On Sequoia Time

On Sequoia Time
Daniel Keys Moran
Copyright 1996 by Daniel Keys Moran.
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DESCRIPTION: "On Sequoia Time", a short story first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction in September, 1996.
On Sequoia Time
Daniel Keys Moran
John Muir called it the "king of all the conifers of the world, the noblest
of a noble race." The trees were named for the Cherokee chief
Sequoyah, the man who invented the Cherokee alphabet.
They are the largest and very nearly the oldest of all living

things.
- 1 -
WHEN MY GRANDFATHER Charles was seven years old he first
saw the box canyon where he would spend most of his adult life, the
canyon where he would plant the tree.
It was late afternoon on Wednesday, July 2, 1924, that Charles saw the
entrance, and a little bit inside. They were driving a two-lane, poorly
paved road through northern Arizona. (They were moving from Idaho
to California. After twelve years of trying to make the same sixteen
acres of Idaho farmland feed his family, with a little left over to sell,
my great-grandfather had seen the writing on the wall, and packed it in.)
Charles suspected they were lost, but from the way the muscles in his
father's neck were standing out he knew better than to say anything
about it.
Charles had very good eyes in those days, and when he pointed the
canyon's entrance out to his older sister she could not see it.
They sat in the back seat of a battered old Model T, a car that had
probably come off the assembly line looking old. It wouldn't go faster
than forty miles an hour and it complained above thirty. Aside from
their clothes and some boxes of kitchen utensils tied on top of the car it
was the only thing their family owned.
His sister Abby peered out the dirty window at the place where two
mesas came together, about four or five miles off. "Right there,"
Charles insisted. "There's a opening in there and you could go inside,
maybe."
"I don't see it," said Abby crossly, and that was the end of the matter.
Ê
WHEN HE WAS twenty-nine my grandfather came back looking for
the canyon. It was the summer of 1946; World War II was over, and

Charles had just gotten out of the Marine Corps.
His eyesight wasn't as good as it had been as a child. Four years of
constant studying in college had damaged his vision, and it had gotten
worse during the campaign to take Okinawa from the Japanese. He'd
broken his glasses early on and had to work and fight without them for
several months; it had nearly cost him his life.
He went hunting for the canyon with binoculars and a brand new pair
of glasses, a parting gift from Uncle Sam.
It took him a good part of the summer just to find the road on which his
family had come to California. He drove a black pre-war Packard that
reminded him sometimes of the Model T in which his family had
moved to California. It ran a bit faster but it was just as ugly and beat
up.
The hunt for the road took up most of his time. There were a dozen
roads his father might have come by, including several that were not
even listed on the map he had. His father had died during the war (at
home, of a heart attack) and his mother had verified, when Charles
asked, that they had indeed been lost much of the time while driving
through northern Arizona.
On a hot, dusty day in early August he finally found it.
The entrance was just as he remembered it across the span of
twenty-two years; a small gap between two mesas, not quite five miles
off the road. In 1924 the road had been about as good as roads in those
parts got; by 1946 it was rutted and worn away in places. By the time I
first visited my grandfather's ranch in the mid-70's it was almost
entirely gone.
Charles drove the Packard