Skip to main content

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.  
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more