A Guest Visual Diary: Redwoods (a reintegration)

My next door neighbors growing up had in their backyard one of the biggest oak trees I’ve ever seen. The passage of time has perhaps inflated the scale of this tree in my memories to something on the level of Yggdrasil, but there was no denying how it dominated my childhood skies - a sturdy, trusty monolith casting it’s cool shadows on our yard. My parents live in a neighborhood that has one of those manmade lakes, which allowed for a faraway horizon, and unfettered skies - skies which were allowed to be filled with that tree. It was a huge shame when sometime in my early twenties, I came home to find the tree completely gone, removed by my neighbors for a multitude of valid reasons and, perhaps, some local palm greasing since I believe California has strict laws against oak tree removal. Seeing the sky clearly in that area of the yard still feels odd to this day.

Last year, a friend and I spent a holiday up in Trinidad, CA (in Humboldt). It was a relaxed affair without any particular agenda in mind, but we made it a point to enjoy the redwood forests up there.

I’ve been to that area before - once as a child, and once before in school to visit some friends. Even with the more recent visit, which was almost entirely about a local gem called Fern Canyon (an apt moniker), there was very little that could have prepared me for what we encountered up there. It’s amazing to me how, almost immediately upon entering amongst the trees, you’re beset with a cool, ethereal stillness. All other sounds fade away, as you walk deeper into a vast and dense set of trees exploding with lush greenness, and all, huge.

Then, you come across a tree clearly bigger than anything else around it, and this one has strangely been burnt from the inside. Why, you don’t know, but the sheer amount of wood that still remains is nothing short of incredible. It’s like you’re sitting in a cave, except its made out of tree, and there is so much more of the tree around it evokes nothing less than a miniature mountain range. There is no sadness though with a giant such as this in such a state - there are OTHER trees growing out of this tree. Life abounds everywhere. Even the opportunity to walk into the burnt hulk of the tree afforded a rare moment of intimacy with such a sentinel - to be able to appreciate its age and enormity, and be ensconced in the coolness and shadows I enjoyed from that old oak tree of my youth.

Then the next redwood tree appears around the bend. Then others, surrounded by all the other foliage in this green wonderland. Each are impressive monoliths, organic walls of lignin, vast ecosystems in their own right. It was incredible to enjoy the company of lifeforms centuries old, these bulwarks of climate change and bastions of a dreamlike impenetrable wilderness. And again, the sheer amount of wood these things made for a kind of canvas, their weathered surfaces forming an unexpected, natural artwork amazing to behold. Then, you see the woods clearing, the trees thinning, and the light brightening, the way out of the forest becoming more obvious. Seeing the sky clearly after leaving the forest felt very strange indeed.

I guess in the end, all I can say is that I really like trees.

-Phillip