This is not a tragedy like Job, the Endurer, or Oedipus, Eye - Opener. Trees don't fall like these tragic heroes, or like King Lear, though there are fools enough in this : inquiring students, the U.S. Forest Department, legislators, ...

Then too the mise en scene looks like a set of a tragedy: clouds over - sized; wind blowing endlessly hard over the driest earth on Earth; ground cover non - existent, just dolomite, a limestone with low nutrients but higher moisture content ; and cold, really cold almost all of the year - high up on an empty mountain range overlooking a desert where little else exists - as if these beings were hermits or philosophers in retreats meditating ...

Perhaps asking like Hamlet, "To be or not to be?"

But the stage is so ho - hum. Plot thin. Just the usual mix up of identity. No reason for a subplot. No great soliloquies, no dying last words, no wings to exit into ...

And our hero, no young stalwart (no maidens pining for him - no pulses quickening). Instead gnarled like the skin and fat of old men : brown, withered looking, pulled in tight with a narrow strip of bark drinking up all the water and nutrients, (the xylem), a life thread ; and topped with green blue pine needles sticking out in all directions like short gray hairs.

Like their contemporaries; the brick hard pyramids, tombs rising out of the desert, they stand safe from bacteria, fungi, insects - wood so dense. And like the air of Egypt away from the Nile - it's so dry , prevents rotting.

Main Character: One half as thick as tall, Prometheus (named by the Great Basin National Park Association), the Greek hero, child of titans, that gave art and fire to mankind, then punished by the Gods for doing so by being chained to a mountain for thousands of years, 4 thousands of years.

Setting: Nevada's eastern border with Utah. Wheeler Peak.

First Act: Bills introduced in both houses of Congress to protect this area - passing seems eminent - shot of clock on the wall ticking, or a swirling circling calendar. Special Interests; grazing, mining, hunting walk in, sway the room, and defeat the bill's that year ... and year after year.

Second Act: Enter young geographer from the University of North Carolina and an associate (late 1964) searching for evidence of Ice Age Glaciers; hiking through the Wheeler Peak Glacier.

At the timberline, coming across pines, Bristlecone Pines (Pinus Longaeva). Begin to take core samples from several trees, counting the rings on one specimen, 4,000?

Plot thickens like clotting blood, running sap to amber; coring tool breaks. Curtain falls.

Third Act: The Student and Associate ask for and are GIVEN PERMISSION by the U.S. Forest Service to cut a tree down, a pine. They do - 8 feet above the base - and begin counting rings: 1,2,3,4, ... All totaled 4,950 rings, 4,950 years old. The Student had just killed the oldest living thing on Earth.

Epilogue: The world cries for its oldest.

Moans echo off the hills.

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