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Among Giants

The Giant Sequoias in the High Sierras seem to stand in their own kingdom; as monumental as the mountains themselves.  they are royal family members from an earlier age of earth, forgotten even in lore; unsurprised by their eventual discovery.  

At the coast, as dependent on the breath of the ocean air as the sequoias are on the cutting mountain climate, the redwoods have pushed up the hillsides, far beyond ordinary trees as if, once, in that earlier age, they had been princes of earth themselves, sent to the unknown edge of the kingdom.  

The small bristlecone pine trees, on the sawtoothed edge of the Sierras, live longer than the magnificent giants on the coast, who, themselves, span centuries.  

The sequoias seem solitary, side-by-side in the remainder of their high kingdom, but the coastal redwoods are a virile family of giants, old and tall and strong.  

Last week, middle in a circle of helpless humans, all of whom together might have been able to embrace the giant, one of the old ones loosed its last grip on the earth beneath it, and leaned, barely at first, but surely, and then with inevitability, to thunder down to the forest floor, broken and still forever.

Life and death together.  

I thought of Olav Burley; Olav Børli, once, who married the daughter our Norwegian-born grandmother brought to her marriage when she married our grandfather, and came to America, to the coast where the giants lived, but north of the redwoods and the sequoias.  We lived among the douglas fir, a teeming tribe of arboreal zealots swarming the northern coastal mountainsides.  

Olav was cutting down one of those lesser giants when a limb, high over his head, and as silently as an old sequoia relaxing its grip, let go of the tree high up, and crushed Olaf's hard hat, and head.  

There was no blame:  life and death together.  

Nothing lives forever, not even the mountains and the sea.  
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