The Trees That Were Here First

Up here on the flat, in the deep timber, let me tell you about the oldest living things you will ever stand next to — because you're in the middle of them right now, and most folks walk through without ever knowing.

These woods on the plateau were never cut. Not by Ricketts, not by anybody — this is old-growth forest, one of the last true stands of it in all of Pennsylvania, and the government set it aside as a natural landmark. And the trees are old past easy imagining. Look at these hemlocks and white pines, some of them four feet through and better than a hundred feet tall. Many of them have been standing right here for more than five hundred years. And that's the modest number. When one of these giants has come down over the years and people have knelt and counted the growth rings, they've found trees that lived nine hundred years. Nine hundred. Let that land on you.

A tree standing here nine hundred years was a seedling before there was an England worth the name. It was already ancient when the first European ships bumped into this continent. It stood through every drought and blizzard and lightning strike of nine centuries, while down in the valleys whole worlds of people came and went — the native nations, the settlers, the lumber companies, the wars. Empires rose and fell and this tree just kept quietly making rings, one a year, minding its own business on the top of a Pennsylvania mountain.

And it's still here. You can put your hand on it. Think about everything that's happened since it sprouted, and here it stands, older than all of it, older than the whole American story, patient as stone. Colonel Ricketts saw these trees and couldn't cut them, and I understand him completely. Some things you just leave standing, out of plain respect. Walk soft through here. You're among your elders.