I recently took a trip back to my family in northern California. An impending family event made the journey both necessary and important. The somber nature of the visit put me in an especially reflective and nostalgic frame of mind. While there I was drawn to places that had been important to me as I was growing up: the family home, my old high school, and some of the redwood groves where I had played as a child and young man.
For those of you who have never spent time in an old growth redwood forest, it really is something you should consider for a place on your bucket list. These are mystical and magnificent places. The sense of life there, emanating from the enormous and abundant trees, is overwhelming. These are powerful places that help put our small brief lives in perspective.
As I walked through one of my favorite groves I was reminded of so much that I might not have noticed when I was much younger.
The ground is soft to the foot. The centuries of accumulated fallen needles, branches and even the occasional tree have buried the earth deep below. Yards deep, these fallen pieces shed from the massive trees cover the forest floor and cushion each step. The decaying duff covers the shallow roots and nourishes the forest.
Like all forests, the grove was full of sounds. There was an active community of birds singing, chirping and calling to one another. I could hear as well as see a group of deer walking in wary parallel with me. (They would not allow me any closer but felt no need to run away.) Squirrels leaped from branch to branch. About fifty yards to the south Bull Creek rushed over stones. From time to time, branches crashed to the ground.
Still, there is a special quiet in a redwood grove. The thick, soft and porous bark of the great trees and the spongy forest floor muffles and removes the sharp edges from each sound. It is a hushed place, as seems appropriate to this living cathedral.
It is a place where you can hear yourself think ... if you are so inclined.
Where the forest thins, along the stream bank, other trees grow where the sunlight is less dappled. Aromatic pepperwood and the crooked madrone with its rust colored bark reach out to the light. These act as a kind of parenthesis marking the edges of the grove.
There, one of the great trees had fallen some years earlier. It spanned from bank to bank, forming a natural bridge. I sat on the downed tree, directly over the running water. The stream was low that day.
I remembered that soon the rains would come and the stream would fill the banks and at times overtop the dead giant on which I sat. Even then, the stream will not be able to budge that log, wedged as it is among living trees on both sides. For decades to come, travelers in the forest, human and otherwise, will be able to cross the creek dry footed. Still, the stream is patient and some day it will rot and wear away the wood until the bridge is gone. But the forest is inexorable and by then another tree will have fallen across somewhere else.
From the outside, a forest is a mass of green; or rather a mass of varying shades of green. From the inside the dominant color in a redwood forest is brown. The floor is a yellow-orange brown of the dry decaying needles. Where the top has been disturbed it is a deep black brown like swamp mud without the water. The thick redwood bark is a dark red brown that dominates the view from the ground to the first branches fifty to seventy-five feet overhead. Then there is the black. Ancient fires burned through these woods. Most of the old trees were unaffected, protected by their insulating bark. Sometimes a particularly hot fire would find a way to burn through the bark and hollow out one of the massive trees leaving a multistory room in the still living tree, a shelter for many of the forest animals.
To see green you could look up or down. There are patches of ferns growing like fringe around carpets of redwood sorrel ... deep green throw rugs on the forest floor.
I laid down in one of these spots and looked up to the green canopy above. The vision, with bits of blue sky and streams of sunlight, seemed like a stained glass window built on a wonderful unimaginable scale. I lay there and I let my mind wander. I thought of my life and my family. I thought about the things I hold dear and the things I miss.
On a more mundane note, it being November 3rd, some of my thoughts meandered to the issues and debates of the upcoming election. I was, in that setting, struck by the cartoonish way we have reduced our political discourse. One side chides the other for its seemingly selfish devotion to the individual and the second side scoffs at the first for its stifling elevation of community over its members. In this cartoon world, one side would promote mediocrity over excellence and the other freedom over obligation. These simple-minded sketches create a false dichotomy unrecognized by nature.
The trees seemed to mock these ideologies, as well they might. After all, these trees have been there for more than a thousand years. Not just the forest, but these very individual trees have stood and flourished for millennia. Many have reached more than 300 feet tall. Each has grown into a massive monument to the power of life and taken together they impress like nothing else can.
The forest is awesome and humbling. The forest is more than the trees because without it none of these trees could have possibly grown to be more than a suggestion of their potential. The tall trees would lose their tops in gales without the shelter of the nearby giants. The shallow rooted redwoods would be toppled long before reaching maturity if they were not interconnected with the roots of hundreds of other trees in the same grove. Without the duff to hold the moisture the roots would die. Absent fungus growing on the downed limbs and needles, returning them to their base nutrients, the trees would be weak and puny. The forest is magnificent because of the magnificent trees it protects and nourishes from seed to their fullest potential.
I have come to believe that what is true of the redwood grove is true for us as well. Without the support of our families and communities none of us would reach our full potential. Equally, we have obligations to our communities because if we fail them no one will flourish. As John Dunne said so long ago, "No man is an island, entire of itself ... for I am involved in mankind."
It's just a thought.