Kathy Nikery (9:21)
That was Kathy Nycarry. Recently retired, she is thrilled to now have time to volunteer. She writes a cooking column for a local newspaper where she combines her love of cooking with storytelling. She enjoys life in Louisville with her husband Sam, and their new orange cat, Rhubarb. Our next story is from well, me. I told this at a New York City mainstage outdoors in Greenwood Cemetery. So if you're wondering why you're hearing crickets and other sounds of the natural world, that's why here I am live at the mall. All right, so it was 2011. I was fun, employed and living in a converted garage in Santa Monica, California. The travel agency I'd been working for went out of business about a year earlier and since then I've been dividing my time fairly evenly between taking long walks on the beach, clipping coupons and playing Frisbee. I was 33 years old and I was living the life of a retired person. Now I gotta say, this laid back California lifestyle comes very easily to me. You might even say that it is in my genes. I am an 8th generation Californian on my mother's side and the Southern California, the west side of Los Angeles in particular, is where we have our deepest roots. In 1794, my great great, great, great great great great great grandfather, a man named Felipe Talamantes came up from New Spain as part of one of the original settler families of the pueblo of Los angeles. And in 1819 he was given a land grant by the then Mexican government over a huge plot of land that came to be known as the Rancho La Bayona. Regrettably, none of that property or wealth was passed along to me. But what was passed along to me was some mild inherited trauma and a long legacy of unfulfilled potential. For example, I am the first person in my family to go to college. I am also thank I'm also the first person in my family to drop out of college. Now, I eventually, eventually went back and I finished school, but so much time passed over that time period. My dad actually went back to school and graduated, and he actually became the first person in our family to graduate from college. My life was full of these kind of stops and starts and these unspoken expectations that I was having trouble meeting. So one day I was doing my customary nothing, and a friend of mine came over and told me that he had recently uncovered a secret. And that secret is the exact location of the oldest living thing in the world. Now, it is an ancient bristlecone pine tree, and its name is Methuselah. The Methuselah Tree is over 4853 years old, and it's in California. It's only a couple hours away from where I grew up. And even though it's on public land on a trail, its exact location is unknown to the public. Now, there used to be a sign in front of it, but people could not be trusted with this information, and they would come and take away branches and cones and otherwise harm the tree. So for its own protection, the sign was taken away. And ever since then, its location has been a very closely guarded secret. So secret, in fact, that it is not posted anywhere on the Internet. There is no dropped pin at the Methuselah tree, and there are no images of it online either. If and when you Google the Methuselah tree, you will find a picture of a massive, gorgeous, ancient bristlecone pine tree, and that is not the tree. In fact, the only verified photograph of the Methuselah tree can be found in an old issue of a geographical magazine of national renown that will remain nameless. My friend was able to track down that magazine using the photograph, was able to locate the tree, and he told me he would take me up there to see it as long as I didn't give away its location. So a couple weeks later, we were hiking the trail. The ancient bristlecone pine forest. It is a austere and otherworldly kind of place. It's very remote. You kind of hike up this mountain, and before long, you're just surrounded. But all that's around you are these petrified trees. They're all thousands of years old, and their bark has been stripped away by eating eons of wind and cold. And they're gnarled and they're twisted and they're mostly dead. But if you look close enough at the tips of their branches, they're kind of reaching out to the sky and the sun and the warmth, there's a little bit of green and they're unmistakably alive. And we're walking through this forest and eventually we come up on the tree from the photograph. And you know, it's not the largest tree in the forest or the most aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it's. It's kind of small and almost frail looking. But as I stood there with it, nobody else around, I couldn't help but feel this profound connection to it and a really deep admiration for the fact that this living thing had planted its roots here in this place before the pyramids were built. And over that entire period of time, it had managed to survive in this very unforgiving environment and to continue to move itself and its family forward. And at the same time it occurred to me that it was trapped, that it was stuck here, and that these very roots that kind of kept it in place were preventing it from going anywhere else. And it wasn't growing anymore, it was just kind of surviving. And I understood that if I wanted to grow, I was going to have to uproot myself and move as far away from Los Angeles as possible. And so I moved to New York City. Now, when I got to New York, I did my best to reinvent myself. I got a 9 to 5 job in the financial district where, you know, I took the subway to Fulton street every day. And I wore buttoned up shirts and basically cosplayed as the protagonist of a rom com for a couple of years before I spectacularly quit. At that point, I went out to an old standby, bartending, waiting tables. And I even dabbled in the nonprofit sector before discovering that it is particularly non profitable for me. Almost 10 years had gone by and I was still clutching at straws. I felt like I was not moving forward. I was still kind of stuck. And then the pandemic happened. Everything I was doing stopped. All of us were trapped in our apartments for months. And coming out of that experience, all I knew was that I wanted to work outside. And one day I was on the train and I saw a recruitment poster for New York City's greenest the Department of Parks and Recreation. And that, my friends, is how I found myself a little over a year later, knee deep in a muddy pond in eastern Queens on the thin green line as a full fledged member of the New York City Urban Park Rangers. Now, my partner and I had been called out that day on a high profile case. We had a swan on the loose. Now bird cases can get a little Dicey. I don't know what you know about the New York City birding community, but they can be a little intense. And swans in particular tend to captivate the public's imagination in ways that most birds do not. People find them beautiful, people find them graceful, they mate for life, which is something people really respect in a wild animal. And whenever a swan shows up in a New York City park, it instantly becomes something of a celebrity. Now, rangers hate swans. They are what is known as an invasive species, which means that they are not from the area, which in and of itself is not a problem. The thing is, when they arrive to a New York City pond, what they do is they out compete the local waterfowl for resources. They push them out, they build these huge ostentatious nests, and they generally make a spectacle of themselves. They are bullies and they are gentrifiers. This particular swan had been a thorn in our side for months. It had been seen frolicking in various high traffic areas of the park, where it was having numerous close encounters with unleashed dogs, which is another cultural flashpoint in the parks. And so the decision was made that for its own good and for everyone's good, we should go and bring them in. Riding shotgun with me that day was my partner, Sal. Sal and I went back a ways. We were in the academy together. He's kind of a strange man, hot temper, but also a militant vegan who seems to subsist entirely on dandelion sandwiches. In any event, it was just us two. After conducting a couple of interviews, we were able to get an approximate location on the perpetrator, and we moved in, put on our equipment, protective equipment, and headed down to apprehend the swan. Now, I must stress at this point that we are highly trained professionals. We have gone over this scenario many times in the academy using stuffed animals. However, any ranger will tell you when a real world scenario, when you're eye to eye with a wild animal on its home turf, it's a totally different ball game. I don't know if you've been very close to a swan, but they are bigger than you think, they are meaner than you think. And this particular animal started hissing and clicking and beating its wings like a little pterodactyl, which basically it is. And so I look over at Sal, Sal looks over at me, and I think we're both wondering, is he going to come quietly or are we going to have a problem? As it turns out, it was all for show. It was a bluff. We were able to coax the Swan into the animal carrier with very little fanfare and load him up into the vehicle. And as we get him into the truck, he's in the carrier. And I'm standing there, and we're basically even height, we're eye to eye. And I'm looking at him in the face for the very first time. And, you know, I don't see a bully, you know, or I just. I see another creature just trying to make it in New York City, maybe just made a couple of wrong turns and found themselves getting a little stuck. Just a little nudge. Moving on to the next thing. And as we're driving out of the park, we're going to take it to the Wild Bird Fund. It's going to be relocated to another area of the park. We pass by a huge tulip tree, so over 100ft tall, 150ft tall. And this is the Alipond Giant. And the Alipond Giant is the oldest living thing in New York City. It was already a notable tree when George Washington visited it on his way out to Long island shortly following the Revolutionary War, which was right around the same time that my ancestor, Felipe Telemontes, was coming up from New Spain to put down his roots and mine in Southern California. And as I looked up into the canopy of this tree on this hot and humid summer day in New York and seeing these really bright green leaves, I couldn't help but think of the fact that it had planted its roots here in New York, and those roots had allowed it to grow, to grow strong. And I couldn't help but think of my own roots back in California and my family and everybody that I had left back at home. And I know that it was this thought that kind of paved the way for me to eventually return to California, where I currently live and work as a National park ranger with the National Park Service. And thank you. Thank you. And, you know, I still do not own any land in California or anywhere else. But what I have now is something that's perhaps even more valuable to me, which is a sense of ownership over a place that means a tremendous amount to me. It is something that. A responsibility that I have to look after this place, to protect it, but also to share its stories. And it is a responsibility that I take very seriously, and it fills me with a tremendous sense of pride and of purpose. Now, one of the first things I did when I went back to California was I went back to the Methuselah tree. I'm happy to report that it is still there, but this time was a little bit different. There were people around. There was a family there that obviously knew which tree it was. And there was another individual there that can best be described as a potential YouTuber. And so it appears as if the secret is out. And I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I'm concerned about the tree and its welfare, but on the other hand, I'm hopeful that if people can find out where the tree is, they can go to visit it. And being in its presence, they'll be able to have that same connection to that I was able to have with it. And through that connection, they'll realize what I realized, which is that it's not one person's responsibility to take care of these things in the world or to keep them a secret. It's everybody's. So thank you. After this story, I ended up moving back to California, and I was extremely, extremely lucky to get hired as a seasonal ranger at Channel Islands National Park. On one of my very first trips to the islands, I had an experience that is pretty rare, but it does happen out there. I got mugged by a whale. That's the term we use when a humpback whale gets right up close to the boat and breaches the surface so close you can smell its breath and feel the mist from its spout. It was a truly magical experience. And ever since then, I've been captivated by the islands and have found a wonderful community of people who love them just as much as I do. We'll be back in a second with a story from a national treasure.