Reflections: Listen to Your Elders

An interesting side effect of the whole lockdown thing has been the impulse lots of us have felt to learn the hands-on skills that our forefathers—or foremothers, more likely—would have considered the mundane stuff of everyday existence. Suddenly it seems like everyone is cross-stitching, baking bread, making jam or canning home-grown vegetables. It’s interesting when you consider that while a tech boom transforms our society with Zoom meetings and contactless shopping and Amazon everything, enough of us have felt driven to start baking bread to have precipitated a nationwide flour shortage. When the aforementioned Amazon is capable of delivering a loaf of (relatively) fresh-baked bread to our doors in about the same amount of time that it takes us to bake our own, what does this tell us about ourselves? Is contactless shopping convenient? Certainly. Is it satisfying? Rather less so. When all the usual rules go out the window and we struggle to understand the strange new path life is following, there’s comfort in doing the practical, hands-on, tactile stuff of feeding, clothing, and housing ourselves. These are the things that anchor us in the here and the now. Wider world be damned; what’s close at hand matters more than ever. Perhaps it’s no surprise that in times of uncertainty we cleave to the tangible, the touchable, the nourishing. Netflix can only distract us for so long. We are analog creatures, after all. 

Another side effect of being confined to our native range is a renewed appreciation for all things local. Deprived of the ability to fly halfway across the country (or the world) in search of an Instagrammable moment, circumstances force us to consider, or reconsider, the merits of local attractions. On a beautiful May Saturday, facing yet another weekend weeding my newly installed vegetable garden, contemplating my sourdough bread failures, or figuring out what cross-stitching is anyway, I put my kayak on the car and set off to finally do something I’ve been meaning to do for twenty years: go and find the oldest bald cypress tree in North America. Despite having lived in St. Francisville most of my adult life, I had somehow failed to ever go and visit a tree which, at around fifteen hundred years old, is generally accepted to be the oldest living thing east of the Rocky Mountains. This despite the fact that it stands only about thirty miles from my house. This, for the publisher of a magazine devoted to celebrating “adventures close to home,” seems to be something of an oversight. Off I went.

[Read more: Cypress Avenue: In the middle of a Tangipahoa Parish swamp, the last uncut primary growth cypress forest north of Lake Pontchartrain stands strong.]

Apparently you do not get to be fifteen hundred years old by being easy to find. To visit the National Champion Bald Cypress when the river is high—which seems to be most of the time—you need a boat. The tree stands deep in the interior of the Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, a ten-thousand-acre tract of bottomland hardwood forest and cypress-tupelo swamp embraced by a bend in the Mississippi River west of St. Francisville. In early May, with the river at forty feet at the Baton Rouge gauge, the closest I could get to by car looked to be about seven miles from where the tree stands, according to compass coordinates given to me by photographer CC Lockwood. So I put my kayak into the water at the old St. Francisville ferry landing and set off for a four-mile slog up the Mississippi, to the mouth of an old canal that leads right into the heart of the refuge. This is where the adventure really begins. Gliding up the canal, surrounded by miles of water sliding silently through the sunken forest and guided only by some digital compass coordinates, I felt a very small and rather unprepared visitor into that primordial wilderness. I don’t know how Cat Island got its name, but given the size and impenetrable verdancy of the place, it’s easy to imagine some species of huge cat lurking here for hundreds, or thousands, of years. The deeper into the refuge I paddled, the larger the trees became—oak and tupelo gum giving way to towering cypress trees so large I began to wonder whether I’d know the National Champion tree when I found it. 

I needn’t have worried. An hour after leaving the main river channel the forest opened up on an expanse of open water marked on my map as Lake Platt; CC’s pin marking the big cypress appeared to be little more than two hundred yards away—somewhere behind what appeared to be an impenetrable wall of vegetation growing right to the waterline. But with seven miles of hard paddling behind me I wasn’t about to give up now, so after floating around for awhile looking for the path of least resistance I charged into the undergrowth, where I thrashed around thanking God my wife hadn’t accepted the invitation to come along this time. When eventually I emerged through the thicket I was in the presence of giants. Tall, graceful, impossibly broad cypress columns rose from the still water, their buttressed trunks pulling the eyes upward to the emerald green canopy far overhead. Drifting in the general direction of CC’s compass point I paddled from one tree to another, each more massive than the last. 

Finally, in a green glade, where it has stood since the fall of the Roman empire, was the oldest tree east of the Rockies. Even with fourteen feet of water hiding the broadest part of its base, the National Champion Bald Cypress is a massive living thing—a twisted, gnarled, study in the passage of time. I floated around the trunk for awhile, eating a PB&J, running a hand over its grayish bark and trying to decipher the runic inscriptions that have been carved by visiting graffitists over the aeons. None appeared to be in Latin. With a last look up its sweeping trunk I finished my sandwich and, content to be spending a summer discovering the best my native range has to offer, slowly paddled away.