Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (11 page)

Up ahead I notice a sign and ask Bryan what it says before stopping to read it for myself. “This tool is called an ‘increment borer,’ ” states the text, accompanied by an image of the T-shaped device.

Why Donald Currey didn’t use an increment borer is one of the more contentious aspects of the Prometheus story. Currey claimed that he started to, but after several attempts it cracked and there wasn’t enough time left in the season to get a replacement.

Bryan and I break from the trail and the terrain becomes considerably more precarious. In order to reach Prometheus we have to hike up a steep incline of glacier-piled quartzite rocks and boulders that feel unstable in spots.

“What’re the chances that some of these could give way?” I ask.

“It’s possible,” Bryan replies, stepping nimbly from stone to stone. “But if anything bad happens,” he deadpans, “they might name a trail after you.”

I stop for a minute to take a slug of water. “You ever use one of those GPS things when you hike?”

“I prefer maps,” Bryan says. “That way you can see the whole area around where you’re going and places you might have missed otherwise.” He then expounds on the benefits of exploring without 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 be
belting 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 natural
world 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 titan of myth who was condemned to endless suffering for stealing fire (representing knowledge) from his fellow gods and sharing it with man, WPN-114 also sacrificed for the sake of humanity.

Currey’s detractors, and there are many, argue that he acted recklessly and with a touch of hubris. He was a geographer, after all, not a dendrologist. And while useful information was indeed acquired by sectioning Prometheus, it should be weighed against what else might have been learned over time if the tree had been spared. Any hope of following Prometheus’s life span to its natural conclusion ended irrevocably on August 6, 1964.

There’s another long-term factor that comes to mind as I amble about the wide sunlit area where Prometheus once grew. It relates to something Bryan told me soon after we met, when he was extolling Great Basin National Park’s scientific value as an “eighty-thousand-acre living laboratory where ecological, biological, and genetic diversity can be studied.” There is also, he said, the park’s human story, from the Fremont Indians and sheepherders who once lived and hunted in this area to the day hikers and overnight campers who now visit this peaceful, pristine environment for mental and spiritual renewal. They—all of us—need time to reflect and think and imagine, undistracted by gadgets, deadlines, and incessant chatter. Great Basin offers that sense of solace and respite.

Bryan is particularly heartened by the number of families he sees come here and reconnect with one another, communicating in whole sentences—as opposed to abbreviated texts—and bonding over a shared discovery, whether it’s an intricate rock formation, a hidden bird’s nest, or stands of bristlecone pine trees that first sprang to life about the same time Homer was composing
The Iliad
. When these are
destroyed, whether through vandalism or carelessness, future visitors are denied memories and experiences that have nourished the souls of so many others. The impact of these irreparable losses cannot be quantified.

Bryan has returned and is eating quietly about thirty feet away from me. I’m not hungry but decide I’ll need energy for our descent and begin nibbling on some granola and a green apple. After I finish, Bryan stands up and adjusts his backpack, a silent signal that it’s time to leave. I check around to make sure I haven’t dropped anything and then pocket my notebook. My mind was a whirlwind of questions coming up here, but now I’m just lost in the scenery.

Bryan looks over to see if I’m ready, and I nod.

We head down, neither of us saying a word.

THE ISLAND, FROM
half a mile away, seems to be floating above the ocean.

“That’s because of the red mangroves,” Bobby Romero explains to me as we approach Mound Key in Estero Bay, Florida. “Inland you have the black, white, and buttonwood trees. The red ones, which thrive in saline, are mostly on the edges, and their roots grow straight
down from the branches, right into the water.” Clustered together they create a dark, shadowy ring around the island, giving the illusion that it’s hovering several feet in the air.

Fifty-six years old and semiretired, Bobby charters tours of Estero Bay and is motoring me out to Mound Key on his catamaran
Beachcomber
. After we nestle the boat in a tiny lagoon called North Landing, I lower myself into a kayak and paddle around the island’s edge to take pictures. Up close the mangrove roots appear ominous, a dense tangle of fingerlike undergrowth waiting to grab anything that ventures too near. I head out into the deeper water.

The island, Bobby also told me earlier, is growing. “It’s much larger now than it was during Fontaneda’s time,” he says, referring to Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda, whose story is my reason for coming here. For seventeen years the young Spaniard was held captive by the Calusa Indians in La Florida, as the territory was then known, and Mound Key is the one verifiable place he lived before gaining his freedom.

This was in 1556, more than fifty years before Captain Christopher Newport brought the first Virginia Company settlers to a swampy outpost called Jamestown and almost sixty-five years before the Pilgrims rowed ashore at Cape Cod. Fontaneda, whose writings about the New World influenced European royalty and future explorers, gold seekers, and colonists, is significant in his own right. But he’s also representative of an entire era—starting from the time Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492 to the arrival of English entrepreneurs and Pilgrims more than a century later—that is something of a historical blind spot in our nation’s rearview mirror.

A few brief highlights from this period: In early April 1513, Juan Ponce de León waded onto a Florida beach, making him the first non-native individual to set foot on what would eventually be the United States of America. Beginning in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano made three trips to North America, sailing up and down the Atlantic coast until he was eaten by Carib Indians in 1528. That’s also the year Pánfilo de Narváez organized the first—and, to this day, most catastrophic—overland expedition across the continent. It started near Tampa Bay
with more than four hundred men and ended in present-day Arizona with four, including the Spanish nobelman Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a Muslim slave named Estevanico—but not Narváez, who perished along the way. A decade later, fellow Spaniard Hernando de Soto led a six-hundred-man army from Florida to the Mississippi River, thinking he would do better. He would not. By 1542 half of his troops were dead, as was de Soto, and the rest had given up. And in 1565 the Spanish Navy’s Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement in the States.

When Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda landed in Florida in 1523, he had no intention of exploring or schlepping around the New World. Born in 1536 (possibly ’37; the records are iffy) to wealthy Spanish parents living in Peru, the thirteen-year-old Fontaneda was sailing to Spain with his older brother when their ship sank near the Florida Keys. Fontaneda was “rescued” by the Calusa Indians, who stole whatever treasure could be salvaged from the ship and murdered most of the other passengers. Killing and robbing the near-drowned survivors wasn’t very hospitable, but the Calusas were motivated by more than greed; previous light-skinned visitors were known to carry a nasty array of incurable infections and did not, themselves, always play nice. Fontaneda’s life was spared because he danced and sang for the Calusas’ chief, Carlos, who considered him a harmless amusement. Carlos ruled from Mound Key, and from there Fontaneda was granted release and allowed to return home after seventeen years in captivity.

The water around the island is choppier than I’d anticipated, and my kayak is rocking unsteadily. I’m a fair distance from shore at this point and having trouble putting out of my mind what one of the local park rangers told me when I called to ask if there were sharks in Estero Bay: “Yes,” he said. There might have been more to that response—something about the odds of an attack being about a billion to one—but I don’t remember anything after the “Yes” part.

When a speedboat’s wake almost tips me over, I snap one more picture
of the island and paddle back to North Landing. Bobby and I hoist the kayak onto his boat, and after gathering together my camera gear, food, and water, I set out on foot for the other side of the island.

Ten minutes later, I’m there.

Mound Key is about a thousand yards across at its waist, and a trail of crushed seashells leads from North Landing to an even smaller beachhead on the south side. The path is meant to discourage visitors from veering off into the wooded areas where archaeological digs are ongoing, and it’s mostly straight except for a slight wiggle near Mound 1, where Carlos is believed to have released Fontaneda. Interpretive signs about the Calusas, which are the only historical markers on the trail, make no mention of Fontaneda. Instead they focus on the inventive assortment of tools and mechanisms the Calusas devised for cooking and hunting—bow drills to start fires, spears with replaceable stone points, snares, traps, and atlatls—along with sophisticated awning-covered canoes.

Before finding Mound Key, I’d sought out where Fontaneda had shipwrecked in the Keys, which would have added some variety to my landlocked itinerary. Florida has an exceptional historical marker program, and they’ve even mounted plaques on the ocean floor next to sunken steamers, World War II cruisers, and Spanish treasure ships from the early 1700s. Fontaneda’s ship has yet to be recovered, and the Florida treasure hunters I contacted said there was little financial incentive to locate the vessel because the Calusas had stripped it clean.