Milennials

On the way home in the dark one night we pass an illuminated line of trees. 

"Stop," I say, just as S asks: "Do you think that's them?"

The trees are in three terraced rows, rising up behind each other on the mountain-facing side of the road. They are gnarled and roped, their trunks wide as my spread arms. There is a small placard on the gate beside them. 

These trees are over a thousand years old. Oil is still being made from their fruits, says the sign. 

I walk through them in the trance-like green of the spotlights, touching the trunks softly. 

"I didn't know," I say afterwards, back in the quiet of the car. "I had no idea any tree could live so long."

*

In the Chouf Valley, there are cedar trees believed to be over a thousand years old. 

They are canopies of light, spread like a fanned wing. I sit for a while under the "Lamartine Cedar" and gaze down the valley. In the heat, the air is spiced with scent of the needles underfoot.

It's not even the oldest tree in this country. One specimen in the Valley of the Gods is estimated to be three thousand years old.

"Lebanese cedars don't fruit until they reach around about 60 or 70 years old," a guide tells us, as we traipse around in a pre-wedding, post-party fugue, craning our necks. 


These are the first forests ever written about, as far as we know, recorded in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. They are mentioned in Psalms and Judgments; were cut by the Phoenicians to construct their merchant fleets; tapped by the Egyptians for mummifying resin; first protected by the emperor Hadrian in the first century CE. 

How many ways can a person say: I didn't know, I didn't know.

*

It is 2024, and olives groves along Lebanon's borders are burning. I look at the satellite images of before/after, and imagine what generations of labour are being undone, demolished, written off the map. 

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