Rooted in time - Black River area in North Carolina

American Forests, March-April, 1992 by Wallace Kaufman

Gifts in our family are often events rather than things. That has its noble side, but it is also a practical necessity in the life of an amateur naturalist and freelance writer. Yet I was a little embarrassed when I suggested to my daughter Sylvan that as a bon-voyage gift to her we spend a few days canoeing on the Black River. The trip would be a far cry from the one she was about to embark on--a journey along the Amazon. In contrast with the world's longest river, the Black is short, flat, and almost unknown beyond coastal North Carolina.

Still, some of the trees along the Black River may be older than any found along the Amazon, and in the last few years the Black's trees have become E an important window into the history of the world's climate.

The Black River runs a mere 60 miles from its origins in North Carolina's southeastern coastal plain to its union with the Cape Fear River near the Atlantic Ocean. In dry weather, it is often clogged by sandbars.

As soon as Scots-Irish settlers moved into Carolina's coastal plain in the early 1700s, they began to log the Black's bottomland forests. Nineteenth-century steamboats hauled off the big stands of gum, live oak, and longleaf pine. In 1885 during a five-day study of the river's navigation possibilities, Captain W.H. Bixby of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported seeing rafts carrying "about 620,000 feet of timber and about 10,000 barrels of rosin." To build bridges and docks, loggers took baldcypress out of the seasonally flooded swamps beside the river, but they left the largest trees because the bell-bottomed giants had been hollowed by dry rot.

The last steamer left the Black River in 1926. The sandbars returned, the land was too wet to clear, and trees once more arched across the river. Local people assumed the remaining cypresses were no more than a few hundred years old.

Today, as the cypresses probably did then, the old silver-barked trees tower over the rest of the forest. The lower branches are often broken, and those on top are flattened as if they,d met an invisible ceiling. Some trunks are cracked open from crown to buttress. Every one of the cypresses seems to have been hit by lightning or survived a Civil War artillery barrage. This kind of "overmature" old-growth makes some foresters talk of silviculture, but as our worries about the global climate grow, these once useless trees have taken on an important role in helping us measure the seriousness of today's environmental problems.

In 1986 scientists from the University of Arkansas found one big cypress that time had not hollowed. Its annual growth rings revealed it to be the oldest tree east of the Rocky Mountains, having taken root some time before 364 A.D.

The trees of both the Amazon and the Black cannot be separated from their river. In both places floods rise so high that large portions of the forest become navigable by small boats.

The Black was in flood on the cold morning in early February when my daughter and I put our canoe in the water. Within minutes we were off the main channel, pushing our boat through thickets of pop ash (the local name for Carolina ash) and tangles of cat briar and poison ivy. Dead branches and dry leaves covered the bottom of the boat. We ducked, we poled, we pushed off tree trunks. The main channel disappeared from sight, and we were lost. We would worry about that later.

All around us rose the silver-gray and moss patched trunks of baldcypress trees. We were looking for one in particular. It would be four feet thick above its buttresses and have a slight lean and two distinctive burls. It would be labeled with a small aluminum tag inscribed, "BLK 69." It was the tree the scientists had discovered in 1986 the oldest known living tree east of the Rocky Mountains. Other trees either along the Black River or in other cypress swamps--may in fact turn out to be older, but BLK 69 is the one that has won new respect for this almost-unknown forest.

We found many larger trees, but when I struck the trunks with my paddle or even my fist, they echoed like a drum. I asked several local people how to find BLK 69. Each of them had read about it in the newspaper, but no one was sure how to find it. Fishermen who string their shad nets and herring lines across the mouths of creeks and coves say the tree is in an area called "Three Sisters," a system of old channels and ponds on the west side of the river. But channels that are distinct at one water level disappear at another. Getting in and out, even in a canoe, can be a little like squeezing down the passages of a cave. Even old-timers going in to fish, hunt or gather mistletoe sometimes got lost.

Like several other searchers I know, Sylvan and I never found BLK 69, but paddling the main channel, the quiet coves, and through the woods we traced a story that cannot be told by a single tree. The Black River cypress forest stands almost as it did a thousand years ago. Even the Indians rarely visited the swamps, and logging has had little impact on the areas where the cypress grows.