Among the Giants
Trunks the color of rust, fire scars as tall as houses, a meadow of gold grass under a blue sky, and a hand laid flat against bark older than most nations — part two of the road trip, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park.
Sequoia was made a national park in 1890, one of the oldest in America. People came up the mountain then for the same reason we did: to stand next to something that makes no sense.
A giant sequoia is not the tallest tree in the world. It is the biggest — the most wood, the most weight, the most life in a single living thing. Some of the trees in this forest were already old when the oldest cathedrals in Europe were being built.
The first thing everyone does is the same. You walk up to one and put your hand on it. The bark is soft — fibrous, warm, almost like fur — and a foot thick. It is how these trees survive fire.
Two trunks growing side by side, rising until they disappear into their own crowns. You tilt your head back, then further back, and still there is more tree.
Fire has passed through these groves, and it shows. Black hollows, scorched trunks, standing snags. But the sequoias know fire. Its heat opens their cones and clears the ground for the seeds. Even the scars are part of the life cycle.
The road runs straight through the forest, and the cars look like toys. Rangers say you can always tell the first-time visitors: they drive at walking speed, faces pressed to the windshield, looking up.
We parked and took the trail on foot. A sign pointed the way — Big Trees Trail — and then the path went quiet, the light went green, and the forest closed in around us like a room.
Looking up
Every tree asks for the same gesture. Stand at the base. Look up. Lose your balance a little. Laugh.
The fallen ones are almost more impressive than the standing ones. A sequoia on its side is a landscape of its own — a ridge of red wood, roots spread like a wall, light falling through the gaps. When they fall, they stay for centuries.
And then the forest opens into a meadow. Gold grass, blue sky, a ring of giants standing around the edge like they are waiting for something to begin. A wooden boardwalk crosses it so the grass can stay wild.
Huge granite boulders sit among the trees, dropped here by the mountain long ago. The sequoias grow right up against them, as if the two had made an agreement about who gets to stay.
A dead snag, white and hollow, still standing after the fire took everything inside. Beautiful in the way old things are beautiful: completely itself.
Twin trunks in the afternoon sun, burning red against the dark forest. If you are lucky with the light, this is the color you will remember for the rest of your life.
Small things in a big forest
A seedling no taller than a hand. A cone smaller than an egg. A chipmunk on a branch, unbothered by all of it. The giants start here.
Some of the trees carry names — of generals, of presidents, of a nurse who founded the American Red Cross. The names are recent. The trees are not.
At the end of the day, the museum, the cones under glass, the exhibits about how a giant lives and how a giant dies. And outside, through the window frame, people gathering around one tree, cameras up, quiet for a moment. Everyone becomes a little bit of a pilgrim here.
Driving back down, the forest let go of us slowly — first the giants, then the pines, then the oaks and the golden hills, and finally the flat, warm valley. Back in Visalia that night, it was hard to explain what we had seen. Big, we kept saying. But that was not the word. Old was closer. Patient was closer still.
