On Sequoia Time | Page 3

stood in the fifth row of trees, with scraggly orange trees
on both sides of it, well back from the wind. Grandpa had just planted it
that summer, and it was still small and thin, about five feet tall, but you
could already tell it was going to do better than the citrus we had
planted around it.
Ê
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.
Ê
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.
Ê
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