January 20, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Alex Ross’s fascinating “The Bristlecones Speak,” in which he explores his obsession with bristlecone pines – contorted, wraithlike trees that grow on the slopes of the White Mountains in eastern California and live for thousands of years. Ross visits an area of the Whites known as the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. He describes a forty-five-hundred-year-old bristlecone named Methuselah:

Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above. All told, the tree is an unprepossessing specimen; most people march past it without giving it a second glance. When I sat by the tree for an hour last July, the only visitor who took any notice of it was a dog named Dougie, who briefly sniffed the trunk and then darted away.

Ross visits the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Arizona (“Inside, researchers have access to a kind of arboreal Library of Congress: a vast collection of tree fragments from around the world, including cross-sections of giant sequoias. The lab is affixing each with a bar code, so that researchers can check out samples”). He tells about dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring dating. He visits the site of a study “comparing bristlecone populations with those of the limber pine, another hardy species that grows at high altitudes,” where he sees a bristlecone that, at first glance, appears to be long dead:

It looked as though it had been blown over in a storm, but tufts of green needles emerged from a branch on one side. A vein of live bark snaked around the dead trunk and disappeared into the ground. It was like a vine growing on a ruin, except that the ruin was itself.

My favourite part of “The Bristlecones Speak” is the final paragraph, a description of what Ross sees (and hears and feels) as he hikes out of the Schulman Grove:

By the time I headed back, night was falling. Light fades fast in the mountains, and I walked the last mile to the parking lot in near-darkness. But then a full moon rose, and the dolomite on neighboring slopes began to glow eerily bright, like phantom drifts of snow. The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling. When the wind stopped, the forest felt like a cavernous but soundproofed space—a silent concert hall, an empty cathedral. The moon lit up the mountains as I drove to the valley below.

That “The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely.