You are not logged in.
None
Other articles in Stories
THE SECRET PLACE OF TWO BOYS. 15 April 2009
Canyon 26 February 2009
Bled Dry 18 February 2009
| Imperfect Reflections: Ancient |
 |
 |
 |
| Stories |
| Written by Connor Delaney Rickett |
| Thursday, 05 February 2009 02:15 |
|
The beauty of nature is that it doesn’t ask those questions. It is content merely to be, and never asks why it is. Humans complicate things. We are shaped by nature, but we shape it as well. We ask questions of existence, and we expect our questions not just to have answers, but to be answered. We want to bind all truths, label them, and place them on the shelf. We tend to forget that we do not coexist with nature, we are part of it. We are reflected in nature just as we would be in a pond, even down to the ripples and distortions. Our technologies and civilizations have allowed us to change nature often and on a large scale, but five thousand years of civilization do not supersede three billion years of evolution. If nature is what we made it, we are one hundred times more so what it has made of us. If we want to understand ourselves we must look without, to the web of the life that surrounds us for answers, because we will not find them in ourselves. Ancient
The car was stopped, at the top of a pass, high, high, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We’d come from Sequoia National Park, and I think my mind was still simply adjusting to what I had seen; trees so big that they seemed to be more like pillars of stone than living things. They seemed too large to be living, too massive to grow or change, so much so that I could not picture one dying—that they would live as long as the mountain on which they grew seemed evident. Of course, such is not the case. Rome was already falling while the seeds of the oldest sprouted those first tiny tendrils and began their climb towards the sun. If they did not reach it, they at least came closer than any others. Ancient, giant, and majestic beyond words, they are still mortal things, and exist only for an instant. Back to the mountain. The wind was that high mountain wind, the kind that is always cold, and bites through any clothing. My jeans and sweatshirt did not even give it cause to pause. It carries a taste, or perhaps only a smell, that is unique to it. I suppose it’s what all the air high above the ground smells like, and it’s hard to describe. The air seems new, fresh rather than recycled, though it has been, many times over. I was climbing over hard, cold granite. Sharp grey stones laced with sparkling quartz bit at my numb hands, and the holes in the knees of my jeans. Small patches of summer snow still hid in the shadows. I was following the path of a spring up the mountainside. It was a young spring, with no true path, just haphazardly flowing over rocks that were barely beginning to erode away. There are many things like that in the Sierras, new things, things still waiting to become what they will someday be. The stream was as cold as the snow it had been just minutes before, and as clear as if it were crystal turned somehow to liquid. It was as if the water were so clear that the bottom were amplified, rather than obscured. Climbing up a small ledge over a shallow pool, I slipped, and was soaked up to my knees in a cold that took my breath away. The fine silt in the pond turned the crystal into a black cloud of swirling sand. Yet the peaks of the high mountains have no patience for marred beauty, so in a matter of moments the murk had washed away, and the water was clear once more. In the bottom of pool I saw a shimmer, which I knew to be the true reason men had braved these tall peaks to begin with; flakes of gold that had sunk into the silt were exposed to the sun once more. As I walked on, my legs, which had gone numb almost the instant the water had touched them, began to feel as if they were on fire. My feet had simply gone numb. I kept walking, still looking for what I had come to find. As I walked, I pondered on how anyone who wanted to end their life in a peaceful way might simply lay back in one of those mountain ponds. Perhaps fifteen minutes of staring at picturesque slopes, clouds racing above, the world turning below, while the water gently drank in the body’s heat, and then a gentle fall into sleep. Following this line of thinking, it also occurred to me that if my leg had broken when I had slipped, I would have been in big trouble. Still drinking in the pure scent of the mountains, tasting the stark beauty of the stones, and hearing the scuffling noises of hardy things that lived there, I finally reached my destination. A grove, or rather a loose conglomeration of trees. At first glance many looked dead, but a second glance showed tiny needles on spindly limbs. They looked like nothing so much as gnarly old men who had climbed to the top of the mountains, and grown bark and roots. Wrinkled, twisted, branches bent, they showed every sign that their lives had been hard. The wind in their branches sang a wordless, groaning, lament that sent chills down my spine. In the rough center of the grove stood what must have been the most twisted and gnarled tree that had ever rooted on those cold slopes. It clung, with roots like long, dark, fingers, to a great stone on the banks of the stream. Out of the bulk of dead wood, there was only single living branch, clinging desperately to survival, just as the tree had been doing for its entire existence. Many, if not all of the other trees, scattered about, old as they were, were undoubtedly the children of this ancient. I walked over to it, feeling the crackling of old broken branches, and with a numb hand reached out to touch the trunk. It was as cold as the air, and rougher than the granite beneath my fingers. I noticed that the great roots of the old one had cracked the massive boulder it spanned. The crack ran straight through; if the rock broke further, the tree would fall and die, if the tree died, the roots that held the stone together would do so no longer. Rock and tree were locked in a battle that had spanned a time human imagination could not, a battle of slow, solid strength, but both endure only by the strength of the other. Then I began to understand. Breath comes hard in the high mountains, but it was not the altitude that made it hard for me to breath, nor was the thin air what was making the word seem to spin. I realized I was touching an ancient thing. As old as, or older perhaps than, the spring which ran beside it. You see, if their lives were hard, then hard lives are the secret to longevity; I was standing in a grove of bristle-cone pines, touching one that was old, even for one of its kind. The tree I was touching had been rooted to this mountain, sending its first shoots upward when tribes in the fertile crescent were beginning to realize that the grain from the fields they hunted antelope on could be made into bread. It was already old when the first words were written, already a parent, of sorts, when Hammurabi wrote his Code of Laws in Babylon. The tree had survived droughts, avalanches, falling stones, the attentions of man, of animals, and the maladies of disease, all without moving, without understanding, without knowing its own existence. It has merely been, and I wondered then, as I wonder now, whether that might not still be the true secret of longevity, but it also brings a question. Why live so long, when time means nothing? I do not know that answer, and I would dare to guess. I do know that I understood that right there, in the harshest climates, on the slopes these young, young, mountains, both the largest, and the most ancient of things lived out their lives. To that tree, all of my life has been a moment, all of civilization a single lifetime. Yet, to the mountain all that tree’s life had been no time at all, and to the world we live on, the mountain is still being born. The wind had changed, and so had their song. It had become, in my ears, a funeral dirge, a tribute to all the things that had been in their time, only to fade away. They whispered over, and over again, stay, stay, don’t go, don’t change, let us live together, endure as long as the mountain. I forgot my running nose, my bleeding palms and knees, my numb hands and legs, and I saw something as clearly as if before there had been only murky silt in the streams of my thought. Suddenly, the current had carried it away, exposing what had always been there, but hidden. I understood completely that everything was change, and that change for the better or change for the worse resulted in evils and wonders that existed only for the briefest of moments, and they led, inevitably, one to the next. Men, trees, stones, the mountains themselves all march to the beat time plays for them, none ever escaping. I knew that if the tree could speak to me it would tell me, Winter comes, and goes. Summer comes, and goes. All else flows with time, and I have felt the stones of the mountain flow beneath my roots, surely as the young spring flows over them. And that if I could ask it what the meaning of life was, it would say only, living. I cupped some water in my hands, from where the roots touched the water, and brought it slowly to my lips. I drank it—water, dirt, blood, and all. It felt like ice in my chest, and the shock of the cold brought me back to the place I belonged. I still don’t know what possessed me to drink the water. Possibly I felt, deep-down, the water was what made the tree live so long, though it is really the tree that does that. I think, though, it was more that I wanted to share something with the tree, that, aside from simply being alive, I could share nothing with; I could not show it the way to understanding the significance of its long existence, nor could it show me the way to existing long enough to gain a significant understanding of my own. Either way, it felt right, as if it should have ended that way, and could not have really ended any other way. So I turned and followed the spring back to the road, shivering, bleeding, and as happy as I have ever been, merely to be living. Continuation: Shadow Dancer |
|
|