On Sequoia Time

On Sequoia Time
Daniel Keys Moran
Copyright 1996 by Daniel Keys Moran.
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I, Daniel Keys Moran, "The Author," hereby release this text as freeware. It may be transmitted as a text file anywhere in this or any other dimension, without reservation, so long as the story text is not altered IN ANY WAY. No fee may be charged for such transmission, save handling fees comparable to those charged for shareware programs.
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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.
��
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 slowly off the road. The spare in back held air, but the tread was mostly gone and Charles did not want to take a chance