Thoughts on Redwoods, Yosemite, Kings Canyon and the Sequoia National Forest, and the Grand Canyon

They all leave me gobsmacked. I’m sure every glowing, perceptive adjective in the whole English language has been used up to describe them. I’m overwhelmed, amazed, not only by their beauty, but the questions they raise, about time, about Earth, about the universe; about us, about the meaning we attribute to life; the meaning of everything.
I suppose geologists, archaeologists, palaeontologists and other more evolved species are used to dealing with millions and billions of years, and probably don’t care too much about issues of the here and now.

What troubles most of us neohumans goes back a few thousand years, but just look at a cross-section of a giant Sequoia, and there, more or less in the middle, is its beginning, a little tree as think as your thumb at the time that Christ walked the Earth (and it would probably still be standing if it wasn’t for 9/11 ecoterrorists.

These trees go back about 10 million years, when the dinosaurs we are digging up had meat on their bones and we knew our place in the trees. And even with the Earth’s shattering climatic and geological changes since then, small pockets survive where shadows of that much older and wetter climate persist.

So how old are the "individual" Redwoods? These trees have burls, from which shoots, and potentially new trees, can sprout. But the parent tree keeps them in check with an enzyme. But when the parent is traumatised, by fire or wind for instance, the enzyme is suppressed and the burls sprout, competing with one another until one emerges dominant and suppresses all or most of its siblings, using the same enzyme. It might take over the root system of its parent if it is mortally wounded or, if the parent survives, will coexists with it. Their root systems spread wide and interconnect with others. They even appear to share nutrients. So in the case of the Redwoods, at least, the question of "individual" trees is moot.
A ranger, Steve, was very eager to draw our attention away from the quest for the oldest and the tallest, and to facus on the whole ecosystem of the forest – ferns, salamanders that live their whole lives in the treetops, birds and, naturally, us and our impact on them.
Worthy as it might be to try to spoil our fun, I overheard him and a colleague discussing the scientist who had blabbed to the LA Times the day before that he had found the tallest known Redwood. Why he did do it, Steve wondered (and concluded the scientist was probably looking for a sponsorship), and agreed that its exact whereabouts should be kept a secret (obviously from people like me, but not from rangers and scientists like them).
So, yes, the scientists are obsessed with the same things that obsess us. They have assumed the ecumenical qualifications to commune directly with Nature. We are scolded and told to keep our eyes on the Big Picture, to continue our dull existences in grimy Dickensian downtown Jo’burg, spewing out the industrial filth that generates the necessary income that keeps the servants of the Green Lord in their LA apartments and long sojourns in the Redwood forests.
Priests, politicians and scientists share a lot. Clerics of the same order.

The trees themselves are immensely silent. There is no comforting shudder, no subliminal recognition. I touched them, felt them, stroked them and longed for some connection.

I thought of Tolkien’s Ents, stragglers from an ancient time. They possess something intangible to us – we’d call it wisdom, shared experience, group conciousness, or whatever the next Jungian usurper will dream up. If we ever shared it, we’re now hooked on speed, recklessly driving climatic change in the fast lane of evolution.

Perhaps it is the pagans, the Buddhists, those who don’t set themselves apart – the salamanders in the treetops – who can still share something with these trees.

Wonder and awe. I just looked and looked and looked. The stillness… there was something comforting about that.

Similarly with the Grand Canyon, a great scar of incomprehensible age, erosion from water flowing for eons that throws into perspective the shortness and insignificance of our lives.
As you travel from one overwhelming thing to another, you pick up stompies from the brochures and information centres, from people speaking – the melting of the Ice Age glaciers, the creation of vast lakes, the bursting forth of great tsunamis of water and rock bearing mountains of ice, crashing down onto the plains, shredding, tearing, spreading far and wide, creating so many of the creaselines we recognise on the face of Earth… overnight. Daybreak would show a changed world.

We quarrel about the nature of the Gods of the past few thousands years. And all the millions and billions of years before that? Were They sitting up there in the clouds, scowling at One Another, waiting and waiting until One created the shrill human chessboard on which They now play out Their ancient anger?

I look around me, I watch the news… I don’t think so.
I don’t think even Big Mama Earth cares about what crawls on her skin. Like the bacteria in our pores, the microbes in our hair, nothing like a facial or a shampoo to start a bright new day.

* Alfred Hayter has too much time on his hands. He should get a life.

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