Tall Thoughts by Brontë Goodspeed-Gross
A deep, charcoal blackness hangs above me. Packs sprawled around my sleeping bag, I am sprawled out inside a coastal redwood, Sequoia Sempervirens, the tallest tree in the world, stretching over 300 feet into the air. This tree, despite a fire-etched cavity taller than a school bus, is still growing around me. If trees had heartbeats, this one would feel like the subterranean thump of Jormundgandr, writhing in his sleep. Two friends and I have been biking through the redwood forests of Northern California for a few days now, living in a world of giants, dodging rays of sun slanting through the thick forest and onto the road. A few days ago we were taking a day of rest on the pebbled banks of the Smith River, a starkly blue snowmelt ripple swathing through the giant glades. Normally inseparable, we split up to idly wander the woods on our separate paths past the feet of titanic wooden columns, wraiths in an ancient cathedral.
Above me, knurled trunks arch gracefully into a twisting blue sky that danced between the canopies. Their creased and furrowed bark looks like laugh lines on weathered faces, wrinkles that testify their longevity. Standing here among the redwoods makes you feel like a bacterium, flagella waving in a colossal, breathing world. In this dark and silent glade, the final forest, perspective packs its bag and skitters to the back of the mind. Instead, perspective’ s job is left to imagination, and suddenly the forest is filled with blue whales, elephants, limousines and monster trucks, stacked in piles, balanced end on end, measurements of a different kind, crowded up to the edge of vision. I lowered myself to the ground, and above me all such comparisons fell apart, a strangely graceful tumble, whales pinwheeled to the floor and bounced among the moss. Soon, all that was left were the trees, the earth’ s prayers to the sky, and these too faded with the sun. We slept that night on an abandoned pathway, alarms set to get us out before the park rangers clocked in. In the early hours of the morning we set off, possessions packed away, three souls swimming in the day’ s first sunbeam. The cars that shared the highway were matchstick racers in a deep green meadow, lost among blades of grace twining upward.
Staring back at the darkness of the cavity of the redwood, I lie back and think of the dirt beneath my head. Somewhere under my skull, this tree started as a seed, the fevered dream of a few strands of DNA. Thousands of years of sunshine and rain have powered the growth of a titan, through earthquakes, gales, and fires, a thousand disasters big and small. Inside this tree is the heady smell of a long and slow life in an unstable world, a resinous pine scent, blackened by fire. Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought of the first sprout of that seed pushing up through a rich loam, still moist from the rain the day before. Its DNA knew the plan from the start, coded predictions that all rang true. In its prophecies there were blueprints to survive every chaotic fire, every violent earthquake, the bark’ s fibrous cork woven just thick enough that I wondered if there was a silver thread connecting that sprout to the future, a spinning helix filled with the promises of two thousand years of light and life, stretching past the fires and the axes. I saw the forest in the last light, each tree tethered by its silver strands, and before my eyes closed, I saw my own tugging me into the darkness of sleep.
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