Big Trees

“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark . . . that stays with you always.” — John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley,1962

It’s been 56 years since my father took us to the sequoias. We drove through one of the giants and stopped along the road so we could get out of the car and stand in a line before a gigantic trunk. I think my sister has the photo Mom took in the dim forest light. I know the trees drew more reverence from me than any church ever has.

We three—my dad, my sister, and I—stood beneath that tree in an ancient silence too profound to break. I heard no chattering squirrel or screaming jay—not even the little puttering sounds of some tiny rodent or insect. Light came through the fern-like foliage, so far above our heads, in streams. Shafts of light chose small bits of forest floor for celestial illumination.

Statisticians age the trees between twenty-five hundred and three thousand years. Although I know that’s not old enough to have hosted pterodactyls, the flying dinosaurs would have seemed at home among them. As we stood in the forest, I waited to hear a scream.

Steinbeck wrote of a newcomer who bought land near his childhood home near Monterey. The man bought a grove and logged it out. “This was not only murder,” he wrote decades later, “but slaughter.”

I understand his grief. A few years ago i took my son and a niece to share the experience of the grove my father shared. It no longer exists. A few isolated giants remain, but I can’t imagine how they’ll survive.

Where was the respect for an ecosystem that has existed for millennia?

We now know that groves have interconnected root systems that allow individuals to share resources below ground. We know that, when one tree sustains an insect attack, the others prepare their defenses. We know that the trees lean on one another, shelter one another, when high winds toss their crowns.

How could anyone argue that one isolated tree here and another over the hill—maybe a few more of the most spectacular—could be enough? Alone, they’re diminished. It was the grove that drew my respect. The loners are impressive, but they don’t evoke reverent silence. They’re just big trees.

I’ve tried without success to find out what happened to the trees I saw when I was just a kid. Maybe it doesn’t matter. They’re gone and my heart hurts at the loss.