Greetings earthlings,
I learned a new word recently: Saeculum. It came to me by way of Mandy, my partner, who encountered it in a book she’s reading called Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit. Here’s the excerpt that she shared with me:
There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.
The timing of this little nugget dropping into my consciousness was perfect as recently my family and I visited the Vernon Nature Area in northwestern Ontario where we encountered a very large White Pine described by the trail sign as being over three hundred years old. It certainly looks it. Its diameter at its base is easily four feet and it towers over the rest of the forest by at least twenty feet.
There aren’t any trees like this on the northern plains where I grew up. You may encounter a huge Cottonwood—and they can truly get huge—but they are very fast growing and short lived. Touching its bark may only transport you back a hundred years or so. There may have been very old oaks around here at some point, but I think they were all cleared away for agriculture.
But take a two-hour drive from Winnipeg into the Canadian Shield and you may encounter a true old-timer that can connect you with a much deeper past. They are few and far between, though. The frantic onslaught of settlement during the 19th century saw the deforestation of essentially all the old-growth forests in the northeast (and the subsequent extinction of the passenger pigeon).
So, finding this ancient White Pine was special. We caressed its bark. We craned our necks all the way back to see its crown, which is made up of massive limbs flaying this way and that, with dense clusters of long needles that sound lovely in the breeze. I didn’t want to leave.
Back at the cabin we were staying at, I remained dumbstruck by the experience of meeting that huge, old pine. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But then Mandy mentioned something she had discovered at her work that pulled me out of my revery. She is an Archivist with the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, and she recently encountered a map from 1794. It was created by Phillip Turnor for the Hudson’s Bay Company and “exhibited most of the first inland exploratory knowledge collected by the HBC at the time,”1 including the region we were staying at near Lake of the Woods.
“The map’s almost as old as that pine,” I said flippantly.
It took a few seconds for the weight of my words to hit. That White Pine, if the trail sign can be taken as accurate, started life in about the 1720s. That’s seventy years before the Hudson’s Bay Company had its first map of the inland Hudson’s Bay watershed.
This new perspective hit hard. I was like David St. Hubbins standing before Elvis Presley’s grave.
My thoughts spiralled around all the events that have occurred during this White Pine’s lifetime. It was already old when the first settlers arrived in what would become western Canada. It was already old when the Dominion of Canada confederated in 1867. It was already old when the Numbered Treaties were signed in the 1870s. It was already old when Winnipeg was incorporated in 1873. It was already old when the railroad connecting Manitoba with the east was finished in 1882…
In short, virtually all the historical events that have converged and conspired to make my existence a possibility have occurred during the lifetime of this pine. And the tree still lives! And will very likely continue to live when I’m gone!
Makes my life seem pretty small.
It also makes me want to crack a cold one and crank Trooper.
“Phillip Turnor’s Map,” Archives of Manitoba, 2 August 2023, https://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/spotlight/philip_turnor_map.html.
Your observations are always so well placed to help share a more humbled appreciation of the world around us.
I don't think I truly started to appreciate the layered histories of the area that I grew up in until much later in my adult life. I am also fortunate enough to have studied ecology, with an interest in deep ecology and the deep time perspective. Having a friend who is a geologist and material science researcher also has broadened my horizons on looking at the Earth from timelines far older than a mere human life.
Looking back, it might have been because I grew up near the Drumheller valley in Alberta, and a deep seated appreciation of time might have been planted from my years exploring the hill slopes and hiking in the Rockies - finding fossils of long extinct marine life, dinosaur bones, fossilized wood, and the occasional arrowhead to remind me that we are merely walking in the footsteps of others who came before us, both human and non-human. But also that the landscape is a constantly evolving system, almost as if the surface of the Earth itself is an organism that grows and changes with time.
When we start to view the world through a perspective of much longer lived things, like trees, or rocks, or fossils, I think we start to understand our own position in a different light.
Your story about the pine is a good example of the short-livedness of humans and our living memory. Yet, it also highlights the amazing talent that we have learned to transmit living memory through history - either through maps, or stories, or what have you. It is humbling to be reminded that there are living things and ecological processes much slower and longer lived than us, and if they could speak to us we might have a drastically altered understanding of our place on this planet. I also wonder what stories they would tell.
Not to take this to a dark place, but I am. I spent most of my life hiking in the wilds of Alaska. I was always in awe of walking through a group of trees that had been ancient when the first European settlers came. So humbling. This insignificant ape walking amongst them. They never noticed me, but I marveled at them. Those experiences have had a profound impact on my life and how I attempt to live it. Now I see the footage of the wildfires in BC and Northwest Territories. So much destruction. Yet these things happen so frequently they are not news worthy. In the US they are only covered when they impact air quality in us cities. Oh my, the ecological memory we are destroying. And oh how we have failed those who are coming behind us.