Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll Page B

either. “There’s nothing like suddenly coming upon a special canyon or waterfall, and it’s like when two people meet for the first time. The probability of these two things happening simultaneously is so slim, it makes the experience even more meaningful.”
    We resume our march up the talus, and after passing by limber pines and Engelmann spruces, we’re encountering more and more bristlecone pines. Bryan points one out to emphasize a particular survival technique. “When a root or branch gets infected, like on this section here, the tree stops sending nutrients to the dying part to ensure that the rest will remain healthy. They can also shut down photosynthesis to conserve energy.”
    Bryan also tells me that the trees have migrated to higher altitudes, where the thin air makes forest fires less likely.
    From an aesthetic standpoint, bristlecone pines are wonderfully expressive, almost humanlike in their proportions and poses. The trees grow out instead of up, making them more stout than towering. (At 17 feet in height, Prometheus would have looked like a bonsai next to the 379-foot Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, located in Northern California’s Redwood National Forest.) We pass by one I name the Opera Singer because she’s facing the open valley with arms outstretched, back slightly arched, and, through a large mouth-shaped hole, seems to bebelting a prolonged aria to her adoring audience below. Another, the Soldier, is ramrod straight with a branch angled out and then in toward its crown like a bent elbow, crisply saluting. Most of the trees, however, are twisted and contorted, as if writhing in pain. Had Edvard Munch designed a tree, the bristlecone pine would be it.
    As I’m mentally strolling about in my own happy little world assigning names and personalities to this odd cast of characters, Bryan stops and without much fanfare (I’m guessing he’s not a fanfare kind of guy) says, “This is it.”
    This is what?
I think, glancing over a scattered pile of large gray rocks. I lean closer and realize that mixed among them are chunks of curved gray wood. Then I see the base of the tree jutting about a foot and a half out of the ground, cut unevenly across the top. Prometheus.
    I had expected the stump, but not these large portions of the actual tree strewn about. He must have been enormous, I think, reassembling the pieces in my mind. Currey reported the circumference to be 252 inches, or exactly 21 feet.
    I tell Bryan I need about a half hour to make notes and take a few pictures of the site. He says that’s fine and goes off to conduct whatever duties he’s officially here to perform.
    Before coming to Nevada, I had considered Prometheus’s fate—in that he had been cut down by those who, ostensibly, should have been protecting him—as comically ironic. But looking over his withered remains, I’m struck by how profoundly sad a loss this is. A tree that had tenaciously survived for approximately five thousand years, through droughts and blizzards and windstorms and avalanches, was knocked down, just like that, in an afternoon.
    Currey later expressed regret for what he had done, and before he passed away in 2005 at the age of seventy he was an impassioned voice for both the creation of Great Basin National Park and a law that would protect bristlecone pines on federal property, legislation that Congress eventually enacted.
    Currey’s defenders believe that, ultimately, he made an honest mistake and that human inquiry often relies on poking holes in the naturalworld to study what’s inside. “Archaeologists,” the old saying goes, “burn the pages of history as they read them,” and the same can be said of many other researchers. Some scientific data were gleaned from Prometheus’s rings, aiding climatologists in measuring temperature fluctuations and weather patterns over thousands of years, as well as archaeologists who utilize tree rings to verify radiocarbon-tested data. Like the Greek