Cabin Journal

Among the Redwoods

I just returned from a trip to northern California, where I came to worship the redwoods. I knew all about the fight to save the remaining redwoods after most had been logged, how only 4 percent of the original redwood forest was left. And yet not until I was in the preserved parks did I realize how meager are these remaining tracts of the coastal redwoods: basically four small state parks.

In the main park, Prairie Creek, which is where most of the trails are, you can drive the length of the park in less than half an hour. Most of the designated places on the map are groves of redwoods, most of which can be seen in a half-mile loop trails.

A year ago I was looking forward to seeing Alaska, one of the last wild places in the world, and yet, when I got there, it only made me realize how little wildness was left in the rest of the world. 

In the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, south of Prairie Creek, it was a cool day with soft rain, making these somber forests even darker. Out of the darkness blaze the rhododendrons, startling pink among the gloom, and the ferns and redwood sorrel, which look like large cloverleafs, gleaming a bright green (below). I thought the only thing that would make this experience better was to see fog, and then I looked up to see a white blanket silently enshroud the tops of the trees, some 200 to 300 feet above me (top).

One of the things you notice immediately in a redwood forest is how quiet it is. The trees block most of the sunlight, so there’s little vegetation to support wildlife. We saw one banana slug and heard, from high above, the varied thrush, whose single haunting cry doesn’t pierce the gloom so much as add to it.

Everything moves slowly: the slug across the path, the water dripping from the ferns and tops of trees; maybe the fastest thing here is the growth of these trees, at 3 to 10 feet per year. With some trees 1,000 to 2,000 years old, there’s a sense of accumulated time, of wisdom stored for centuries in these redwoods, many of which exhibit burn marks at their bases. They’ve withstood fires, strong winds, even us humans, who tried hard to remove every single one. Can they withstand climate change?

Even here, along northern California’s coast, where annual rainfall measures 50 inches, last winter and spring were dryer than usual, with less precipitation, and redwood experts are worried about the loss of coastal fog, on which the redwoods thrive, and water, as well as the warmer weather.

The good news is that about 22 percent of the redwoods is publicly owned, thanks to gruups like the Save the Redwoods League, which has been buying harvested land and planting redwoods.  Even now, as I write this, young redwoods are returning to places that had been desecrated. If there's still a world in the next millennium, the ancient redwoods should be able to tell a good story--how they nearly died out, how a handful of humans fought to save them, how they are still standing tall.

 

Everything I Learned About Death, I Learned from My Cats

 

I’ve had to say goodbye to four grandparents and four close friends, among others, but it’s the deaths of my cats that have put me closer to the process of dying than anything else, closer than I would have wanted.

I just lost my cat Ajax (right), my constant companion of 18 years. Three years ago, after an operation to remove bladder stones, he nearly died, and so the past three years have been one of nurturing him, constant battles to get him to eat when he often felt too nauseated and to keep some fat on his body when his overactive thyroid turned him into skin and bones.

Because he was constantly hungry, I limited my time at the cabin so I could be at home to feed him as much as he needed it, envisioning the time when I could stay at the cabin as long as I wanted. Vacations for the last three years were also perilous, wondering if we would be called home by our cat sitter when he stopped eating or his situation became grave again.

And yet, I would take back all my grumbling, all my time at the cabin or on vacations to have him back, to have him sitting crying at his food bowl when I got up each morning, to have him lying on the couch, where he had installed himself for the last few years. All my cavalier thoughts about “when he’s gone” didn’t prepare me for the reality of his absence, for what it would feel like to not see him every day.

These animals, almost more than our human friends, insinuate themselves into our lives, become calming presences, the ones who stand by us day in and day out. And then they’re gone, and their absence seems huge.

Watching him die, I learned that any abstract thoughts about death don’t come close to what it feels like when one minute you are with your living, breathing cat, and the next minute there’s only a cold pile of bones and skin. What we learn about death, so close up, is that it breaks our hearts open, leaves us reeling, unable to imagine life without them.

A month or so before Ajax died, I was sitting next to him on the couch, thinking about the Buddhist precept that animals aren’t reincarnated, except, my teacher told me, in rare instances where they learn compassion toward others. If only, I thought, Ajax would show compassion toward the other cat in the household, Chicory, who he had always ignored and pushed away.

The next morning, both cats were in their usual positions stretched out in the warm sunlight by the front door (above), but this time Ajax slowly inched himself toward Chicory (on the left), and, in front of my amazed eyes, stretched out his arms toward her, almost touching her. For his efforts, he was rewarded with a bop on the head from Chicory. And yet I’m hopeful that I may be seeing Ajax again, in whatever form the universe delivers.