Put your hand on one of these old hemlocks for a moment, before we walk on — and think about what a tree like this has lived through, standing in these woods the whole time.
A tree like this, three hundred years old and more, was already a good-sized tree when there were still only a handful of little colonies clinging to the coast — no United States, no Maryland as we know it, none of it. It was standing in these mountains, dropping its cones, when the last of the Native peoples still hunted here. It stood through the Revolution, and the Civil War, that it never heard a shot of. It stood while the rest of the forest for a hundred miles around was cut to the ground and hauled away — and somehow, these were spared. They have drunk from the same river and the same rain, in the same green shade, for longer than anyone you have ever known has been alive, longer than their grandparents grandparents.
We come and go so fast, you and I — a person whole life is a single season to a tree like this. And there is something wonderful and humbling in that. Standing among these ancient ones, you get to feel, just for a minute, how brief and how precious your own little while really is. That is a gift these old trees give, free, to anybody who stops and pays attention. So pay attention. You will not stand among many things this old again.
Photo: Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region · Public domain
