Basque secrets face ‘mortality’
John Bieter never knew his grandfather. A Basque immigrant from Spain, his grandfather had died by the time his grandson was born in Idaho.
But Bieter has found a way to connect with the world where his grandfather walked: names, pictures and messages carved into the aspen groves that cover the mountains surrounding Boise, carved by the last century’s Basque sheep herders.
To the average hiker, the carvings probably appear to be just that. But to Bieter and other Basque people in the U.S., they represent something more. The Basque, native to what are now the Atlantic borderlands of Spain and France, are an ethnic group whose origins are so ancient, their language so old, that nobody quite knows where they came from. Long persecuted in their homeland, many Basques began immigrating to the U.S. in the late 1800s, with many men finding jobs as herders in the West.
During those solitary days in the mountains, those men left small pieces of themselves carved into the white bark of the aspen groves. Think petroglyphs, but carved into trees: “arborglyphs.” They’re not just vandalism or the marks of bored men, but rather a record of the early Basque American conscience — the intimate, the anguish felt by the forefathers of one of the American West’s most well-known diasporas, who endured hard labour as they forged a new life, far from the persecution of fascist Spain. In the 20th century, thousands immigrated under contracts with the Western Range Association, a livestock group that had set up a recruiting office in Bilbao, Spain.
“(The arborglyphs) start to give you different glimpses into who they were, what they were thinking, what they thought of each other,” says Bieter, also a professor of history at Boise State University who has catalogued Basque arborglyphs around Idaho. “Something comprehensive needs to be done to document these.”
But time to document them is running out. The fact that the Basque herders carved into trees (as opposed to rocks) always meant the arborglyphs would not be permanent. Not only do the trees heal over time, but anything that can damage the trees themselves — disease, pests, fires such as those currently raging across the West — puts existing arborglyphs in danger. Finding and documenting those that remain, before they disappear, has always been a race against the clock. Now, climate change is running the clock out even more quickly.
“We’re starting to see what we think is another wave of mortality starting,” says Bill Anderegg, a biologist at the University of Utah who studies sudden aspen decline, or SAD. “It really seems it’s the hot temperatures driven by climate change that are really pushing these trees over the edge.”
Anderegg was one of the scientists who documented amassive SAD event that peaked in 2008, when aspen groves across western and central North America succumbed to the type of drought that will only become more common as the planet’s climate continues to change. He’s starting to see the familiar symptoms again in Colorado: sudden loss of the trees’ canopy in as little as a year. One study predicted that nearly half of the aspen’s current range will be lost to climate change by 2060. And when those trees die, they will take existing Basque arborglyphs with them.