Ring One — The Thin Ring

02027

The oldest thing about you is your future.

The science is called dendrochronology, and it began with an astronomer. A. E. Douglass came to the Arizona desert in the 1890s to study sunspots and ended up founding an entire discipline in the trunks of trees — the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona still runs today, the oldest of its kind on earth.

What he found: a tree in a drought year lays down the thinnest ring it can manage — a pale, tight line. Scientists prize the thin rings above the fat ones, because fat rings all say the same thing — it rained — while thin rings carry information. Sequence enough of them and you can date a wooden beam to its exact year with no written record at all.

And in the very worst years, a tree writes nothing. The ring is simply missing. Dendrochronologists call it a locally absent ring, and they recover the lost year by a method called crossdating — reading the rings of the neighboring trees, which carried the record when one tree couldn’t. No year is lost if anyone around you was keeping count.

The thin ring is the honest one. Write yours that way.

Where was your ring thin this year — and what grew anyway?

Knock once next September

This page will never ask you for anything.
No account. No list. It only gives.

— Ian ✦