns of Nature. Only humans think to put themselves apart from Nature. And that can be a costly mistake. I sometimes hear political statements advocating the destruction of what currently exists in favour of a utopian future. But the vision is not connected to reality. What’s more, they have not learned from history which social structures work and which do not.
This was the first interesting insight gained from siting with the Bristlecones.
All They Know is the Long Now
In a flight of fancy, I had thought that maybe the trees have some awareness of their great age. It seems though that the only awareness the tree has is of the long now of the eternal present. Perhaps there might be some memory of the annual cycle of the seasons. Each passing year registering in their awareness much like a human perceiving the rhythm of the waves washing onto the beach.
Bristlecone’s rate of growth is really slow. There was an exhibit on the trail of an ancient trunk sawn cleanly across to show the growth rings. One scientific paper I looked at when writing this said a Bristlecone might take a century to grow one inch (2.5cm) in diameter. The growth rings on the exhibit were so close together, that I could not distinguish single rings.
It is so cold and dry in the high sierra, and the soil so sparse and depleted that rapid growth is an impossibility. But doing anything fast runs the risk of invoking the old axiom that the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.