An Ode to Age

And, a happy birthday wish.

My mom turned 90 yesterday, which is truly amazing and wonderful, and for which I am eternally grateful. She’s good egg that mom of mine. A lifelong learner, an historian, a writer, a reader, and an unrepentant liberal, she has long been an inspiration for me as someone devoted to family and friends and to justice and just causes. She is opinionated (and I write that with affection) and honest, guided by the words of the early Jewish scholar, Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

We all know that 90 isn’t young and that getting old isn’t easy so I wanted to put her birthday in perspective relative to the world of Puget Sound around her.

90 years old - Several species of rockfish live to be at least 90 years old, including one Methuselah, who lived to be 205. Like humans, rockfish (of which there are 27 species in the genus Sebastes in the waters of Washington) generally don’t mature until their teenage years but, unlike us, they typically become more fecund as they age. Biologists have found that the loss of these elders (due to overfishing and misunderstanding of rockfish biology) was a contributing factor to the drastically reduced populations of rockfish in Puget Sound. Now that we better understand the biology of the fish and the importance of big old ones, we are developing better management techniques and rockfish populations have started to creep back up.

Copper Rockfish - A nonagenarian? Potentially.

Centenarians - Our resident icon, the orca, make it to the centenarian level. As befits an animal with such a huge brain, these elders are the leaders and guides of their pods. Specifically, those leaders are females, who bring their decades of knowledge about where and when to find prey, how to hunt, and how to communicate to their family group. The guidance of these ancient and wise ones is essential to the entire orca community and the health of the full Puget Sound ecosystem.

173 years old - Few animals are as infamous as one of our other Puget Sound icons, the geoduck. Well known for their well-endowed physical feature, geoducks, or at least one (and probably not too much of an outlier in length of planetary tenure) in Richmond Beach, lived to be 173 years old. How do we know? Like trees, geoduck add new material every year, in this case, a new layer to their shell. All one has to do is carefully count the layers to get the age; it’s not easy and requires patience and good magnification. By the way, geoduck appear to have no reproductive senility; one male was found to still be producing sperm in his 107th year. Unfortunately, scientists had to kill him to learn this.

Centenarian geoducks? Not a chance, now, that they’ve been harvested.

1,000 years old - Several species of trees in our region live for more than a thousand years, including Douglas fir, western red cedar, and Sitka spruce. Massive, enduring, inspiring, awesome, and beautiful, these survivors provide an enduring testimony to good genetics and good living, as well as to good community health because it’s the rare tree of great age that stands alone. They are almost always part of a diverse stand of plants—stronger, healthier, and more resistant because of their connections with others.

3,900 years old - To geologists, the modern edifice of Mount St. Helens began to form about 39 centuries ago. Since then, the volcano has had seven periods of eruption, including one period that produced an explosion four times more powerful than in 1980. Two things stand out about these eruptions. The first is that people probably witnessed all of them; I wonder what they thought. And, second, these eruptions make Mount St. Helens the baby of the state’s five volcanoes.

500,000 years old - The Mountain began to form about a half million years ago, building up its great summit, layer upon layer, eruption after eruption. Spewing lava and tephra, Tahoma/Mt. Rainier slowly grew to at least 15,000 feet high, only to blow its top off about 5,400 years ago. The eruption also produced the Osceola mudflow, which spread across nearly 200 square miles of the Puget lowlands. Just because the mountain has been active for a half million years doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have more tricks up its slopes to mess with our lives.

330,000,000 years old - Big jump here, back to when the Midwest looked like the Bahamas, meaning a warm, quiet, shallow tropical sea located near the equator. Filled with life, it was a graveyard of invertebrates, who died by the gazillion, settled into their watery cemetery, and turned into a beautiful, ivory white limestone quarried in Indiana. The Salem Limestone is the most widely used building in the US, gracing everything from mundane offices to the Empire State Building. You can find it in Seattle at the Rainier Club and the old Seattle Times facade, both of which contain numerous fossils.

3,524,000,000 years old - The deepest dive we can make in Seattle into the planetary past and some seriously old, old, old rock. Quarried in Minnesota (not terribly distant from my mom’s birthplace of Kentucky), the Morton Gneiss (which can be seen on the Exchange Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street) began to form so long ago that the surface of the Earth didn’t look anything like it does at present. Back in those days, the biggest forms of life on Earth were single celled, which means no trees, no flowering plants, no birds, no anything that added grace strokes of color to our little third rock from the sun. Now, that fits my image of old.

So Happy Birthday to my mom, 90 years young.