The fact that the location of the world’s oldest tree has to be kept secret encapsulates everything that’s bad about humanity.
There’s a story about that, actually.
According to the smithsonianmag.com, the world’s oldest bristlecone pine was a nearly 5,000 year old tree later named Prometheus. In 1964, a man named Donald Rusk Currey decided to use an increment borer to determine its age (a process that cuts a small hole into the center of the tree trunk, and is not intended to kill the tree). Unfortunately, the borer got stuck. He and a park ranger cut the tree down to remove the equipment, and when they counted the tree rings, they realized their mistake. Oops. This incident lead to better protection of the remaining bristlecone pines.
There’s some wiggle room about what can be called “the world’s oldest living tree.” The world’s oldest living single tree is the tree that the OP is referring to. Its name is Methuselah,and it is also around 5,000 years old. Since its location is unknown, nobody knows what it looks like. But it might be this tree here:
But technically, it isn’t the oldest living tree. Let me explain.
It turns out that root systems of trees can send up genetically identical saplings (aka clones) via their root systems. Like so:
Which means the original trunk can die, but since the root system is attached to other trees which give it nutrients, it lives on. The root system can theoretically do this indefinitely. So the tree trunks could be fairly young, but the roots could be large and very, very, very old. So the oldest “tree” isn’t a small grove, it’s a logic-defyingforest.
I’d like you to meet Pando.
This male quaking aspen covers 106 acres and is ancient. I’m talking an estimate of 80,000 years. The trees you can see are just “shoots” he sent up, and their average age is 130 years old. He is his own forest. If trees could talk, I’d love to hear what he had to say.
He might be dying, due to insects and drought (hmm, wonder what could have happened to cause that). A section of Pando is being studied in an attempt to find a solution. But in the meantime, we can enjoy him for his beauty.
When you die, you appear in a cinema with a number of other people who look like you. You find out that they are your previous reincarnations, and soon you all begin watching your next life on the big screen.
If I shared anything with my reincarnations, it was in our belief in fate. Though each previous version of me held a very different perspective of it. The me that had died in the Great Depression thought it a terrible thing, wicked and omnipotent. The me that had lived as king in the middle ages thought it a gift presented by God. Me, I believed it a promise.
My next reincarnation was a baby with deep blue eyes and pink skin named George. He started his life alone. George cried so much that they had to put him in a separate room, devoid of the other infants. A nurse checked in on him every few hours. Nobody blamed her. She had more pressing matters to attend to, such as George’s mother, whose heart rate was steadily growing out of control and her breathing stuttered.
When the young lady died, she did so whispering her son’s name. I wasn’t sure if she ever even got a look at him. In that hospital room, with the flat-line beep of a heart rate monitor, the nurse checking on George stood, lips quivering and fists clenched.
In this world, children were supposed to be loved by their parents. If not the mother, who else would? For George, it was nobody, not even himself.
The orphanage boasted posters of smiling blonde-haired boys and girls with deep blue eyes. George could’ve been a literal poster boy if he ever smiled. But no matter how many stuffed animals they threw his way, how many hugs and smiles they offered him, they could never get those lip-locked edges to curve up.
By the time he had hit thirteen, he had already smoked his first cigarette and drank his first beer. Nobody wanted to tell him, but everybody knew. Nobody adopted teenagers. He would be a lifer, an unwanted child turned into an unwanted adult.
And on his seventeenth birthday, he bought a gun.
None of us watching were worried at all for other people. Despite everything that happened, George was a gentle boy and that was his problem. Nobody could reach him through his overpowering politeness. It took a mother’s love to chip away at the boy and all he had was an old photo of a ghost who once loved him.
He snuck out when the moon had hit its apex, left all the money he had in a small package with a letter. It read: Thanks for taking care of me. And that was it. He didn’t sign it, didn’t address it to anyone, he wrote it all in a cheap pen and stuffed it inside with twelve-hundred dollars cash.
The spot he chose was out of the way. Nobody was nearby to be disturbed. No runners would come this way to be scared. The only selfishness he allowed himself was that it was by a river, a black canvas of glittering moonlight.
“I was never meant to live,” he told himself and us. “This is fate.”
Some of us nodded with him. Others shook their heads. I stared, my neck stiff, eyes unblinking as he put the gun to his temple.
“No,” I whispered. “Don’t do it.”
Some of us, the more boisterous ones, cheered along, egging the boy to pull the trigger. They had seen a thousand lives and would see a thousand more until all of mankind vanished. A single life in a single point of time meant nothing to them. But for me, this was my first.
“No,” I said and stood from my seat. “Please.”
The screen flickered to the tremble of his finger. Soon, it would go completely black. He would fulfill his fate.
“No!” I screamed. “This isn’t how it should go!”
The boisterous ones were no longer laughing. The others around me turned away their eyes. At one point in time, they had all been me. They had thought that life mattered, that our pain had meaning. But after a thousand shows of a thousand lives, most of them only slept through the show.
I clenched my fists, the words swelling in my lungs. Then, I took the breath to give them life and I prayed, that somehow, I wasn’t just a dead man with a loud mouth.
“Don’t pull,” I yelled, tears pouring down my cheeks and snot from my nose. “Not until you have a chance. Maybe you never will, maybe this will be how it always is, maybe I’m wrong about everything, but there’s meaning in your pain! I can’t tell you if I’m right or if I’m certain.” My voice dropped low. “I can only promise.”
George closed his eyes. He hadn’t heard me, of course he wouldn’t.
I held my breath.
Then, George broke down, the gun still pressed to his head. “So cruel,” he whispered to nobody. “After all this, all I have is a promise. That’s all my fate has to offer.”
My eyes went wide. My jaw dropped. “And that’s enough,” I said, my voice too low even for myself to hear.
There, George stood, the gun rigid in his hand. And when his tears fell, so too did his gun.
All the people baiting the haikubot disappoint me. A proper haiku should have deep nature feelings, lack of “me” talk, and a seasonal indicator, but even if you’re not a traditionalist with a boner for Basho, y’all fuckers aren’t even trying to split your posts into reasonably nice-sounding lines. Smh
As the leaves fall down, so does the intelligence of online poets.
ill bait haikubot in whatever way i choose by the way its fall
a haiku battle rages between two NaNo bros about a bot
who will win this fight? tune in next time to find out who haikubot picks
YOU FUCKING COWARD HEY GREED-THE-DORKALICIOUS COME FIGHT ME NOW BRO
“deep nature feelings” full offense but that my guy just sounds pretentious
“deep nature feelings” full offense but that my guy just sounds pretentious
^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
me: so i’ve got a final paper and an online exam both due around noon tomorrow
me: *starts writing original fiction*
me: nailed it
And during this recent interview in Manhattan, [Braugher] dwells on his two passions: his family and his work.
What fuels that love for acting?
“It’s an emotional release,” he explains — an outlet that might otherwise lie beyond his reach. “Men are not usually forthcoming in the expression of their emotions.”
Growing up in a rough Chicago neighborhood, he was blessed with loving and demanding parents. “But I was socialized in a certain way. Even as a kid there’s no real suitable outlet for emotions that don’t fall within a certain small range: anger, lust, ridicule — Army emotions, I call them.”
Then, at Stanford University as an engineering major, he helped out a friend by filling a vacant role in a campus play. He liked it — a lot. He had found a new major, and an unexpected calling.
“As an actor, I’m allowed — encouraged! — to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But I’ll be damned if I can give myself permission to bring it out as a man.“
“As a father,” Braugher goes on, looping back to one passion from the other, “I’ve tried to encourage my children to have a broader and deeper emotional life than I’ve had. I want my sons to be able to express their feelings about things,” he says with feeling he seems fully able to express.
I read this interview over a decade ago now and the concept of “Army emotions” is still key to helping me understand what men deal with in terms of toxic masculinity.
just moving along like everyone else 