could it be too late
to learn what merest tree knows
‘Stone Soup’ is a folk tale in which a tattered traveler enters a village carrying nothing but a cooking pot. He is hungry and asks each villager he encounters for something to cook. All claim they have nothing to share. The traveler wearily finds his way to a nearby stream, dips water into his pot, plunks in a small stone, and sets the pot atop a cooking fire.
Soon a villager happens by and asks the traveler what he is cooking. “Stone soup,” the traveler replies and goes on to explain that stone soup is very delicious and, while he would be happy to share, the soup would be even better if it were garnished with a few vegetables. The villager hurries off, and soon returns with carrots. As word spreads, more and more villagers arrive bearing ingredients for the soup.
Such morality stories are often universal, have very old origins and, preceding writing, were passed from generation to generation - in one form or another - by oral tradition for perhaps thousands, of years. After each telling, eager listeners probably felt warmly sated and proud of themselves - just as if they had partaken of a particularly delicious stone soup to which they all, beyond any question, would certainly have contributed. In this current era, some might see the story as a possible riff on ancient creation myths (take stone, add water), but it is likely that many others would grumble and demur, viewing the ‘traveler’ as an ancestral one-percenter who would soon learn how to fill his pot with gold.
And while most of the villagers contributing vegetables and grains* to the proverbial stone soup probably had to soon move on to new lands because of the erosive loss of living soil caused by the rampant, catastrophic, destruction of sod for the cultivation of their crops, the bristlecone pictured here, growing on a substrate that has been sliding away naturally since the last glaciers melted, is gathering a stone soup of the most authentic and purest kind. A seasonally well-watered stone soup where roots and twigs and pine needles and microbes and fungi will subtly and silently confabulate in that mysterious, defiantly complex, more than two billion years old, alchemy which nurtures and sustains all terrestrial life. Eventually, with just a little luck, a bristlecone seedling may find sustenance here and the inevitable will be postponed for just a short while longer.
Walking through a grove of ancient bristlecones is often like walking across a tidal flat among cattywampus boats stranded by an outgoing tide. Only, the ‘flat’ is polished, sloped bedrock, the ‘boats’ are trees standing on tippy-toe roots or fallen at crazy angles, and the ‘tide’ is stone and rudimentary soil sliding inexorably out from under everything - and everywhere there are braided kelp-like stranded roots that lost contact with any semblance of living soil centuries, even millennia, ago.
It is said that loss of soil has been a major contributing factor to the demise of every great civilization that has ever existed - in an average of one thousand years. It is also said that even now soil is being lost around the world at a rate ten to one-hundred times the rate of replacement. Loss of soil is often the root cause (yes...I did;) of historic and contemporary involuntary migration. But soon there will be nowhere else to go** because - like a lot of other ‘pick-your-poison’ things we are hearing about these days - global soil is predicted to be seriously, irreversibly, depleted by the turn of this century.
In an analogous natural process that began about eight-thousand years ago in the Snake Range of Nevada, this is what is happening to high-altitude ancient bristlecones. Only, because bristlecones are - so to speak - at the top of their game, there is no ‘up’ to migrate to and, because of global warming, there is no ‘down’.
It is seductive to think of these scenic, millennia-old trees in terms of permanence - as something that, on the scale of a human lifetime, has been there forever and will be there forevermore. In reality, ancient bristlecones are a rare and very specific form of an almost metaphorically mundane and short-lived lower elevation tree (think Clark Kent) that long ago spanned the breadth of what is now sometimes referred to as the sagebrush ocean. That specific high-elevation form has pretty much served its purpose - which could be thought of as to be bountiful for a very long time in a place where not much else could, and (IMHO) become extraordinarily and inspirationally and hauntingly beautiful in the process. But even ancient bristlecones cannot flourish forever where the gift of opportunity slips constantly away.
Such trees are as transient as the soils that continue to slide away like a tide that will not return until eons after every one of them has fallen and only sparse bonsai versions of bristlecone have held on in cracks and tenuous bowls of rocky substrate for but a short while longer. The irony of this high-elevation situation is that lower elevation forests are generally the best builders, sustainers and stabilizers of soil on the planet. But no need to rush, trees that are yet living will frequently remain standing for a thousand years or more after they die - indelibly graceful and dignified to the very end.
Human nature is...well...now...regrettably...it is largely what defines Nature and, as such, could equitably be described as being that of a failed species. At the very least - especially the last 500 years - as that of a failed culture over eight-thousand years in the making.***
And so, as this era of heroic ancient trees - whose roots are, in the end, no match for flowing stone - is replaced by an era of trees the stature of bonsai, I sometimes envision a distant future when a seeker - wandering serene and alone among these diminutive and diminished groves - becomes aware of an eerily familiar sound and, kneeling gently before a tiny, isolated, wind-tousled tree, leans in closer and closer until finally - listening intently, hair brushed back from the ear, forehead almost touching the earth - she hears, emergent from the tree’s flittering, glistening branchlets, a softly whooshing exhalation that seems to whisper in exultation a dimly-remembered and once dismissive refrain from a darker human time long, long ago:
whhoosshhhh...ookaaaboommrrrrr...whhoosshhhhh...
. . . . .
*‘Wheat is Why’: The answer to every question you ever may have asked about who we are and how it came to this. Really.
**...unless you are in a position to hitch a ride to Mars with Bezos or Musk (see: ‘Full Disclosure’) - A cautionary tale: Within a just a few generations, stranded descendents of Easter Island aquanauts had lost both the technological legacy and the resources that would have enabled them to leave. Their fate was to stay and compete directly with the descendents of stowaway rats.
***It could be just a coincidence that this number is almost the same as the number of millennia substrate has been sliding off Snake Range ridges. (But, in fact, humankind has been struggling mightily with the 'coincidence' conundrum even unto today. Answers range from ‘everything’ to ‘nothing’.) Bottom line: Snake Range bristlecones have been slowing erosion for close to 8000 years, civilization has been accelerating it globally for more than 8000 years. Slowing wins.
(Full Disclosure: Because I live in a rural area and have been gouged my entire life by local merchants, I am a huge fan of Amazon/Prime. In addition I have an online subscription to the Washington Post. But I will never welcome Alexa into my life. Ditto a Cybertruck.)