To find the oldest living thing in New York City, set out from Staten Island’s West Shore Plaza mall (Chuck E. Cheese’s, Burlington Coat Factory, D.M.V.). Take a right, pass Industry Road, go left. The urban bleakness will fade into a litter-strewn route that bisects a nature preserve called Saw Mill Creek Marsh. Check the tides, and wear rubber boots; trudging through the muddy wetlands is necessary.
The other day, directions in hand, Rachel Sussman, a photographer from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, went looking for the city’s most antiquated resident: a colony of Spartina alterniflora or Spartina patens cordgrass which, she suspects, has been cloning and re-cloning itself for millennia. The city’s oldest trees, among them the Queens Giant, a tulip poplar near the Long Island Expressway, have been living, at most, for centuries. But the Staten Island marshes, formed after the Wisconsin Glacier receded from New York, date back thousands of years. Surrounded by commercial property, and buffeted by pollutants—from oil to heavy metals—they remain a resilient prehistoric fixture. Scientists had suggested that she look there.
For nearly a decade, Sussman has been tracking down such leads, maxing out credit cards and travelling to every continent, to photograph ancient life as it tenaciously hangs on—the planet’s ultimate survivors. This year, she compiled her photos into a book, “The Oldest Living Things in the World,” and for an exhibition, which will run at Pioneer Works, in Red Hook, until November. Many of Sussman’s subjects are unassuming: the two-thousand-year-old Welwitschia that she photographed in Namibia looks like a forlorn mop of leaves. Some are otherworldly and beautiful, like the three-thousand-year-old Chilean llareta, a bulbous desert growth that would blend in just fine on a set for the nineteen-sixties “Star Trek.” Her oldest subject resides in a soil sample at the Niels Bohr Institute, in Copenhagen: bacteria that have been living for half a million years.
“I think this is where we’re supposed to park,” she said. It was noon, and just off the road bisecting the marsh was a junk yard filled with old tires, stacks of particleboard, and a dilapidated trailer inhabited by cats. Up the road, there was a gate with two signs, “Danger: Keep Off” and “Notice: Private Property.” Sussman ducked underneath and walked along train tracks heading north. A siren roared in the distance. “What is that?” she said. “We have entered some kind of Twilight Zone.” She followed the tracks to a footpath into the marsh.
Stepping into the sticky Staten Island mud, she said,“When I was in Greenland, there was this glacial mud—someone had to pull me out.” She paused. “There are map lichens in Greenland that grow one centimetre every hundred years. Just think about that in human terms: imagine if, in your whole life span, your main accomplishment was to grow one centimetre. Continents drift away faster than that!”
The creek flowed slowly. Pools of water had gathered among the grass, some of the water tainted by algae. “It’s probably pretty polluted,” she said.
She scanned the ground. “This short grass is Distichlis,” she said. “It’s just a different type of marsh grass. And there’s a heron or crane or something.” She raised her camera. “Right now, I’m getting a bit of the juxtaposition of the whole marsh and this bird—and is that a power station? It’s a very dirty-looking industrial complex.” She took a picture. “In Riverside, California, there is a thirteen-thousand-year-old Palmer’s Oak, and it’s next to mounds of garbage.”
Sussman pushed farther into the marsh, soft lumpy earth underfoot. “It feels like we’re walking on bones,” she said. An open swath of spartina swirled in on itself, in a way that seemed both haphazard and organized. “This is really beautiful,” she said. “It looks so windblown and battered.” After additional surveys, and genetic testing to measure age, she would eventually be able to confirm whether any of the plants belonged to an ancient organism. Sussman gazed across the creek. “I would love to go over there, but I have a feeling that we’re going to get stuck.” The tide was coming in. The wind was rushing across the wetland, and the air filled with the smell of effluent. She headed back toward the train tracks. Strands of high-voltage wires hummed eerily overhead.
Of the thirty ancient living things that Sussman has photographed, two have since died. “One was a thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘underground forest’ outside a botanical garden in Pretoria,” she said. “Apparently, they changed the traffic pattern and just bulldozed right over it. The other was a thirty-five-hundred-year-old tree just outside Orlando, Florida—actually, the original tourist attraction before Disney. Meth heads snuck into it to do meth, and they accidentally burned it down. One of them later said, ‘Oh, shit, we killed something that was older than Jesus.’ ” ♦
