Cathedral Hush

Perhaps I spent too many years under the spacious skies of the southwest, but I am more often drawn to the wide panorama of the sea or the grassy vistas of high prairies than the secluded depths of the forest. When I dare to enter its lush green underworld, the redwood forest overwhelms me with silence and timelessness. A recent wander along Lost Man Creek roused a vision, yet left me searching for words. Just as an amateur photographer can never capture the majesty of the redwoods, an aspiring scribbler such as I, is hopelessly, shamelessly lost in painting with pen the verdant blanket enveloping the lone traveler. In my wordless stead, I substitute the words of the more accomplished Mr Steinbeck:

"No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time."

"There's a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon. The dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun is high. Then the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade. After the sun passes zenith it is afternoon and very quickly evening with a whispering dusk as long as was the morning.

"Birds move in the dim light or flash like sparks through the stripes of sun, but they make little sound. Underfoot is a mattress of needles deposited for over two thousand years. No sound of footsteps can be heard on this thick blanket. To me there's a remote and cloistered feeling here. One holds back speech for fear of disturbing something - what? From my earliest childhood I've felt that something was going on in the groves, something of which I was not a part."

"And only these few are left - a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?"

Redwood philately

Our backyard redwoods will be featured on the US Post Office's 2009 Priority Mail stamps available in January. (Yellowstone's Old Faithful graces the more expensive 2009 Express Mail stamps.) The illustration shows a pair of Eddie Bauer attired hikers (Does the woman look like Jennifer Aniston to you, too?) beneath the towering redwood canopy. The illustration is the digital creation of an Illinois artist under the direction of a southern California art director. These long-distance artists (no locals were available apparently) capture nicely the multi-layered canopy, fire scars, ferns, even an old dead top tree...all indicative of old growth forests. I'd love to find out which of our forests from Santa Cruz to Humboldt and Del Norte served as the model for the illustration.

Though I'm no where close to being a philatelic historian, the redwoods were last featured by the USPS in the 2006 Wonders of America series of 39-cent first class stamps. The only other redwood-themed stamp I've discovered in 12 minutes of exhaustive googling research is a 1964 issue honoring John Muir with redwoods as the backdrop. Though they could be the giant sequoias with which Muir has more of a stronger association, the shape of the trees and their proximity to one another makes 'em look a whole lot more like our neighborhood coast redwoods.

Here's a link to yesterday's USPS press release on the Redwood stamp including directions on where and where to get 'em when they're available: http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2008/pr08_132.htm

Procrastination Destination: Lady Bird Johnson Grove

Friday 07December07

Standing beneath a millennia-old, 300 foot old-growth redwood in a windstorm is a humbling experience. Ten feet wide at eye level, the eye traces the deep grooves of soft gray bark skyward into the thick green canopy. On windy winter days like this, this tree and every other one surrounding me, bends and creaks and moans as a 30 mile-an-hour breeze effortlessly pushes their highest branches to and fro.

Watching this treetop ballet, you realize how fucking small we really are. It’s in moments like this you witness the power of the earth, of time, of forces we can never dream to match, much less completely comprehend. Even the redwoods, stalwart and timeless champions of terrestrial evolution we wish them to be, seem small and fleeting in relation to earth and space and time.

Perhaps my brain is overly taxed from participating in a global climate change workshop on Thursday, trying to come to terms with the eternal processes of atmosphere and global ocean currents. Add in my current read, Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World, in which massive continental plates and millions of years are tossed about casually within the story. My mind has been pushing those kind of big pictures around for a few days now.

A realization (or is it a revelation? an epiphany?) comes to me as I wander beneath the swirling redwood boughs on a blustery morning. The god we have created, in all his various and variant forms across cultures and continents to explain away our existence, our purpose, our actions, and our thoughts, if he exists, is too small for this world. The one that initiates the global winds and ceaseless ocean tides, cannot be concerned for niggling bipeds scattered over less than a third of this planet, which is itself nothing but a dust particle in the creation that is the universe, much less giving a whit about Super Bowl victories, who falls in love with who, the strongest Republican candidate, what you wear to church on Sunday morning, or how many virgins await you on the other side of that hand grenade pull.

We seek god, but we are myopic. We don’t see beyond ourselves. Listen to the winter wind in the redwood forest. Consider the endless roll of waves against a slender beach. It is there we glimpse, and only glimpse, forever.

A rational humanist searches for meaning on a breezy Friday while avoiding the meaningless minutia of his workday.

Chasing Chewbacca with Chickens (free-range of course)

Seems the hunt for Bigfoot (or Sasquatch or Yeti or Omeh) is heating up on California's north coast. Led, or at least chronicled, by a former Humboldt County politics and society blogger known as "Captain Buhne", the search leads into directly into our neighborhood's "Haunted Forest", otherwise known as Redwood National Park.

Curious? Check out the tabloid-ish cover story from this week's North Coast Journal, "Bigfoot Trapped by Norcal Fanatic".

Now perhaps I'm too much a skeptic. I have spent a summer reading about science, reason and faith courtesy of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Unitarian preachers after all. Hundreds, possibly thousands of secretive, breeding primates wandering the backhills of America's most road-strewn national park? You'd be better stashin' your faith in a world-savin' Jew borne of a teen virgin and an elderly carpenter. Oh yeah, guess that one's still floatin' out there too.

So our good Captain Buhne sets off to prove Bigfoot's existence by concocting several thousand words documenting the complete lack of evidence for any such beast. Short of any convincing documentation via the scientific record, the Captain baits the redwood forest with Bigfoot's favorite cuisine: whole free-range chickens bungied to tree trunks. Why the mysterious creature would turn his nose at a chicken from one of our national industrial chicken factories isn't explained. (Perhaps Sasquatch read The Omnivore's Dilemma, previously reviewed on these very pages.) Finally, we're treated to the Captain's determination to wait the requisite 10 days for a legal firearm to embark on an illegal hunt with a national park to "bag" a Bigfoot of his own, the fame and fortune of great scientific discovery revealed finally to an appreciative world.

Let's take a look at the Captain's thought processes, shall we?

A long time ago, a couple of Humboldt cowboys curiously carrying a movie camera while riding in the remote forests captured a few seconds of iconic footage of a hairy and large-tittied Sasquatchette, who now goes by the classic 60s name of Patty. (Why doesn't anyone name their kid Patty anymore?) Though no one else has ever produced any footage of similar Patty Bigfoots, or Patrick Bigfoots for that matter, it doesn't seem to bother Captain Buhne or the true believers. It's enough that the photographer died without admitting to the lie, and that his trusty sidekick hasn't coughed up a better explanation in all these intervening years. Captain, the lack of a deathbed confession isn't proof that it happened.

The Captain relates his own close encounter in Redwood National Park's "haunted forest" three years prior. While wandering back to his vehicle in the shadowy mists, he heard three knocks on the trees followed by another set of three knocks. Suddenly. a shower of "golf-ball sized stones" rained down upon our valiant seeker. Knock three times roughly translates as "Ready. Aim. Fire" in Yeti it seems. (Or was Tony Orlando fuckin' with the Captain's mind?) The Captain claims to know that it wasn't woodpeckers tossin' stones at his head since there's no proof that woodpeckers can actually throw things. Apparently he's never seen the Woody Woodpecker Show. Giant blue woodpeckers with white gloved hands haven't been positively documented in the redwooods either, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, does it?

Captain Buhne tries to breathe a little science into the discussion. "Academics...posit that Bigfoot is likely Gigantopithecus blacki", an ancient precursor to modern orangutans. While the Captain would like us to believe that G.blackis wandered over the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago alongside our own first Americans, scientists have already shown that the G.blackis disappeared from the evolutionary record more than 100,000 years ago and no sign of 'em has ever been found in North America.

Those damn inconvenient facts. No problem for the believers though, because there are several mysterious plane crashes in the northwestern forests that prove that you'll never find remains of Bigfoot either. (Huh?) Yes, according to the captain, the lack of evidence confounded by irrelevant analogies= proof.

Want more? To prove that the redwood forests support enough food for a population of thousands of wandering Bigfeet, Captain Buhne notes the enormous populations of Roosevelt Elk. That elk can find food enough proves there's plenty for the Sasquatch family. If there's enough grass for the elk, then there must be enough chicken for the Wookie goes the logic.

Let's end this with the Captain's attempt to photograph Redwood National Park's Bigfeet through hidden cameras and not-so-hidden chickens.

"I strapped several cheesecloth pouches of raw chicken to nearby trees, fastening the juicy bundles to trunks in view of the game camera such that, arms outstretched, the baits are positioned well above my own 6-foot, 3-inch head. (The oozing pockets of free-range, organic poultry would sit out-of-reach of every known forest inhabitant, I calculated.)"

Raw chicken, oh so carefully placed out of reach of every known forest inhabitant? Apparently our Captain's never heard of black bears, known to climb high into the redwood trees in search of the sugars and bugs hidden under redwood bark or the carelessly hung food sacks of unwary campers. Nor does he know the qualities of ravens who scour the forests for anything edible. Racoons? Must not have 'em here.

But yet, the Captain's camera did snap photos of black bears and foxes drawn to the smell of the hanging free-range snacks. But suddenly, or somewhere in the span of three hours when the camera apparently didn't take any photos at all, the chicken vanished. Something had taken it while the camera rested. Not the bears in the photos most certainly, but a critter with opposable thumbs! Captain Buhne's camera did spy a black-hair covered shoulder. Bigfoot? Bear? Skinnydippin' Greek camper? There's your proof of the existence of Bigfoot in the redwoods.

Thanks for all your efforts Captain Buhne. And good luck on the hunt. We eagerly await your follow-up report.
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Ya know. I generally trust the North Coast Journal more than I don't. The tabloid cover and the impossible story so close to Halloween imply to me a good Halloween ghost story. A Sidd Finch tale for Humboldt County.

Ya almost had me there, Captain Buhne. I'll give you a call you if Tony Orlando starts banging on trees next time I'm hikin' the Lady Bird Johnson trail.