Jared Farmer - Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

Alfred Tennyson (1850)

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

John Muir (ca. 1900)

I read widely on the present world situation, but am not frightened or discouraged. The life of a species has been calculated to cover about 9,000,000 years, so perhaps man will have gained some necessary wisdom before he has run his course. The world has been a going concern for about three billion years. With such a long-range view, todays conflicts and confusion, however disagreeable to live with, cannot make one feel pessimistic or hopeless.

Winifred Goldring (1950)

O NE SUMMER DAY IN 1988, WHILE Y ELLOWSTONE BURNED, MY FATHER and I drove through Utahs West Desert. Just beyond the Nevada border lay our destination: Great Basin National Park. Leaving US 50, the Loneliest Road in America, we went up and up the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drivea route so smooth it felt too easyand killed the engine in a subalpine parking lot. From there, we hiked the short trail to the cirque beneath the second-highest mountain in the Silver State. We gazed at the glaciernot much more than a rock wall chocked with dirty ice. During its retreat to near nothingness, the cirque glacier had exposed layers of moraines. On a soilless field of quartzite blocks stood trees that looked geological as much as botanical. My father, a scientist at Brigham Young University, must have told me this population of pines postdated the Pleistocene. I was a teenager, so maybe I didnt care. I cant remember. I do recall being possessed by the peak. I desired to climb it.

A few years later, after scampering up the ridgemy first ThirteenerI left my name in the notebook in the mailbox on the summit. Two entries stuck with me. A European who had toured the charismatic red-rock country of southern Utah conveyed relief at the grayness of the Great Basin. And a local man from White Pine County, Nevada, shared his heartache at high altitude. Im so lonely, he wrote. I just want a boyfriend.

Two decades passed, and I revisited the cirque, my attention on pines. Prior to drafting a manuscript on ancient trees, I wanted to pay respects. Also, I admit, I hoped for some kind of revelation within the rocky grove. Habits of magical thinking acquired in my religious upbringing die hard. I knew that somewhere in the shadow of the everlasting peak was a former living being, an almost sacred thingthe oldest tree ever known to science. I longed to be near, though not too close. I resisted the urge to pilgrimage to a stump. Being a professor of history, I historicized the object of my yearning as a cultural fetish.