The Little Giant Sequoia

Terrain.org

The past could be jettisoned… but seeds got carried.

Joan Didion

For my birthday this year, my five-year-old son presented me with a sequoia seedling just four inches high. Sequoia as in, Sequoiadendron giganteum—the Sierra redwood that, given a couple millennia, can grow to be one of the largest living organisms on the planet. It came, this fragile sprout of evergreen, in a clear plastic tube emblazoned with assurances that this tree could and would GROW ANYWHERE!

This gift was not entirely far-fetched. That February weekend, in Sequoia and Kings National Park in Central California’s not-so-nevada Sierra Nevada, we had visited several named trees—Generals Sherman, Lee, and Grant still looming large on our western flank—and we had walked the hollowed-out length of one fallen specimen. In every grove, I had exhibited intense enthusiasm for the magnitude and grandeur of these trees, the pitch of my euphoria approaching that of John Muir himself (this from a letter he wrote in purple sequoia sap):

See Sequoia aspiring in the upper skies, every summit modeled in fine cycloidal curves as if pressed into unseen moulds, every bole warm in the mellow amber sun. How truly godful in mien!

I can’t speak for Muir’s rhetorical purposes, but my exuberant performance was intended mostly to move my children, who at three and five are wholly unsurprised that objects in the world are larger than they are. I badly wanted them to know and remember that we were visitors in a rare and significant place; I wanted to rouse in them a worthy state of wonder.

My older son had observed these antics of mine and arrived at the perfectly logical conclusion that his mother was as crazy about giant sequoia trees as he was about Legos and dragons. So when he saw that real, live sequoias were sold at the park gift shop, he knew what to do, and he wore his father down.

“Isn’t it just what you always wanted?” my son wanted to know the moment I pulled the tube-tree from its paper bag, his eyes glittery with the pleasure of there being a present in our midst….