While I loved the largest of the trees and never tired of seeing them, I suppose some of my favorite redwood scenes were of the mixed-age forests. Old veterans scarred black with fire, hollowed out even but still standing, damaged by winter storms through the centuries. Beside them healthy young trees or spindly saplings, some from the logs of fallen trees, a variety of shapes and colors and textures between them.
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
An unexpected delight from my visit to the redwoods was finding trillium all across the park, little jewels blooming beneath the giants. Our western trillium blooms white early in the spring and turns purple as it ages, like the flower in the bard’s tale.
Everywhere I go, animals are overjoyed to see me. I can’t believe it’s been a year since I was in the redwoods, can’t wait to get down there again.
One thing I hadn’t remembered from my previous visit to the redwoods were the magnificent ferns that filled the forest floor underneath the towering trees, the forest feeling at once magnificent and ancient and certainly unlike the forests of the east that I wandered in my youth. I have never been a big lover of ferns, but I came away so impressed that I wanted to come home and create my own floor of ferns in the backyard.
While I did resist that urge, when I found a scraggly fern late in the winter hidden down in one of our wildflower gardens, I cleared out an area around this hardy survivor and hope it will grow and remind me of this spiritual place.
Redwoods have a shallow root system and fall over more than you might think, such as this tree that fell off the Hatton-Hiouchi trail. I visited early enough in the spring that winter blowdown still blocked some of the trails, fallen giants that weren’t so easily bypassed as the trees of my youth. When one tree blocked the Prairie Creek Trail I had to climb up the debris field to get across the trunk whose diameter greatly exceeded my height.
I had an easier time of it further on where a tree lay beside the trail and only its branches blocked the path. As I carefully made my way through, a trickster unseen grabbed my right ankle and sent me tumbling.
Even when I stumble, I have a pretty good sense of balance and so rarely fall when hiking. But not this time, the grip on my ankle was too strong and unexpected and I fell face first. Miraculously I stopped just above the ground, suspended in mid-air, and in that moment of confusion my mind went straight to divine intervention. But my guardian angel and trickster demon were one, for one branch had tripped me while another held me aloft.
God helps those who help themselves, so I felt for the ground with my feet and then eased my weight off the branch, collected my wits, and continued down the trail.