- When you go to the Sisters, the trees are talking to you as long as you're ready to listen.

- For me, it's a place of awe and wonder and emotion.

And my tours through here bring in all kinds of people from all over the world.

- I knew I wanted to bring my students to the natural history, it's the human history, it's the geography.

- Trees that are standing in a swamp for 26 centuries, cypress leaves that are 8 and 10 and 12 feet tall.

- There's something almost subversive about this place that exists in the in-between of land and water.

- It's so extraordinary.

It's just so different.

And there's nothing else like this in the world.

♪ - Three, four, five, six... I am Charles Robbins.

I have a guide service here on the Black River in southeastern North Carolina through a section called the Three Sisters Preserve.

Owned by the Nature Conservancy, it has in it the oldest living cypress trees in the world by far.

We think there's trees in here well over 3,000 years old and maybe much older.

It's a long time for an organic anything to stand in a wet environment like this and drought, but still making seeds and still alive, still making history as it is.

- We must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.

They've been on the earth far longer than we have been and have had time.

My name is Kimi Faxon Hemingway.

I am a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and I teach classes about place-based writing, creative nonfiction, and food writing.

I visited Three Sisters a year ago with a group of writers and naturalists and was utterly overcome.

How did I not know this existed, like, right in my backyard?

How do we tell the stories of places that are important to us?

Because the experience was so powerful for me, I knew I wanted to bring my students into the swamp as I was teaching this writing about place class.

Observe, pay attention.

I'd heard or read once that we call a place wilderness and we do not yet know the stories of that place.

And if we can love a place, we will always protect it.

And that feels really important in this moment.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I think it's really important.

- Yeah, I think I'm just going to have that be one of the very first things.

- Oh, hey, folks.

- Oh, hi.

- Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm Charles.

- I'm Charlie.

- Charlie, nice to meet you, C.R.

Camille.

- Camille.

- Justine.

- Jacob.

- I want to thank you all for coming.

And I know you're a special group of writers.

If you can transfer this place and its time and its whole being into words, that's incredible to me.

You know, it's like, it's my church, you might say, in a way.

I've always called them the cathedrals.

It's just such an emotional type of a thing for some people.

So go ahead and sit down in it, and let's get your foot rest adjusted.

- I was very excited to go on this trip.

Thanks, Sam.

I love nature.

I love adventure.

And this brought everything together in a very cool way, and the chance to write about it.

You couldn't have asked for a better day.

I mean, it was blue skies, birds were flying, insects were buzzing, the frogs were chirping.

- Once we turn the corner up there, we're going to have to go slow, pick our way through, and we're going to try to cross over right here.

- The students were mostly ahead of me.

They were boisterous, and they were laughing and making jokes.

And suddenly, there was this deep hush.

- God.

- I could almost feel them taking it all in.

- Oh my gosh.

What?

Isn't that incredible?

- You feel suddenly like you're in Jurassic World.

- Oh, that's so cool.

- The trees stand like sentinels over you.

- Look at this tree here.

- The moss is the color of green that I have never seen before.

- Ah!

- It just, everything settles and you feel alert and awake and alive and fully present.

- Isn't this beautiful?

- It's unbelievable.

- CR, can you tell me again how cypress regrow?

- Well, everything lives off the root systems.

The fact that they're all connected underground.

So in drought, they'll support each other.

The north side of this swamp will get dry.

This side is wet, but when it dries up, because they're grafted together, they're one big system.

- We're hearing about the science of how these trees share a connection with one another and that helps them weather droughts, but also weather extreme flood events.

And I'm just thinking about all that they have endured, but also what they teach us about ourselves.

- So we have sandbar, so we can get out here.

Welcome to the magic kingdom.

- Wow.

Never ceases to amaze.

- Okay, we are here, so everybody just follow me.

From this spot, it's hard to believe that it gets better, but down river here, things seem to get older.

The knees get taller, the artwork, I call it, gets more dramatic.

- If you're adventurous, you can wade through the deeper waters and stand beneath the trees and marvel at their knots.

- These trees were as they are now, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, the tops were blown off in some millennia ago storms, lost their canopies, and then through frequent flood and drought, the fungi will rot out the bottom.

And so they were not cut.

Everything else was cut down in the colonial days.

And these were saved because of their demise of age saved their life.

That's sort of how we see that.

- Okay, guys, come over here and I will show you this tree here with the two antennae out the top.

It's BLK number 227, and it's the oldest cypress tree known at 2,632 years old.

There's lots of trees in here that we think are older.

We're pretty sure they're older, but they're hollow.

We can't core them.

- How did you discover the age of the tree?

- Well, you know, these trees, we're working here with Dr.

Dave Staley, a dendrochronologist from the University of Arkansas.

And the way they determine the age of a tree is by coring it.

- So it's about dendrochronology, the study of tree rings for the application and study of climate.

So you have to core the tree to the center of the tree.

So you need all of the tree rings to do the study.

And the wide rings would be a wet year.

This would be a little drier, a little moisture, and then it also shows you drought.

And most of these trees, I'd say 90% of them, they're all pretty much hollow at the bottoms and the tops.

So we had trouble finding some solid wood.

We had worked through the swamp for four and a half years, didn't find what we wanted.

I go to Wilmington, take a 36-foot extension ladder apart and bring them in here on the side of a canoe and we started climbing.

So we went back through this swamp as much as we could for three and a half years and found that tree, the last one.

So we now have a climate footprint 2,624 years old in southeastern North Carolina, this area.

And it all is done through dendrochronology.

Yeah, it's quite a thing to be standing in this environment, survived all this time.

That's uplifting.

Gives me hope.

- Yeah.

- I've heard CR say that, you know, they're not beautiful in the way that we think about beauty.

And I love that idea that like, if you look a little closer and you understand the way these trees have survived and the way they work and operate, then I think you can't see anything else other than a miracle, even if it is a chimney, as CR says, this empty, hollow vessel.

- So the exercise I'm going to invite you to do is to just write for 10 minutes without stopping.

We're thinking about attention to the sounds we're hearing, the smells, all of the sensory detail that bring this place to life.

So observation, awareness, specificity, and just maybe they'll find a seed for a poem or a story or an essay they feel compelled to write.

- I'm thinking about how old these trees are.

- Cypresses, like titans waiting, waist deep.

- Black water swerving ancient columns, a two-way mirror.

- The captain, CR, calls it a church, a cathedral.

- I'm touching the rough bark wedged in my kayak between its trunk and a few knees.

What can I learn from their story?

- Today was such a success for me and my students.

It just has this sort of magic and they allowed for the place to wash over them.

- Whatever you believe in, I promise you it's here.

- Inhale the murk and thank the tree for its divine canopy.

- For me it was a really deep moment of reflection of my own life, of the stories that I want to tell.

And when we immerse ourselves in a place like that, I mean that's a feeling that you carry with you for the rest of your life.

- Are you worried about this place surviving the changes in climate we're seeing now and that are anticipated?

- The way I look at stuff like that, I'm pretty old, but I'm just 75 and that's not much considered 2,600, you know.

So they're here, they've been here, they'll be here.

But the threats of climate, we're having stronger storms, more flooding in here.

And then that package extends on into clear-cutting.

Down river and above us, that brings the water table up.

There's a seedling right there, there's four right there that are about this tall.

There will be a habitat loss, there will be a habitat gain.

So this is just a little speck in time.

We just get to enjoy it.

And there's not much else around like it, you know.

It's just, that's just nature.

That's the fact of what it is and we enjoy it now and hope for hundreds of years to come.

They're resilient.

- Goodbye trees!

- Bye trees.

- See you later, cypresses.

- Goodbye swamp!

- I think seeing the Three Sisters Swamp gives me hope.

You know, this is a place of the most miraculous things that you can see.

This ancient gem of knowledge, of history, really just right in our own backyard.

Maybe we learn from the story of this cypress grove how to be better humans.

- I feel so proud of my students, inspired and grateful to CR.

I think we will always fight to protect the places we love, but we can't love the places we don't know.