We, Too, Can Move Mountains

#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.