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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

A little perspective

Checking in with my old friends deep in the swamp

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 3/23/16

LOST LAKE—Sometimes, at least for me, a visit to old trees helps to keep things in perspective. We view the world from the vantage point of a small, fragile, albeit admittedly clever, primate that …

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A little perspective

Checking in with my old friends deep in the swamp

Posted

LOST LAKE—Sometimes, at least for me, a visit to old trees helps to keep things in perspective. We view the world from the vantage point of a small, fragile, albeit admittedly clever, primate that struts upon the stage of life for a few score years, before meeting our usually quiet end.

By the time scale of an old tree, we live in dog years. And while we humans have a pretty high estimation of ourselves in general, it’s hard not to feel puny and insignificant when standing next to a giant of the forest.

This time of year, when the snow has dropped, I always try to make time for a visit to some of my favorite old friends out here in the hidden away corners of the Lost Lake Swamp. These are the trees that avoided the logger’s axe back in the day, usually because they were just too hard to get to. There are plenty of places like that out in the big swamp, small upland islands where some of the largest trees I know of in Minnesota can still be found. Giant white cedar, some of which likely began growing about the time that Columbus reached America. Huge yellow birch, with crowns like a mighty oak, that have been growing at least since the founding of our nation. There’s even a few astonishingly old white pine, though most are long since past their prime. But even in death, these old trees stand as reminders of the brevity of a mere human’s existence. I know of massive white pine snags still out in the swamp that have been standing dead for decades and will probably be standing still long after I’m in the ground.

Some organisms on Earth live their lives in hyper-drive. Shrews, for example, live an average of 14 months, but they live at a pace that we humans can barely imagine, with a heart that beats as astonishing 25 times a second. That’s 1,500 beats per minute, compared to the human average of 65-70. Shrews rarely sleep since going even five hours without food can be fatal to an animal that lives in what we could only consider to be a non-stop adrenaline rush.

We humans live life at a more middling pace, although we still rush through our moment in the sun compared to the pace of some of our fellow creatures, like whales and giant tortoises, many of which routinely live more than a century.

But even by those standards, old trees live in slow time, the kind we humans can barely perceive. In the 25-plus years that I’ve made regular rounds to my old tree friends, I’ve grown gray and now experience the aches and pains of middle age. My friends, by contrast, stand entirely unchanged, at least to my human eyes.

There’s something to be said for that, particularly to those of us caught up in the human world, where the pace of change can seem dizzying most of the time. My old friends in the forest are like anchors, with connections to something rooted deeply in the Earth, both literally and metaphorically. I must be a pagan at heart, I guess, because, for me, these old trees are like priests or pastors, gurus or rabbis. In their presence, I can feel something close to the profound.

At a time when it’s right to wonder about the future of this troubled world, I take some solace in the thought that there’s still a few places, out here deep in the swamp, that make room for the slow lives of big trees.