November 23rd, 2006
in the redwoods – part two
Prairie Creek
Yesterday was the first of what will probably end up being three or four posts on the redwood groves that we visited while in California in September and October.
Leaving aside the diameter and the height, the thing that blows me away about these trees is their mass. I can’t help thinking about how each tree is such an immense living organism. It’s not just a 300 foot tall vertical chunk of lumber — it’s a living thing that may have existed for at least twenty of my own lifespans. If that doesn’t give one pause for thought, I can’t imagine what will.
The feeling of being in the presence of a large mass of living organisms certainly struck while I was standing before the above cluster of Coast Redwoods. This photo cannot do proper justice to the scene. Several trunks were massed together, with a huge, slightly flattened, twisting trunk twined upward between them. Both the size and shape of this tree almost defied belief. That a tree managed to grow in such a way, the great mass of its upper section surviving for literally hundreds of years against the forces of wind, weather and gravity, seems astounding to me. When I think of it in those terms, its existence is almost unfathomable.
Another aspect of these trees that challenges the notion of what we think of as a “living tree” is that, sometimes they appear to be nothing more than standing shells — and yet, as in the example below, they will continue to support life in their upper reaches. Green grown thrives despite the center of this tree being all but gone. I’ll have something more to say about that in part three on the redwoods.
