The Grandmother Tree

Michael Miley

                  You walk south out of the camp at Samuel P. Taylor State Park*   by first crossing a bridge over Papermill Creek. You then cut east again for about 200 feet before you take a right turn up the path and make your gradual ascent into the hills. Parts of the trail are a bit steep, but you only climb through the surrounding redwoods for about 15 minutes before you come to your destination. You’ll then find yourself in a bit of a clearing on the side of a slope. I believe a sign points you in the right direction. You walk about 30 feet west and there she stands, an immense Grandmother Redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, in a fairy circle of other redwoods. Perhaps she is 1,000 years old, partially burnt out by fire, with a cavity big enough to hold four or five people. You step over a gnarled root through the opening and down into the tree to find yourself in a kidney-shaped hollow about eight feet long and three feet wide in the widest parts, the burnt-out cavity extending up into the dark, so that unless you have a flashlight, you can’t see to the top of it. There’s another long leaf-shaped opening on the north side of the hollow, so if you’ve hiked in mid-day, both ends are open enough to shed a soft light into the space. It’s best to settle in and sit for a spell and if you’ve come during the middle of the week, you won’t be disturbed by noisy tourists. You can just sit there and marvel at your newfound home, a kind of Redwood cave, with its dry bed of needles with their dusky aroma, imagining how comforting it would be to sleep there overnight, were it not for the fact that local raccoons or foxes might also have the same idea, or half-blind opossums, or even a snake or perhaps a few spiders. But I’d be very surprised if no one has slept there, or couples, for a love-nest. Me—I was content to meditate in the Grandmother Tree during my first visit, to close my eyes and sit there quietly for an hour or so, until my awareness deepened and I was able to sense her vital strength. A living current opened up in my subtle perception and I could sense and see the quantum stream of her life force flow in waves and particles past my closed eyelids and ascend into the upper reaches of her branches, 200 feet or more into the air, only to spout into the sky like a tuft of green hair bending in the breeze that combed down from the mountaintop. 

                   It’s hard to imagine how long she’s been viewing this small circle of woods, how content she’s been to peer into the same wooded diorama of unending Time, watching leaves and needles fall, spying on wrens flitting from branch to branch, tracking squirrels foraging in the nearby ferns, hearing the groan of trunks that have grown together, now rubbing together, peering down at the deer or fox that periodically sniff around the slopes, listening to the wind seethe through the upper reaches of the woods, or enduring the rain in endless cycles of winters and springs. In the summer I imagine she likes to sleep for days at a time and in the fall she likes to reminisce, though all her memories now fold together into the same present moment with only the subtlest of variations—like a quiet chord sounding on an compressing concertina, altered randomly by a little finger wandering over the button board. That said, in her incredibly long, contemplative life, you know that Silence is the overwhelming fact of her existence and as her branches feel into the woods like the fingers of a sleepwalker extended in the air, that Silence is more eternal and encompassing than any chance sound that may flit across the slope, like the wings of an owl beating from tree to tree, or the shuffling hooves of a family of deer foraging in the undergrowth.                    

                     I brought Catherine, who is now my wife, to Sam Taylor’s Grandmother Tree the first time we went out together, back in August of 2001. After the short hike, we stepped into the tree as if stepping back into a womb, two old children playing hide and seek at the beginning of the 21st century, down into a portal one step from the Underworld, from which goblins and elves sometimes emerge in the preternatural dawn, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. In the light that crept into the Grandmother’s womb, I thought Catherine’s old-world face had the cast of a forest healer, a half-witch who knew spells, but whose main expertise was the mixing of curative herbs she gathered in the forest. With her white hair mantling her head, falling softly to her shoulders, the bones of her cheeks accented in the faint light as she gazed up into the burnt out cavity overhead, she was clearly an exile from an older time, a village wise woman respected for the secrets she knew about the flora and fauna in the hills of Northumberland, not far from the Scottish border. I’d brought my camera, so I took our pictures in the half-dark, using a flash that no doubt startled the great Grandmother, so that she no doubt momentarily feared the elves had lit another fire in her belly. Those photos are record of a love that began there that day, watered by the deep stream of the Grandmother’s quietude for more than twelve years now—a mere blink of an eye in the span of her attention. I’m certain we have her blessing. It’s clear that Catherine and I will live out the rest of our lives and die together. The Grandmother Tree will watch us pass, like so many others. She’ll tell new visitors about the day we came to visit her, as they sit inside her, listening intently to what she has to say. She’ll then speak of the Silence that permeates all things. She’ll speak of Time and how it stretches out beyond all memory, even hers; of how her own birth from a seed three millimeters long was a legend told her one day by a great white stag, who rubbed his antlers against her bark before he wandered off in the ferns, gradually hidden by the sturdy brown trunks of her countless sons and daughters, her grandsons and granddaughters.

                       

            *     Samuel Taylor State Park

                            Lagunitis, CA      

            LATITUDE:  38.01959

                LONGITUDE:-122.729548

                 January 2012

© 2012 Michael Miley  All rights reserved