On Sequoia Time | Page 5

of three hundred and fifty feet; by this time the sequoia in my grandfather's canyon had nearly reached a hundred.
--I was dead by then, of course, and so were you, and your grandchildren, and everyone your grandchildren had ever known or loved.
And still the tree grew.
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WHEN THE TREE was a hundred and sixty-one feet tall the skies above it turned scarlet at midnight.
Two warring groups of humans had tossed nukes at each other, and everyone else.
(Who were these humans? I doubt it matters, but for what it's worth they were a group of people in what used to be India, and another group in what was once South America. Why did North America get nuked? The United States was gone a long time by then, and its remnants were of no threat to anyone--but everybody had extra nukes they didn't need, and there was not a continent on the planet that didn't receive a few dozen.)
The bombs fell, in a nuclear rain that lasted for days, through a peremptory first strike and a retaliatory second strike, through retaliatory second and third strikes, until only submarines and spaceships remained to launch weapons at one another. Through all of this, the bombs fell, and fell. The nuclear explosions were bad enough in and of themselves, and were succeeded by firestorms of epic size that burned to the ground every sequoia on the west coast of North America.
Worse was to follow. Vast clouds of dust and earth were blasted into the sky. Whole continents disappeared beneath them; and temperatures began to drop.
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IN THE CANYON, the sky was an angry orange color for two or three days, and then it got dark and started to get cold.
In the war, and the small Ice Age that followed, most of the living things on the planet's surface died, and a lot of those beneath the ocean. The canyon I had spent three months in, during the days when I was alive, survived better than most places. The canyon was not near any military targets, and most of the species living between its walls made it through. The rabbits had a very hard time of it, and as a result the coyotes died out. But six of the cats survived, four of them females, and in time kittens appeared, and the cats and rabbits struggled on.
It was worse almost everywhere else in the world; and worse in ways the world had never seen before. There had been die-offs before, to be sure. The great majority of the species that had ever existed on the surface of the planet were extinct by the time the last sequoia was planted by my grandfather.
Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid crashed into the Earth, near what is now Mexico. It blasted so much soot and smoke and dust into the sky that years passed in which the planet received no sunlight. Every species of land animal larger than a turtle died off.
This die-off was different, though. It was an orderly catastrophe, planned for and carried out by our children, twenty-five generations removed. This disaster is what finally killed the whales, who had hung on through the slaughter of humans who wanted to slice them up and use their fat as a lubricant or a fuel; who had hung on while those same humans bred new humans, billions upon billions upon billions, and with sheer numbers poisoned the water the whales lived in and the air they breathed. They had hung on through the rise and fall of empires, but they were the largest of all the animals and the ones most damaged when the radioactive debris was inevitably washed down to the sea. The Earth tried to cleanse itself, to wash away the poisons; and the water ended up where it always did. It destroyed the food chain the whales depended upon; and it is a good question whether the last whales died of radiation poisoning or starvation.
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THE TREE WAS not a complex thing, but it had a sort of awareness, a knowledge of when things were well and when they were not. For a very long time after that things were not well. Many of the trees that had provided it with a windbreak died off as the cold got worse. The spring that fed the stream slowed for several decades, and when it eventually resumed its flow, it was contaminated by radioactive isotopes that might have killed the tree, had it been younger or smaller. It did kill some of the other trees, among those that had survived the cold.
Slowly though, slowly even by the tree's standards, things began to get better. The winds that had nearly killed it, winter after brutal winter, stopped being so severe. The winters themselves grew warmer, as did the summers; and