Elders

Really tall trees, as I learned at Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest last month, are hard to make out from the ground. The biggest eastern white pines in the little grove called Cathedral Pines, near where we're staying in the 'Dacks, are well over three hundred years old. Like Joyce Kilmer's contemporaneous tulip trees, their patch of woods wasn't exceptional when they were young, touching the hems of 

giants centuries their senior, like countless kin in all directions. They only became exceptional when all around them was razed by rapacious European settlers. It's not clear how this stand of pines survived the loggers who leveled most of the Adirondacks; they may have been saved by something as prosaic as a disputed property line! Eastern white pines don't generally live past 400 years so some of the Dacks' oldest and tallest have fallen already, with more to come.