Forest and Foggy 'Frisco

The people of this city claim the fog. They own it and wear it like an heirloom handed down the generations. So yesterday was a foggy day. Both Carol and I were delighted that we had first-hand experience of this phenomenon that we had only heard of. It hadn’t happened to us, because you see, we are the Bringers of Unusually Good Weather wherever we go. Wyoming was fabulously warm – a relative term – and gloriously sunny for our adventures at Yellowstone. Chicago was comfortable and non-windy. San Fransisco has had a heat wave while we’ve been here. So, yes, we were delighted to be part of the usual and everyday.

As planned we arrived at the Muir Woods National Monument. This is the Frisco home of the Coast Redwood trees. These are trees that have lived in my memory and imagination ever since I was a little girl. Having read about them in various vicarious experience offering magazines, seen pictures and created my own stories around and in them, I had planned this US trip also around the Sequoia tree and its habitat.

Happy that we didn’t have to drive very far to find them, we reached. Our favorite road Sir Francis Drake Boulevard led us to the winding Sequoia Valley Road, laced and scallop edged with fog and rain. The luck of the travelers brought us a parking space just perfect. We found our bright yellow and red raincoats. Lined pockets with few dollars – this was a cheaper entrance fee! We went in.

All words then failed.

If you google redwood trees and sequoia you will learn facts and figures, see pictures and be awestruck by the fact that some trees are wide enough to have tunnels carved in their trunk. You may be impressed by their height – the tallest in the world is 480 feet. The tallest here was 269 feet. You may hear some distant resonance as you understand that they are as primeval and primordial as your dinosaurs and the rocks that stood through all ages.

However, none of the above had any meaning when I stood there in the silence of the forest. Listening to volunteer ranger Marvin tell us about these woods I saw a whole new world. For one, here was a volunteer who has been part of the woods’ story because of the love that he has for them. This large canyon of these endangered trees was bought by a man who had money and the heart for them and was presented to the US government so that they could be protected by the government from the developers and the choppers of wood. Watching the trees and the crowd of people there – old people, young people, families, children, teenagers – water dripping on knees where raincoats end, large umbrellas enhanching the plip plip plop of the rain, runners, hikers – so many people out on a foggy rainy morning out in the woods. Smelling the warm live fragrance as the rain stirred an aromatic vapor soup of bay, fir, oak and sequoia. Black tail deer munching on the understory of the forest and on the boardwalk, marching, ambling, the feet of a society that cares to feast on this offering – the redwood forest, its silence, its beauty and majesty that may live because the little boy, who came on a Sunday outing with his father to the woods, will carry this memory somewhere in his heart and will return to it – return to this lung of the world, with its protective ribcage of redwoods that live up to the promise of the tree that half its life is standing and half its life is when it falls and fosters the ecosystem from its reclining, retired position - So, that boy will return here, perhaps in times of stress or in times of joy and will touch that place of wholeness and oneness with earth, water, sound, light and the fiery abundance of life that shoots up and forth.

With love and gratitude.