Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (10 page)

At the crack of dawn, I’m back at the dorms. Dr. Jenkins and his team pile into two white vans, and we drive a quarter of a mile along Route
31 and then turn right onto a bumpy dirt road that cuts through an open valley blanketed by sage and rabbit brush. Dusty lime-green sandbags mark a trail up to the caves, and within minutes the crew is bustling away. My goal is to stay out of everyone’s path and, for the love of God, try not to destroy a major scientific breakthrough by accidentally stepping into fifteen-thousand-year-old poo.

Part construction project, part military operation, the site is surprisingly tidy considering how many tons of dirt have been processed. Everyone moves with purpose, and spirits seem high. Over at Cave 2, Scott, a graduate student from Washington State University, is helping his classmate Jen into a full-body Tyvek suit (to prevent the contamination of ancient coprolites with modern DNA). Jen carefully inches her way down a large plank into the cave’s deeper well, while Marci, another student, stands a few feet higher up loading large plastic buckets with freshly mined soil.

The system moves with assembly-line efficiency. Buckets are carried out of the caves, their contents dumped onto three-by-two-foot screens with wooden handles on each side. Before shaking the sifter for a good twenty or thirty seconds, whoever’s manning the contraption yells out, “Dirt!”—the archaeological equivalent of “Fire in the hole!”—and everyone in the immediate vicinity shields his or her eyes from the ensuing dust cloud. Finer particles fall through the mesh wire, while the larger, more promising objects on top are picked out with forceps and placed in plastic bags.

I see a small bone and get excited.

“It’s probably animal,” I’m told. The Paisley Caves are a veritable charnel house of fish, bird, horse, coyote, and even camel bones.

Moments later, someone yells out the magic words: “I’ve got poo!!”

Dr. Jenkins walks over, takes a look. “Bag it.”

The student nods and plops it into a sterile specimen cup.

No matter how serious about the work a person might be (and every academic journal I’ve read lauds Dr. Jenkins for his professionalism and rigorous standards), one does not spend six physically arduous weeks digging through layers of prehistoric bat, deer, coyote, and rat
feces in search of their human equivalent without engaging in some scatological humor. After overhearing a student discussing a “groaner,” I tentatively ask if they’ve nicknamed the different types of excrement.

“Of course,” I’m told.

Thus begins my brief education in coprolite slang. “You have your princess poo, which is very small and dainty,” one student says, “while the groaner is bigger, and the Hershey’s Kiss has a little pinched point on top.”

“Don’t forget the groaner maximus,” another adds.

I’m not going to name names, but apparently one very esteemed archaeologist on the premises has his own favorites. “Oh, his are the
worst
,” a student says. “Ask him what a Klingon is.”

No, I don’t think I will.

For a few minutes I duck into Cave 5 and rest, wiped out by the afternoon heat and impressed by how hard these students and volunteers labor under such enervating conditions. The cave feels noticeably cooler and offers a sensational view of the surrounding valley. Whoever these folks were, they had impeccable real estate sense.

Dr. Jenkins walks by.

“Quick question?” I ask.

“Sure.”

“Do you think the Paleo-Indians who lived here would have appreciated all of this?” I say, gesturing at the magnificent scene spread out before us.

“Keep in mind it would have looked much different fourteen thousand five hundred years ago. A lot of what’s below us might have been water.” I’m expecting to hear the word
fanciful
as well. Instead he surprises me. “But yes, actually, I think they would have.”

Dr. Jenkins was absolutely right about the day passing swiftly. Before I know it we’re hiking down the trail and returning to town. After washing up, everyone gathers for a late-afternoon cookout at a small park by the dormitory.

“Yesterday I talked with Dr. Jenkins about the significance of the
work you’re doing here,” I say to the students while they grill up hamburgers and chicken. “What do you all think we can learn, if anything, from the primitive folks who once lived in these caves?”

Mike, an Iraq War veteran in his late twenties, mildly reprimands me. “First of all, I wouldn’t use the word
primitive
. These were sophisticated people. They created an atlatl, a very complicated hunting device, and sandals out of sagebrush bark. They carved heat-tempered spear points, and they—”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “Explain that last thing, about the spear points.”

“They heated rocks to a certain temperature so they’d flake a specific way.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Everything they had, they made with their own hands,” Jen says. “We’re overly dependent on technology to do things for us. I’m not suggesting technology is bad, just that we can hardly exist without it, and this dulls our ability to function when it breaks down. Personally I admire how resourceful and self-reliant they were.”

After thanking Dr. Jenkins and his students for their hospitality, I get back into my car and drive under the Paisley Mosquito Festival banner one last time. Since my flight into Salt Lake City isn’t until tomorrow morning, there is, in contrast to my frantic dash down here, no need to rush. Long stretches of the two-lane highway to Redmond are walled in by ponderosa pines, and upon spotting a break in the trees, I pull off to look out over a valley aglow with orange sunlight. Whether the men and women who roamed this region 14,500 years ago would have gazed at this land with equal joy—or, possibly, cursed it as one more obstacle to overcome—is impossible to know. But the notion that their very survival, in the face of infinite hardships and dangers, is proof of a resilience and ingenuity that we can draw strength and inspiration from today, doesn’t seem the least bit fanciful at all.

IT’S NOT UNTIL
I hit the Utah/Nevada border that I begin to appreciate just how old Prometheus was when his life ended abruptly twenty miles west of here. While eating ice cream inside the Border
Inn Restaurant & Motel, which cleverly straddles the two states to offer Utah’s cheaper gas prices on one half of the property and booze and slot machines on the other (I’m on the Nevada side), I skim through Gordon Kerr’s
Time Line: History of the World
. Prometheus himself isn’t mentioned, but the chronology puts his 4,900-year life span into context.

Prometheus was born about 2900
B.C.
, some two hundred years before the Egyptians began constructing the Great Pyramids. He was a wee sprout when Sargon of Akkad, the world’s first emperor, rose to power around 2300
B.C.
near what is present-day Iraq, and he was just entering adulthood when the Trojan War began in 1190
B.C.
(As lopsided juxtapositions go, Kerr’s two-sentence entry for 961
B.C.
is a delight: “[Israel’s King] David dies and is succeeded by his son, Solomon. The Olmec invent the tortilla.”) By the time Prometheus was well into middle age, Solon had introduced democracy to Athens, the Buddha had found enlightenment, Brutus had stabbed Caesar, and Christ had been crucified. Prometheus was getting on in years but still strong and vigorous when Spanish explorers first set foot in America during the early 1500s. Then, on August 6, 1964, five men led by a thirty-year-old University of North Carolina graduate student named Donald R. Currey found Prometheus on the north slope of Wheeler Peak along Nevada’s Snake Range and literally chopped him to pieces. Despite having endured for five millennia in 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 transferred to the park’s chief of interpretation, Betsy Duncan-Clark, who couldn’t have been nicer and was soon sharing with me great stories about her home state of Alaska. But she also said it was unlikely that anyone at Great Basin could help me. Finding Prometheus would require a full day of mostly off-trail hiking, the site wasn’t easily accessible, and the staff couldn’t escort every visitor wanting a personal tour.

“I totally understand,” I said, “but what if I tagged along with a ranger who had to hike out there anyway for some other reason?”

“That might be an option, but then you’d have to go on the exact day we tell you, weather permitting, and abide by other conditions. So no promises.” Betsy recommended I consider using GPS coordinates to find it on my own.

“I’m fine with that, but I have a horrible sense of direction—I once drove from Toledo to Detroit and ended up in Canada—and I guarantee you I’ll get lost. Then you’ll have a search-and-rescue mission on your hands, which will be much more time-consuming in the end.”

My passive-aggressive logic apparently paid off. Several days later, Betsy gave me a fixed date and time to meet with Ranger Bryan Petrtyl at the Great Basin Visitor Center. “I’ll be right on time,” I assured her.

From the Border Inn to Great Basin is only about a thirty-minute drive, and, after meeting in the visitor center, Bryan and I waste no time before we’re plotting our day. Bryan is soft-spoken and friendly and clearly seems to know what he’s doing, and I feel I’m in capable hands.

Water bottles filled, trail mix packed, suntan lotion applied, and boots tied, we hit the trail. I’m not sure if I’m light-headed because we’re almost two miles above sea level or giddy with excitement because everything is going according to plan, but for some reason the hike transforms me into a chatty, inquisitive six-year-old. “Bryan, what’s that tree over there?” (It’s a spruce, he says.) “When did you become a ranger?” (Six years ago.) “How old are you now?” (Twenty-seven.) “What got you interested in the great outdoors?” (Hunting fossils as a boy back home.) “Where are you from?” (Ohio.) “When do you think we’ll find Prometheus?” (About three more hours.) I suspect he’s secretly hoping I’ll run out of questions or, ideally, enough oxygen to walk and talk at the same time.