On Sequoia Time | Page 5

pattern, all the way from the ground to the top of the tree.
In later life the branches near the ground would wither away, leaving
the tree with a smooth trunk reaching up as much as two hundred feet;
but for now the tree was young, and its growth was everywhere. The
tree drank the water, and dug down into the soil, and reached for the
sun.
As adults, giant sequoias can reach heights 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.
- 2 -
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.
Ê
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.
Ê
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