Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology

I was reading yesterday about a Dutch botanist in the late nineteenth century who wandered around looking for the world's oldest tree. He heard about the bristlecone pines in the mountains of California and resolved to visit them, armed with a specially-built instrument made in Sweden to his specifications at enormous expense. This was basically a very long, very thin, precision boring tool, capable of extracting a core from a tree, running through to the centre, which the botanist would use to determine the tree's age. So off he went with his young assistant to make the long sea voyage round to San Francisco, and then trek with a guide up into the mountains. After a couple of weeks braced against the bitter mountain winds, measuring various gnarled, bleached and, well, bristly bristlecone pines, it was with great excitement at the fulfilment of a life's work that he found the one he declared to be the oldest living organism. Over 4,500 years in age, he named it Methusaleh, and retired back to his tent in anticipation of a welcome trip back to the soft beds of the City by the Bay's whorehouses.

Life, though, is rarely that simple. His assistant, having spotted a likely candidate for Most Ancient Thing Around earlier in the expedition, only for his theory to be dismissed categorically by his contemptuous (and all-too-familiar) boss, decided to check it out for himself. So he unpacked the Swedish Instrument and hiked off determinedly, muttering and cursing to himself. Who knows whether it was haste, or guilt, or suppressed rage that caused the problem. Perhaps one too many consoling bourbons the night before. Or perhaps it was that to be a truly great botanist in the golden age of mechanical apparata, one needed a preternaturally steady hand. Whatever the truth, the young man drilled through to the heart of his pretender to the crown of the Arboreal Gerontocracy, shifted the tiny gears into reverse, and found the handle came off in his hand.

As when we put a seashell to our ear to hear the voice of some ocean distant in space and perhaps time, if you place your head in a hollow tree on a quiet day, when the wind is right, you can perhaps hear our young anti-hero's dismay turning his guts to liquid. A career up in smoke. A reputation buried. A year's wages sunk in debts to some Swedish bloodsucker. He picked and pulled and dug with his knife, but the pencil-thin, diamond hard, precision-engineered coring screw of the device remained buried deep in Methusaleh's rival, and it wasn't budging. So, he chose a course of action which, though at first it seems to us appalling, on reflection it has as its core aim the concealment at all costs of having done something bad, and which of us cannot relate to that impulse? He went and found a couple of their guides, lumberjacks by trade, and bribed them handsomely to cut down the tree overnight and in secret, and toss its carcass down into the depths of some ravine.

The evidence thus hidden, the tool thus reclaimed and returned to its crate, the damage explicable through the harsh bounces of the mountain muletrain, he sets himself the penance of counting the rings in his core sample, before he will allow himself an hour's sleep. As he reaches the end, or as realisation grows shortly beforehand, perhaps he blanches. Perhaps he tells himself there has been a mistake. How many times does he make himself repeat the count? The answer may vary a little each time, tired eyes playing tricks, bitten-to-the-quick fingers sliding over the same annular ring twice, but the conclusion is undeniable. Our late tree predated Methusaleh by more than a century. It was, or had been, briefly and with one witness, the world's oldest living organism.

But how do we know this? Well, to say there had been one witness is not quite true. Our lumberjacks, always on the lookout for the main chance, were not so foolish as to waste prime timber down a bottomless ravine. Instead, after the respectively nervous and oblivious botanists were long gone down the mountain path and back in the comforting arms of Mimi and Peg, they went back for the tree, and logged most of it for a handsome profit. From the stump, though, they took a thick section, straight across, thinking it would make a handsome table-top for some rich oil baron's or press mogul's mansion. The track then goes cold, and our cross-section of Methusaleh's heavyweight challenger eludes us for some time, but by the 1940s it had evidently crossed the mountains into Nevada, and was hung in pride of place behind the tequila bottles and tomahawks in the bar of the brand new Thunderbird Casino, Las Vegas. And ever since, any customer can prop himself at the bar, armed with a beer and a shot, and with narrowed eyes set about the Herculean task of counting the rings. It's as good a way as any to pass the afternoon.