Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll
Book: Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll
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Authors: Andrew Carroll
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conditions that are fatally inhospitable to most living creatures, the ancient bristlecone pine tree was no match for half a dozen men armed with chainsaws.
A quote about trees by the naturalist John Muir, patron saint of America’s environmental movement, first set me on the trail to Prometheus. “Though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do,” Muir wrote. “They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves.” This shook me from my human-centric selection process and made me investigate trees connected to American history. Most, it turned out, were remembered for being in proximity to something like a treaty signing, duel, battle, or execution.
Then I read about Prometheus, who wasn’t a mere bystander. Prometheus
was
history, in both life and death. When his rings were finally counted, the full horror of Currey’s actions became apparent. He and his team had not just destroyed a 4,900-year-old tree (some estimates have put the number closer to 5,100), they had killed
the oldest living thing
in the United States and, quite possibly, the world.
They even had government approval to do so. Under a National Science Foundation fellowship, Currey was studying the Little Ice Age, which began around 1250 and lasted four to five centuries, and he’d hoped that by examining tree rings he could better analyze regional climate changes. He convinced a U.S. Forest Service district ranger named Donald Cox that while “WPN-114,” Currey’s more clinical name for Prometheus, was in his scientific opinion “super old” and larger than other bristlecone pines in the stand, he wasn’t different enough to warrant special protection. (Although there are indeed male and female trees, bristlecone pines are monoecious, so I’m technically incorrect in referring to Prometheus as a “he” or “him.” Considering his impressive longevity, however, I don’t have the heart to call him just an “it,” and his mythological namesake happens to be male.) “No one would have walked more than a hundred yards to see it,” Cox purportedly said later, defending his and Currey’s decision to have WPN-114 “sectioned.”
There is, to be accurate, an honest debate about the designation “oldest living thing.” A quaking-aspen grove nicknamed “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”) in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is considered to be the oldest
clonal
organism in America; the individual trees live only to the age of 120 or so, but they share a root system that supposedly has been expanding for 80,000 years. It’s also possible that deep within some foreign cave, there’s a plucky little million-year-old microbe that has escaped notice all these years. But for all intents and purposes, when it comes to the oldest single living organism in the United States, Prometheus was the champ. (Methuselah, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named after the oldest person in the Bible, is now, by default,believed to be the current title holder. Located in California’s Inyo National Forest and sheltered under a kind of arboreal witness protection plan, the tree’s exact location is kept a secret.)
After unearthing the Prometheus story, I phoned the National Park Service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to inquire about his precise whereabouts.
“We had nothing to do with that,” a staff member told me right off the bat. “The Forest Service approved the request to cut it down, not us.”
“But Prometheus—well, the stump or whatever,” I said, “is now in Great Basin National Park, and I need the Park Service’s permission to go out there and find it.”
“Contact the folks at Great Basin.”
“Do you know if there’s a sign or plaque by the stump already?”
“Not to my knowledge, and I doubt that’s something anyone is eager to bring attention to, but the folks there can tell you.” Before hanging up he added: “Good luck.”
I called over to Great Basin and was
A quote about trees by the naturalist John Muir, patron saint of America’s environmental movement, first set me on the trail to Prometheus. “Though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do,” Muir wrote. “They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves.” This shook me from my human-centric selection process and made me investigate trees connected to American history. Most, it turned out, were remembered for being in proximity to something like a treaty signing, duel, battle, or execution.
Then I read about Prometheus, who wasn’t a mere bystander. Prometheus
was
history, in both life and death. When his rings were finally counted, the full horror of Currey’s actions became apparent. He and his team had not just destroyed a 4,900-year-old tree (some estimates have put the number closer to 5,100), they had killed
the oldest living thing
in the United States and, quite possibly, the world.
They even had government approval to do so. Under a National Science Foundation fellowship, Currey was studying the Little Ice Age, which began around 1250 and lasted four to five centuries, and he’d hoped that by examining tree rings he could better analyze regional climate changes. He convinced a U.S. Forest Service district ranger named Donald Cox that while “WPN-114,” Currey’s more clinical name for Prometheus, was in his scientific opinion “super old” and larger than other bristlecone pines in the stand, he wasn’t different enough to warrant special protection. (Although there are indeed male and female trees, bristlecone pines are monoecious, so I’m technically incorrect in referring to Prometheus as a “he” or “him.” Considering his impressive longevity, however, I don’t have the heart to call him just an “it,” and his mythological namesake happens to be male.) “No one would have walked more than a hundred yards to see it,” Cox purportedly said later, defending his and Currey’s decision to have WPN-114 “sectioned.”
There is, to be accurate, an honest debate about the designation “oldest living thing.” A quaking-aspen grove nicknamed “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”) in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is considered to be the oldest
clonal
organism in America; the individual trees live only to the age of 120 or so, but they share a root system that supposedly has been expanding for 80,000 years. It’s also possible that deep within some foreign cave, there’s a plucky little million-year-old microbe that has escaped notice all these years. But for all intents and purposes, when it comes to the oldest single living organism in the United States, Prometheus was the champ. (Methuselah, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named after the oldest person in the Bible, is now, by default,believed to be the current title holder. Located in California’s Inyo National Forest and sheltered under a kind of arboreal witness protection plan, the tree’s exact location is kept a secret.)
After unearthing the Prometheus story, I phoned the National Park Service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to inquire about his precise whereabouts.
“We had nothing to do with that,” a staff member told me right off the bat. “The Forest Service approved the request to cut it down, not us.”
“But Prometheus—well, the stump or whatever,” I said, “is now in Great Basin National Park, and I need the Park Service’s permission to go out there and find it.”
“Contact the folks at Great Basin.”
“Do you know if there’s a sign or plaque by the stump already?”
“Not to my knowledge, and I doubt that’s something anyone is eager to bring attention to, but the folks there can tell you.” Before hanging up he added: “Good luck.”
I called over to Great Basin and was
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