On Sequoia Time | Page 3

could already tell it was going to do better than the citrus we had planted around it.
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I SPENT THREE summers at the ranch. When I was fifteen I stopped going, not because I wanted to, but because my parents got divorced and life spun out of control for a while.
The sequoia was nine feet tall then, in the summer of 1977.
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MY GRANDFATHER DIED almost twenty years later, in '96, of pancreatic cancer. It is one of the more unpleasant ways to die. Grandma lasted three more years, but after Grandpa died she was never really the same. She died in June of '99, and that summer was the last time I ever visited the ranch.
We flew to Arizona for Grandma's funeral. It was a small funeral; myself and my older sister Janet, my mother and her sister Beth, and half a dozen of my grandmother's friends, old folks of her generation who made the rounds at the funerals, waiting patiently and with not much fear for their turn to come.
After the funeral my mother and aunt and sister and I drove out to the ranch together. Janet had never been there before; we wandered around and looked at things while my mother and aunt went through my grandmother's few possessions.
The ranch had gone to seed. I'd done the work that had to be done on my visits, but no more, and it showed. The wood needed painting, and the pens where the cows and the one pig had been kept were falling apart.
A small colony of coyotes who didn't know they were supposed to be afraid of humans had taken up residence in the abandoned horse shed, about sixty yards from the main house. I suppose Grandma had never gone out to the shed after the horses were sold. The coyotes stared at us and we stared at them, and we all agreed to leave each other alone.
The creek kept along as it had since that day in '46 when my grandfather had first seen it. It was small enough a that a grown man could step entirely across it. Janet had to take a slight hop.
You could barely see where the garden had once been. It was a slightly empty spot, with a couple fewer weeds, in the midst of the general desolation.
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THE TREES WERE GORGEOUS: a small forest, shady and cool in late afternoon. The evergreens were all doing well, and the oaks, and the walnut tree. Only half of the citrus trees had survived, though, and none of the tropicals my grandfather had tried to plant. The corpse of a palm tree, about nine feet tall and virtually mummified, had managed to avoid falling over. I guessed it had been dead at least as long as Grandpa.
The sequoia was eighteen feet tall.
My sister and I stood together and admired it. It was worth admiring: the tallest tree in the small forest by a good bit, the thick bark was a healthy deep brown and the needles glistened a lustrous dark green in the late afternoon sunlight.
When we were done admiring it we left it alone and went back to the ranch house to pick up Mom and Aunt Beth. Aunt Beth was worried about Grandma's cats; she'd had four and they weren't in the house, and Aunt Beth couldn't find them. We looked briefly but it was getting late and I didn't want to drive back in the dark. We drove away from that canyon and I don't recall looking back.
No human ever saw that canyon again.
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THE TREE GREW.
In 1972, when my grandfather planted the sequoia, humans had wiped out most of a population of trees that had existed since before the coming of humans to the American continents. The only remaining native populations of Great Sequoias were found in an area about 280 miles long, and less than twenty wide, in California on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. They were almost never found at heights of less than a mile above sea level.
The summer I was thirteen I took two books on trees with me to visit my grandparents' ranch. I knew that the small tree was a redwood, but what type of redwood neither I nor my grandfather knew.
The books told me. It was a California big-tree, a Sequoiadendron Giganteum. Of the two kinds of sequoias, the giant sequoia is the one likeliest to survive in the cold, at high altitudes. My grandfather had planted wisely, at least this once. The Sequoia Sempervirens can grow taller than the sequoiadendron, but it's thinner and it handles the cold more poorly; and that canyon got cold.
The tree found itself in an environment that suited it. The other trees, particularly the thick-sapped pines, helped protect it from the wind; and it was closer to the water