by Alan Russell
There were other varieties of trees in the grove, including red elderberries, tanbark oaks, and California laurels, but at first glance hills always get overlooked against the backdrop of great mountains. For a long time I stood at the base of the downed Dyerville Giant. It had been the second largest tree in the world until its fall in 1991. In redwood time, the race is not to the swift.
I continued my walk among the titans. When standing underneath the trees, I tried to take my mental measures, even though I couldn’t see their tops. To get that perspective, I had to move back, had to look up at monuments longer than a football field. And me, a cheering section of one. With optimum growing conditions, redwoods can shoot up more than a foot a year. I thought about that. You do a lot of silent thinking and neck contorting around such giants. I was Steinbeck’s vain, irreverent man, caught in a spell of wonder and respect. I tried to identify my feelings, to think of what I would tell Miss Tuntland later. I felt as short of words as I did of stature. Any description, I knew, would be inappropriate. Our language is suited to describe poplars, and birches, and aspens but fails these leafy leviathans.
Interpretive guide in hand, I made my way along the trail. Ironically, Trail Marker 13 designated a widow-maker. Unlucky 13. I wondered if the number was portentous, if the Green Man’s number had just come up. I read from the trail guide: “Though the limbs you see in front of you seem to be growing, they broke from one of the surrounding redwood trees and, falling several hundred feet, became embedded in the ground—a fairly common occurrence during storms and high winds. You can see why they were given the name ‘widow-makers.’ ”
I examined the widow-makers. As advertised, they did look like trees. Usually, I don’t violate park rules, but I was compelled to try an experiment. I put two hands on one of the widow-makers and pulled. There was some give to it. With an Arthurian yank, I might have been able to unearth the widow-maker, but in my own mind I was satisfied that such a falling limb could impale a human skull.
The trail ended too soon for me. The woods had imparted a special sensation, a balm. I had trouble identifying the feeling. I felt renewed. Invigorated. And something else, something more. I searched for the word, the impression. It was new to me, or at least forgotten. And then I knew: I felt young. That was it. Young.
Younger than springtime.
“Making do without me, I see.”
I awoke from my reverie. Doc looked amused. “I’ve seen that look before,” he said. “I call it ‘lost in the woods.’ ”
“You ever suffer from that malady?”
“Sometimes.”
“What’s the cure?”
“A clear-cut.”
Doc led me away from the paths. “Trailblazing is the best way to walk in the woods,” he prescribed, a philosophy the rangers probably would not have endorsed, but we practiced what he preached. As we walked, Doc lectured. “Touch that redwood bark,” he insisted. I tentatively reached out. “No,” he said, “really touch it.” I did as he said, ran my hand along it.
“Redwoods can stand up to almost anything but saws,” he said. “The high tannin content of their wood, and their thick bark, gives them amazing resistance to everything from insect infestations to fires.”
He patted the bark. “We’re talking major water retention here, thousands of gallons.”
The figure surprised me. “I’ve been told their root structure isn’t very deep,” I said. “I suppose that means it rains a lot around here.”
“Some winters it’s biblical,” he said. “Forty days and forty nights. Average rainfall in these parts is over sixty inches, though more than a hundred and twenty have been recorded. Everyone still talks about the great flood of nineteen sixty-four. The Eel overflowed and washed away a few towns around here. Course the fact of the matter is there wasn’t an inordinate amount of rain that year. People learned the hard way what happens when you cut down trees indiscriminately, and how fast runoff and silt from logging can combine for disaster.”
The farther we walked into the woods, the more it felt like we were venturing into a lake, swimming underwater. The light filtered down, green and diffused. Even trekking along the forest floor felt different, dreamlike. I commented on the spongy surface. Doc came to a stop and insisted I dig. I scooped up several inches of decomposing matter and had to go through lots of humus before I found earth.
“Part of the old in old growth,” he said. “The forest perpetuates itself through the past. Nowhere in the world is there a greater accumulation of plant mass than in these primeval forests. An acre of old growth can contain over two hundred tons of dead wood. Nurse logs, we call ’em. Those snags and downed logs are the bank account of the forest, nutrients for it to call upon.”
“Let sleeping logs lie,” I said.
Doc allowed a grimace before lecturing again. “A fallen redwood can take up to five centuries to decompose,” he said. “The cellulose and lignin can only be broken down by bacteria, and fungi, and microorganisms. But, if you can’t remember that, just think of these downed trees as time-release vitamins.”
As we continued our walk, I directed the conversation to my favorite pastime. “Seen any spotted owls around here?”
“A few. Not many. There’s really not that much room for them out here.”
I gave him a questioning glance. All I could see was room. Doc explained. “Nesting pairs need about three thousand acres of old growth to raise their young,” he said. “Their needs have run into a lot of vested interests.”
“The new snail darter,” I said, remembering the little fish that once held up a dam. That had held up progress, some insisted.
“That’s what the lumber interests say.”
“What do you say?”
“That self-interest runs the world. People don’t wear ‘If It’s Hootin’, I’m Shootin’ shirts because they hate spotted owls. They wear them because they’re scared the owl might be designated a threatened species. If your way of life was jeopardized by a bird, I daresay you might have an itchy trigger finger.”
“The law of the jungle, huh?”
“Close enough.”
“And you accept that?”
“I don’t like it that the owls have been portrayed as the enemies, and that the timber industry has pictured them as preying on humans. If asked, I would state that the owls feed on wood rats and tree mice.”
“But only if asked?”
“I’m not as adept at soapbox speeches as others.”
“You don’t seem very emotionally involved.”
“I am a scientist.”
“Some scientists are also advocates. Some scientists liken the spotted owl to a miner’s canary. They see it as an indicator species, a portent for a dying forest.”
“I think that’s somewhat simplistic,” said Doc. “Less than one percent of all organisms that ever lived are on earth today. Extinction is nothing new.”
“Isn’t that kind of resignation defeatist?”
“The study of ecology is the study of the interrelationship of organisms and their environment. There is no such thing as a static environment. I can’t be romantic about the woods. That’s not how I’ve been trained.”
I was curious about how he had been trained, and motioned all around us. “What do you see out here?”
“Interrelationships mostly,” he said. “Neutralism, and parasitism, and commensalism, and mutualism. They’re all here.”
I understood his isms about as well as I did ists and looked to him for a better explanation.
“Everyone thinks the woods are so bucolic,” Doc said. “They’re not at all. Around us is competition, and predation, and decay, and death.”
His words sounded bitter. In them I could almost hear Mr. Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!”
“You paint a bleak picture.”
“That wasn’t my intention. But then I’m not one to walk around the woods reciting Joyce Kilmer poetry either.”
He made me laugh, and I think he
liked that.
“You wouldn’t be laughing if you had been forced to listen to innumerable recitals,” he said. In a mocking falsetto, he recounted, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”
“Who was forcing you to listen?”
Doc sighed. “Force wasn’t exactly the right word. Her name was Jane. She was a Sequoia Summer camper for six or seven weeks. I think most of her wood lore came from Bambi. Maybe I liked that she was naive. Or maybe I just liked how she looked in her cut-off shorts. She repeated that poem incessantly, and one time I challenged her. I said, ‘Kilmer didn’t write his poem on water. He used paper. A tree was sacrificed for his poem. A tree, according to him, that was superior to his words.’ Jane didn’t like that.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“She became disillusioned.”
“With the woods?”
“No.” He smiled at that thought. “The trees remained beautiful to her. It was people that ruined them for her.”
“Which people?”
“People with an ax to grind.” This time he gave me the questioning look. “I thought you came out here to learn about the woods.”
I motioned for him to lead on. It didn’t take Doc many steps before he started lecturing again—about food webs, and nutrient cycles, and heartwood, and sapwood. Doc pointed out other trees and plants, kept up a running commentary on what there was around us. I stopped him in front of a little tree that looked familiar to me, then recognized that it wasn’t a tree.
“A widow-maker,” I said.
He nodded.
“How do you think he died?”
Doc shrugged. “Freak accidents happen. He was the victim of one. You hear plenty of conspiracy theories. But Shepard wasn’t the first to die from a widow-maker, and he probably won’t be the last.”
I looked up. The redwoods blotted out the sky. I wondered if death was lurking up in the heavens. “In the words of Chicken Little, should I be worried that ‘the sky is falling’?”
Doc shook his head. “You might as well be watching out for meteorites.”
Doesn’t that contradict what you just said about the Green Man’s death?”
“I wouldn’t advise walking around the forest when it’s windy or storming. He shouldn’t have been out under those conditions. Everybody knows that.”
“Did you know him?”
“I saw him, but I didn’t know him.”
We started walking again. Doc had a primeval forest for his lecture hall, and he put it to good use. He knew his way around the woods and didn’t need a compass or any markers to finish up our hike right where we started.
“What brought you to the redwoods?” I asked.
His enigmatic smile returned. “Do you remember that old line about how a dwarf sees farther than the giant when he rides on giants’ shoulders?”
I nodded.
“Well, I wondered what I’d be able to see from a redwood.”
“Like the view?”
Maybe he didn’t hear. Or maybe he just didn’t want to answer. I remembered his pecuniary state, reached into my pocket, and pulled out some bills. “Not a grant exactly,” I said, “but thank you.”
Doc was proud. For a moment he looked like he might not take the money, but then he accepted it with a shrug. “The root of all evil,” he said.
“Not all,” I said. “I’ve found evil has plenty of other roots.”
8
I DROVE AS FAR north as I could along the Avenue of the Giants before returning to the freeway. I was getting used to the open country, enjoying the absence of fast-food eateries and convenience stores. The only major forms of hucksterism were the gift shops, each trying to out-kitsch the other. Most of the come-ons were tree oriented; there were drive-through trees, one-log gift shops, living hollow trees, tree homes, tree houses, and trees that had survived lightning, floods, fires, and logger’s axes (and one which had supposedly taken on all those calamities and was in the process of celebrating its thousandth year on the planet). Large redwood carvings abounded, most of them awful. Some roadside attractions promised mysteries of nature; others had Bigfoot come-ons. All had burls of every shape and size for sale.
Getting off 101, I crossed the Fern Bridge, an old concrete arch bridge the likes of which you don’t see anymore. My destination was Ferndale, and the Reverend Reginald Sawyer. I had heard from some of the Green Man’s friends and was curious about what his enemies had to say about him. The road leading southwest was flat and rustic, providing scenery of green pastures, and very fat and contented cows.
The entire village of Ferndale is a state historical landmark. The town touts itself as “the Victorian Village,” and for good reason. Its early settlers, grown rich from dairying, moved into Ferndale in the mid-1800s and built their Victorian houses, what the locals called Butterfat Palaces. While driving through town, I got to see some of them. You’d expect a San Franciscan to be a snob about things Victorian, but even I had to admit that Ferndale’s houses were worth a long look.
Ferndale was another one-road town, but it was two coats of paint and one coat of primer removed from Garberville. More than that, it exuded a much more conservative air. The village looked like a set for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, but it didn’t come across as a tourist trap. While inquiring about directions, I heard a young man lectured to by a passerby. Apparently the boy had dropped a candy wrapper. Red-faced, he retrieved and then disposed of his litter. No wonder the streets were spotless.
The Truth Evangelical Church was several miles south of town. My direction giver, a salty old man with a dour expression, described it as “out there.” I wasn’t sure if “out there” signified a different town, or a different sensibility, or both. Most of the in-town churches were established in the 1800s, and looked it. Sawyer’s house of worship was apparently less staid. My navigator mentioned, with some disdain, that at night it was lit up “like the Star of Bethlehem.” Then I thought he mumbled something about frankincense. But it could have been Frankenstein.
Most of the countryside around Ferndale is cutover floodplain, the trees harvested over a century ago. With the ocean only five miles west, and the Eel River Delta meandering not far from town, the area offers both fresh- and saltwater marshes. Over a short drive I went from conifer forests to tidal flats to upland meadows.
The Truth Evangelical Church was situated atop a rise, about the only significant elevation to be seen for miles around. The church was modern, at odds with the Gothic revival style of most of Ferndale’s other churches. Its steeple was high and proud. Affixed to it was a sign which read: A CITY THAT IS SET ON AN HILL CANNOT BE HID. In smaller letters, it credited Matthew 5:14.
The large parking lot contained only three cars and a church bus. Behind the parking area was a fenced playing field with a jungle gym, swings, and a merry-go-round. Everything looked new.
I had the choice of a winding path or stairs, and I took the dozen upward steps. The church wasn’t as large as it appeared from below. Exterior ornamentation was minimal, but someone had taken great pains with the rose garden which lined the path. The splash of colors welcomed like nothing else on the grounds, the sole display of warmth and lightness. A long row of floodlights stretched along the grass and took aim at the church. Let there be light, and lots of it.
The church was attenuated, long but thin. A stand of pines tried to flesh the structure out. There was a corridor that led from the church to a vestry, and farther down the path was a parsonage. The house was a Cape Cod design, with wide bay windows that looked out to the valley below. The only architectural cliché missing was a white picket fence.
I tried the house first. Like the playground, it didn’t look as if it had been broken in enough. I rang the doorbell once, waited thirty seconds, then rang it a second time. The door was finally opened by a small woman in a rather severe frock that made her look older than she was—thirty going on fifty.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” she said, her
green eyes looking everywhere but at me. “Sounds don’t carry very far in the house. My vanity, I suppose. I asked for lots of insulation.”
She didn’t need to make the apology, but I sensed she was used to offering her shortcomings to others, and undoubtedly the Lord. Her self-proclaimed vanity interested me. What would be a sin? I wondered. Probably a hot tub.
“Stuart Winter,” I said, extending my hand.
She took time from wringing her thin hands to shake mine briefly, then went back to twisting at her thin gold wedding band. “I’m the Reverend Reginald Sawyer’s wife,” she said.
“I lost your name somewhere in that title,” I said.
Very softly, she answered, “Ruth.”
I had expected someone older. I’d seen her husband on the news a few times, and he had to be in his fifties. Maybe she dressed as she did to impart more years to her person. A makeover artist could have easily made her a different woman. Her brown hair was resigned to a lifeless bun, and her face was pale, without color.
“I was hoping I could have a few minutes of your husband’s time,” I said.
“You’ll probably find him in church,” she said, “practicing his sermon.”
It wasn’t exactly the manner in which she said it, but I sensed a reason behind her wanting plenty of insulation in the house. Hearing sermons rehearsed on a daily basis, I imagined, would make a little quiet a precious thing.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded, and her eyes caught mine for a moment, but then she looked down, embarrassed. Without raising her head, she closed the door.
The church was open. I walked inside and called out greetings, but no one answered. Redwood motif dominated, a lot of John Muir’s “nature’s cathedrals” having gone into the making of one of man’s. Redwood paneling and stained glass lined the walls, each enhancing the glow of the other. The altar at the front of the church, and the dramatic cross that hung on the far wall, were made from burls. Redwood burls are likened to benign human tumors, the difference being that the sequoia tumors have been known to be as much as eight feet thick. The consistency of burl wood is different from that of redwood, usually darker, heavier, and harder, with a much more pronounced grain. The burls of worship were striking pieces of wood. The cross was muscular, about five feet high and three feet wide. It was awash in lights and cast a blood red gleam. If you didn’t genuflect, you at least took notice.