I've just finished reading a magnificent book about redwood trees and the handful of remarkable people who have loved them so much they dedicated their entire lives to exploring and studying and protecting them. If you love trees, especially if you love these gentle giants, I cannot recommend The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston enough. It is both a thrilling and an incredibly moving read, and what I learned about the trees both stunned me and left me in awe of the absolute mystery and sacredness of creation.
Redwood trees once graced most of the land in the northern hemisphere, dating back at least to the age of dinosaurs and possibly long before. Now, they are found only in one small valley in China and in Northern California, where all but two percent of the old growth trees ~ some more than two thousand years old ~ have been clear cut and logged, lost, if not forever, at least for thousands of years. Preston tells the story of the young men who bushwhacked through miles of dense torturous underbrush, sometimes shimming on their bellies long distances through creeks shrouded with thick brush, in search of the tallest of the tall. Beginning in the 80s and continuing since, they discovered trees that were not even a thought, much less previously known, at least, of course, to non-indigenous peoples, including those in the middle of both national and state parks, including the tallest trees on earth and the tallest tree on earth, whose locations remain precious secrets to all but a handful of people, mostly scientists. He writes of the passion of these modern day explorers, the men and one woman who have climbed them, slept in their canopies hundreds of feet in the air, to study the trees themselves and the brilliant and diverse ecosystems that they support.
From a pinecone no larger than an olive, and a seed the size of a grain of rice, grow not only the largest living beings on earth, but the tallest, some reaching the staggering heights of a thirty-eight story building. They are phenomena of nature in so many incredible ways; resistant to fire, flood, and the invasion of insects, with the bark of the old growth titans growing to a foot thick, protecting the center of the precious and beautiful heartwood, the reason they have been logged nearly out of existence. I learn about Redwood
Cathedrals, also called Fairy Rings, where new trees have grown up in a tight
circle around a living or fallen tree, generally sharing the same genetics and
root system as the original, their tall canopies mixing, becoming as one. Also,
that one tree can grow dozens or even hundreds of additional trunks, vertical trunks, not branches, far up off
the ground. Mosses and old-world lichens that fertilize the
trees; and most surprising, mystical even, creatures that have previously been known to only live in water, that require living in water, reproducing and living their life cycle in the redwood's canopies far from the ground. And possibly most awe-inducing, especially for this gardener are the aerial gardens in the
canopies of these giants, not only unseen before this time, but unimagined; large pockets and burned out caverns that are filled with soil from which
grow hanging ferns, blooming rhododendrons, fruit producing huckleberries, elderberries,
and currants as well as canopy bonsai trees such as buckthorn and laurel and
hemlock, that can range from tiny to many feet in height.
I am inspired and also galvanized by the passion of these individuals, the trust they placed in their gut instincts and knowing, the tenacity to keep their dreams alive and not give up. They inspire me, not to climb trees ~ oh, I wish! ~ but to get real about my own dreams, one dream in particular, which is to write about my life in a more purposeful way, which has, for many reasons, seemed an impossible dream. "Prove that it is possible," Michael Taylor went on about dreams coming true. "... and keep going," he added. This from the man who co-discovered the tallest trees and tree on earth, yet who was terrified of heights, plagued by the fear that he would jump if he ever ascended a tree and yet he did, he did one day ascend, with the heartwarming support of a friend, botanist and fellow redwood explorer, Steve Sillett, who not only encouraged him each step of the way, but who held him, literally, held and soothed him when the panic overtook him as they dangled on the ends of ropes far above the ground.
So. I will be taking a break here. I will be seeing what it is that might want to be written in a different way than I write here. What might want to be discovered, learned, practiced, honed, over and over, what it might look like to believe in my my own gut instincts, this dream enough to follow it wherever it might lead, to commit myself to myself.
