The Patience of Old Growth
The old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest measure time on a scale that mocks the rhythms of human attention.
A single Douglas fir in a forest like this one can be eight hundred years old. The fallen nurse log in the foreground began its horizontal life perhaps three hundred years ago, and the hemlock seedlings rooted in its decaying length are themselves sixty or seventy years into the slow work of becoming the next canopy. The moss — every surface of every vertical and horizontal plane in the frame — has been adding millimeters of green biomass to itself, through continuous wet winters and misted summers, for thousands of years.
The characteristic experience of standing in a forest like this one is not awe exactly. It is something quieter and more unsettling. The awareness that the living system around you is operating on a time horizon so deep that your presence within it is meaninglessly brief. The trees do not know you are here. They do not care. They will not remember. The next thing that happens to the nurse log will happen three decades after you are gone.
The wildlife photography tradition this image draws on — Nick Brandt's work in East Africa, Sebastião Salgado's sweeping Amazonian documentary projects, Ansel Adams's earlier Yosemite monographs — has always carried a moral argument alongside the aesthetic one. The argument is that natural systems of sufficient antiquity carry a kind of standing that human concerns should defer to. The god ray in the upper right of this frame is not a spotlight on an object of human interest. It is the arrival of a new day into a system that has been receiving new days for longer than any human civilization.
The patience of old growth is not a metaphor for anything. The forest is not teaching a lesson. It is simply persisting, in the specific durational register that its biology requires, and allowing the rest of the world to happen around it.
If there is a lesson for human observers, it is probably this: our own lives are taking place inside a much larger system whose patience is not available to us but which is the condition of our existence. The forest will still be here long after every question we are currently asking has been forgotten. The answer to most of those questions, eventually, will be: the forest is still here.