#55, November 15, 2000
Lightning cracks the sky, then disappears into its rumbling
gray source. The raindrops are few but big, and enough to darken the bark of
the sugar pines. I sit, back against one of the giants, and look across the
wood to what must be the local granddaddy. His branches begin half way up his
deeply furrowed trunk. The lower ones are leafless, reaching straight and far
out. Higher up, they rise into a flattop crown, perhaps the landing place of a
recent blast of lightning.
Silently, the granddaddy calls me over.
I stand at his feet, looking up close at his lovely skin.
Not shaggy like the redwood or crusty like the Doug fir, Sugar Pine's skin is a
three dimensional picture puzzle of ruddy brown pieces, folded into massive
interwoven ridges and gullies. In places along the ridges grows a feathery
lichen, yellow-green contrasting tastefully with the rain-darkened bark. My eye
travels up this landscape to the lower branches. They are smooth like my skin,
but much bigger and darker. I see sinewy arms and bony fingers of an ancient
tree creature, grasping at the air, the limbs of an Ent, the walking, talking
tree of Tolkien's Middle Earth.
Sugar Granddaddy is old, but still giving birth. Cones lie
gathered along the base of a large boulder at his feet. Their layering, from
the disheveled gray cones against the gray rock to fresh golden brown cones at
the outer margin, marks the passage of time. Season after season, beneath a
tree that has seen hundreds.
I look around. A pair of dead Sugars stand close by, their
upper halves snapped off in some terrible storm, their bottoms still covered
with bark. Huge trunks of downed Sugars lie about in varying stages of decay,
some little more than golden-oranges streaks across the carpet of needles. They
look like the embers in last night's campfire.
"Here live I, Grandfather Fir. The days bring sunshine,
giving my green cells power to make sugar from soil and sunlight. I pull
food-bearing water up from the earth. I eat the dust of my Sugar Pine
ancestors, fallen at my feet. I eat the dust of my cones, and of the animals
and insects that eat them. And of my dead cousins, the firs, and of the
manzanitas."
It that all of your life, I wonder? He says, no, then
reveals a new truth.
The slope where we stand is in the gentle canyon of a creek
which is cutting into the east side of the northern Sierras, filling Lake Tahoe
grain by grain. Without these trees, without their earth-sheltering branches
and needles, and their earth-holding roots, rain would quickly carry away the
slope's soil, shortening the life of the lake. Or would it?
For it is the roots of trees that help make the soil. They
probe the granite, split and dissolve it, and suck it up. Molecule by molecule,
Sugar Pine raises the minerals high to help build branch and needle and cone.
Then he drops them. They bounce downhill, a few steps closer to the lake. When
Sugar Pine dies and falls, he is likely to end up downhill, too.
Sugar Pine is like a conveyor belt, patiently pulling
minerals out of the rock and soil, raising them high, then dropping them,
always a little further downslope. He is both a driver and governor of the
erosive forces, a biotic partner of wind and water, a distant relative to the
mountain-making power of the earth's red hot core.
With a new understanding of "forest", I turn,
start up the slope, and find the impossibly huge body of Grandaddy's Daddy.
He's pointed downhill, stripped of bark, tunneled by beetles. Half of his root
system is exposed, weathered into what looks like the head of a dragon, gray
scales and feathers swept back against the wind. A dozen pine cones lie nestled
in the dragon's mouth-- new life protected in the jaws of death.
When we face overwhelming human problems, remember Sugar
Pine's lesson: patience and focused perseverance can move mountains.