The Pine Cone

US Route 6 is the longest contiguous US highway, meandering from Provincetown, MA through Connecticut and New York, where I came to know it, all the way out to Bishop, California. (The path from being in the lap of sodomite iniquity to Bishop is meandering, but route 6 takes it!) A sleepy burg of a number of well-kept Victorian houses, it guards the upper end of of the valley between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the smaller range to the east, the White Mountains. (The valley needs guarding as it is the Owens Valley, whence Mulholland and others famously took the water that made Los Angeles the second-largest city in the United States.)

The White Mountains are white because their basic rock is dolomite, a form of limestone found most famously in the Dolomites in Italy and Austria. Limestone being formed at the bottom of the sea from the detritus exoskeletons of marine creatures, the White Mountains are testimony to uplift; the uplift is seen most especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the highest US peak outside Alaska is located. The collision of the North American and Pacific plates has both thrust up the Sierras and White Mountains, and created the depression between them in the Owens Valley and, further south, Death Valley.

Being limestone, the White Mountains give rise to a very basic soil, with a pH somewhere well above 7. Now, grass loves lime soils, one reason for the medieval wealth of England: all those lawns could feed the sheep that made the wool of the Cotswolds that was woven by the weavers of the Low Countries while the cities there created the modern age. But pine trees and azaleas and blueberries do not; they require acidic soils to be able to uptake nutrients to stay green. I keep peat moss around my blueberry bushes or they turn yellow from lack of nitrogen.

The Sierra Nevadas rise 14,000 feet; the White Mountains dwell in their “rain shadow,” at a height of 11,000 feet, and so receive precious little rain annually from the winter storms that made interesting dinner choices for the Donner Party. There is, however, one pine tree that has evolved to live in the dolomitic frass. The Bristlecone Pine tree struggles for existence in the sere lands of the White Mountains.

The trees grow extremely slowly, contorting themselves into living bonsai. Because growth is not easy, and because no other living plant has adapted so well to the locale, the trees take a long-term view of life, VERY long term. Schulman Grove is the site of Methuselah, the oldest living tree on Earth, somewhere over 4700 years old. Hold on to that thought for a moment…

The route to Schulman grove takes you on a winding, empty, two-lane road from Big Pine. We had set out on the road rather late in the day, and were headed to the grove within 60 minutes of sundown, this on a road that takes 45 minutes to get to Schulman grove. I drove like a madman, stopping only briefly at the White Mountain overlook of the Sierras. (If you get a chance to accidentally view the sun setting over the Sierras, I can highly recommend the undertaking.)

We arrived at Schulman Grove at about sundown, but with enough light to see the path through the grove. Because there are some people who would want to take a piece of it, the Forest Service only certifies that if you walk the entire path that you will go past Methuselah; they will not identify the exact tree. The path being 4km long, the light fading, the air thin at 11,000 feet, and the chill hitting us, I could see immediately that we were not going to complete the circuit. Since any tree COULD be Methuselah, we went up to the first suitable large, tormented, twisted old tree on the route and decided that that WAS Methuselah. At his feet, the ground was carpeted in pine cones; the edges of the cones have little spikes, or bristles, and thus the name. We gathered a few, went back to the car, and descended the mountain, taking in once more the purple skies over the Sierras.

Now, it is a scientific certainty that a tree takes up carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air, and fixes it in its tissues, some living, most eventually dead. It is a mathematical certainty that every person who lives past, say, 10 years, exhales carbon dioxide that will get taken up by every living tree. The trees I have planted in my yard have carbon atoms in them that were last part of the atmosphere when they were exhaled by people dear to me, now dead a decade.

Methuselah has fixed carbon atoms adrift on air currents that were last exhaled by Moses, Elijah, Zoroaster, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Thomas Aquinas: the entire religious history of monotheism is contained, in some small way, in this tree. (Yes, Godwin: Hitler too.) The twists and turns of the tree reflect the differing courses taken in the path of growth of this idea; some dead branches now might reflect what were once mighty avenues of thought, like Nestorianism.

However, as Patriarchs and Monotheists, we must recall that part of that tree is US, and OUR faith. This near-5000-year-old tree, bent by time and the vagaries of the world, is yet fruitful. Through struggle in harsh ground, the tree puts forth pine cones, after millenia still spreading the seed and propagating the Living Tree. Like pine cones from an ancient tree, we spread far from the original source, until someday all the Earth will be filled with us.