[Ficlets] Methuselah Tree

[deegeeak]

Title: Methuselah Tree
Pairing: America
Genre:  General
Rating: PG-17
Summary:  America meets the oldest living thing on the planet.  Alfred is left in wonder at it. The Methuselah Tree has quite a bit to say to both of them.
Notes:   The PoV may seem weird.  Keep in mind that in this, Alfred is a separate personality from America, so his views are going to be different.  This is also my first song (or poem as it is I suppose) fill.


    Once you had garden of Eden.
    Now you have this.
    A playpen in the desert. Bliss.
    Here, 5,000 years of civilization
    Can be experienced in an instant.
    Have a nice day. Enjoy.
    For in a flash it could all be over.

When the days weighed on America he wanders.  He walks the tamed landscapes.  He seeks the messages that seems to be just out of his reach these days.  America is young compared to most nations - only the South Pacific and South America nations are younger then he.    He rose to fame quickly, gaining his land in an ever faster whirl, taking and stealing to satisfy his inner hunger.  His people wanted to create an empire to last a million years; until the sun itself goes black and the cold creeps in from the dark beyond.   His people raise metal mountains that reach up to the sky.  America wonders - is he the modern day Tower of Bable?  Are his people reaching skywards in an attempt to reach a god that doesn't speak to him anymore? 

    Kings, emperors, deities,
    Craven images cast in plaster, neon lit.
    Look on my works,
    Ye mighty, and despair.
    The smell of money in the air,
    A tawdry son-et-lumiere.

The night is never dark.  Not anymore to Alfred.  Once, when he was a colony-child, this would have been his fondest dream.  With no night, there couldn't be anymore nightmares or fears, could there?  Instead, Alfred fears the night even more now that it's been conquered.  He fears what might happen if the lights go dark and the night comes back.  It's easier to lose himself in the endless day of the huge cities, where no city ever sleeps.  It's exhaustion that drives him more and more.  He does what he needs to survive the night.  He buys coffee, electricity recklessly.  His people follow suit and light up the night in an endless neon mockery of daylight.

But as the saying goes - the brightest light only creates the darkest night.

​

    Your immortals are mortal, they were once flesh and blood.
    Escape the delusion, the noise and pollution
    The true immortals are made out of wood.
    They call us bristlecone pines.
    They call me Methuselah.

Once, America loved the sky.  It was free and wild and called to him.  The one day, the sky lashed out.  His beloved planes fell from the sky, dashing his endless smile from his face, as his people wept and cried.  He raged and wept in equal parts; furious someone used his planes like this, mourning for the dead.  His furious grief kept up, striking out at anyone who came close, like a wounded animal.  Slowly, he droves everyone away. 

And then, one day,  America left.  He walked, and kept walking.  He walked until the soles of his shoes fell and then he walked some more.  When America looked up, he wasn't on the East Coast anymore.  The hills that were around him weren't man-made.  They would groan from age  if they had a voice, bleached bone white and etched with silence.  All about the hills were trees.  Trees that were scraggly, twisted, almost broken looking things.  Trees that looked like demons. He wondered what he had found miles away from anything modern and brushed metal.

"We are," something drifted towards him, "Would you hear, what we are?"

America sat.

​

    Methuselah, Methuselah this human
    christens me, for he has counted
    the candles on my cake... 4,600.
    Am celebrity now, and no mistake.
    Am named. Am given voice.
    The years, like necklaces bestow
    a wisdom, humankind can never know.
    Millennia, they come and go.
    Have no eyes, but have seen it all.
    Ancient civilizations that you can
    Only read about, Methuselah has sensed.
    Am not part of history... No,
    history is parts of me.

"Child."  A voice names him as it becomes stronger then the rest.  The other voices drifting back to let this one speak.  

Alfred shivers.  This tree before him, twisted and ancient had survived beyond what anyone had.  This tree had seen the rise of the great ancients - and seen them fall.  Not even Arthur, proud of his history, was as old as this Tree.  He ought to be scared, but he knows this tree, the way he knows the mountains and hills of his land.  This tree has been here, has counted more stars, for longer then Alfred has been here.  The old Bristle-cone Pine is one of many on theses hills.  Not all are alive.  There are the bone white skeletons all around him of trees long dead that hold an unbreakable record going back 10,000 years.

Alfred is a child to this tree - less then even.  He is a spec in it's time line of life. A mere few hundred years does not make anything to this tree.  What right does he have to stand here in front of this truly ancient one?    He starts to stand, to back away, to leave.  The millenniums weigh on this tree and he fears what he'll be told.  What harsh words will be said?  

"Stay."

    Unlike words, tree rings never lie.
    One year was freezing cold and dark
    The sun was hidden in the sky
    I tasted brimstone and it left its mark
    Like a noose tightening, like a charred wreath.
    What is this thing, I thought, called death?

America listens as the voice tells him of an explosion, followed by cold.  Death had come calling, and had passed this one by - why and how?  If the tree knows it doesn't say.  Immortal, he thinks.  America knows vaguely of what the tree speaks of.  America does not think of natural disasters like the ones remembered before him.  What need does he have to worry about molten fire and clouds of brimstone?

"Listen."

He isn't sure why he's staying here.  The night comes quickly in the California mountains.  But something bids him to stay here and listen to the long, aged trees.    He knows what the event is that the tree is telling him of - Paoha Island and the eruptions that created it.  All around the island are bubbling hot-springs.  Why should he care about evens long gone?  Those things are in the past and he must look forward if he is to survive the future that's bearing down on him.

"I survived."

America wants to know the secret.  He wants to know the how.

    You can read me like a book
    Open me up and take a look:
    History laid bare, a garland here
    a crown there. Plain as a pikestaff
    for all to see. Each year jotted down by me.
    The state of the nation, an annual report
    in ever decreasing circles. The wheels
    of fortune, the cycles of despair.

Alfred listens as the tree talks into the day.  Events that had only been disconnected from him in a vague sort of way suddenly became real to him.  The rise of Rome was real to this tree - it has lived during the same time.  It had breathed the same air as Ceaser and Cleopatra.  This tree had heard whispers on the wind traveling millions of miles across water and land of the pitched battles.  It had seen the rise and fall of civilizations gone past.  It knew why The People had abandoned Cahokia.  It had been silent while the Anasazi vanished.  And this tree, this Methuselah, knew the fate of Roanoke Colony.  

It was soothing to his soul, this discovery of the past.  All thought it was Europe who said it first - Alfred knew the past repeated itself if no one was careful.  He could see the pattern starting before him.  

The wind kicks up a small cloud at his feet.  "All things have a start," it says.

    If I had lungs I would be coughing
    A throat, I would be parched
    If I had eyes they would be stinging
    Flesh, it would be scorched.

    Sulfur, smoke and cinders
    enfold me like a shroud
    There is no silver lining
    only poison in this cloud.

America winces.  He knows what the Tree is saying, without accusation or pointed anger.  America stood beside the generals as Trinity dropped.  He remembers the flash, the way the sky lit up with an unholy light.  He remembers the way the very ground shook and gave way beneath this creation of hell.  Fire would come seconds later, and then a cloud that spread silently across his country, crossing state borders with an arrogant impunity.  

"It burned."

There hadn't been much left of the small doom-towns the military had created to test the effects.  Even the metal had been melted away against the heat of the energy.  Heat, he knew, as well as light, were the cheapest forms of energy, and there had been so much of them it had obliterated everything in it's path.  He wondered if the tree was waiting for him to apoligize for it.  He wouldn't.  Not when the result had brought the end of a war he'd hated.  The choice to use nuclear weaponry was not one he'd let himself mourn - or forget.  It had happened.  

"I know," he said, speaking for the first time.

    Water, water everywhere and not a drop...
    To think that down there, battery trees
    Like plumped up turkeys stand proud and vain.
    Bloated and unaware that they are but a switch's
    throw away from death.

    Water, water not forever...
    For twenty-four hours a day, fountains play,
    Spraying graffiti that mocks a desert kept at bay.

Alfred knows that his southern and western states are living on borrowed time.  Every year the demand for water gets larger and larger as people attempt to turn what is naturally desert into lush green land.   It's not natural to live in these lands and expect green.  The Colorado River - which used to thunder to the Pacific Ocean, rarely manages to deposit a drop of water anymore.  All most all of the river water that carved out the Grand Canyon is diverted into lawns and fountains elsewhere.  

Alfred worries about it.  He worries the demands of his people will become too much, that the land which gave birth to him will rise up and take it all back.  Eventually there comes a breaking point and he fears as more and more of his people forget the Old Ways, the give and take of life, that the cost to him and them will be too much to survive.

The tree seems to share the sentiment.  "All things come to an end."

    But nature has a way of saying "Enough."
    After the pride there comes the fall
    After the boom, the bust.
    Remember man that thou art dust,
    And unto dust...

America scowls.  So what if his people want to build and build and build?  So what if they keep grabbing over themselves?   He is America, the land of Promise and Potential.  He's given the world so much, surely it needs to give back to him.  America doesn't like Mortality.  He doesn't like how casually the Tree speaks of it, how it promises an end.  This tree has lived beyond all else.  What would it know of Death, when it cheats Death almost daily?  

"Why should I listen to you?" he demands, angry. 

At first there is no answer.  Then, an answer he would never have thought to have gotten.​

   Men drop to the earth like leaves
    Lives as brief as footprints in snow.
    Bristlecones enthroned on top of the world
    Watch civilizations come and go.
    They seek our secret, immortality,
    But search in vain, for it is vanity.
    If truth be known I would rather
    be a flower, or a leaf that lives
    and breathes with brief intensity.

The images slam into Alfred's brain like a train sweeping away leaves on the track.  The ache of years, decades, centuries, millenniums slam into him.  Above his eyes as he lays on the ground above him days whips into night into day, into night again.  The stars dance madly above him and he wants to plead that he understands now what the Tree was trying to tell him.    

Years are like seconds to this tree - and Alfred is worried about seconds.  Everything starts, and ends.  If it is his time, then so be it.  Another will start, and then end.  The worries plaguing him, the way he's driven off his friends and foes alike, are meaningless in the end. 

    My life is as thin as the wind
    And I am done with counting stars.
    On the side of this mountain
    I might live forever.
    Could you imagine anything worse?
    My name is Methuselah and this is my curse.​

The wind whispers to him, crooning through the branches, the sunlight hot and dry as it fell towards the ground.  "You were blind",  the trees seems to ask, "but do you see now? "

There was no answer from the still body, just the sound of breath; in and out softly.

​

​

​

Further Author Notes: 
Right!  So.  A few things.  The first is that you should listen to the following as it was what inspired this.
"The Curse of Methuselah" This actually from a Nature program called "Methuselah Tree", which as you can likely tell by now, is about the oldest living things on the planet - Bristlecone Pine trees.  The poetry of the film, and the style of the film is unique to that program and to my knowledge, was never duplicated by Nature for any other program.  It's an amazing, and moving production; so much so, that if you can find the whole hour long program, sit down and watch it.  It is amazing.
Loreena McKennnitt "Ancient Pines  This again, features the ancient Bristlecone Pines. 

Next off are the events/places mentioned in this fill in order:

The Skyscrapers in New York - and the various melting pot of languages the exist in most American cities
The American addiction to Oil and Electricity
9/11, the use of planes as weapons in the world wars, and how America is acting in current world politics
The various Eruptions of Long Valley - most recently 350 years ago, where Paoha Island was created
The various Lost Cities and Civilizations of North America
The Atomic bomb
The over-use of Water in the American South and Southwest - so much that it drains the Colorado River, the River that carved the Grand Canyon dry.  It's a massive problem that has to be addressed, yet no one is willing to admit the issue is with how we (humans) try to re-sculpt the land.
America's Arrogance (see almost anything above)
America's growing desire to be better then what it's been (see almost anything above)
The last I'll leave the meaning to the reader.