Author: Stephani Hemness
The monk handed me his iPhone and asked me to take a picture. There were two of them, with shaved heads and draped red and gold robes. We were standing in front of a giant redwood tree almost older than Buddha, and older than Jesus; a two-thousand-four-hundred-year-old tree, and I was planning to drive my car through it.
On our way home to Washington from Petaluma, California, my grandmother and I saw a sign that read rather simply, “Drive-Thru Tree.” We exited the 101 into the tourist trap, a welcome break from the road. I paid the five-dollar entrance fee and waited in line with the other cars like it was lunch hour at a fast food restaurant. Up ahead we saw a Toyota Sequoia reverse out of line because it was too big to fit through the tree.
This land is your land,
This land is my land,
Here in the Evergreen State we are familiar with old trees too. The towering Douglas Firs and sacred Cedars line our roads, shade our homes, shelter wildlife, store carbon, and give oxygen. But more and more land has been logged to make way for parking lots, car dealerships, and drive-throughs; Even when we aren’t on the road, we’re never too far from it.
As I went walking, that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
We watched two men on motorcycles roll their bikes through the redwood, and finally it was our turn to make our passage. I stood in the opening of the tree and touched its sappy ceiling while my grandmother took a picture, and I noticed the two monks walking up the road past the cars. Seemingly coming from out of nowhere, they skipped everyone in line and came right up to the tree. Another monk suddenly appeared and started aiming an iPad up at the tree. But at over three-hundred feet tall, it was too towering to capture in one shot. I agreed to take the monk’s picture and captured their smiling faces in front of the hole-y tree. The third monk turned to me and told me it was our turn now.
Slowly, I drove my Toyota Camry through the tree tunnel, just barely squeezing through. The whole time my grandmother muttered with worry that I might scrape my old, already scratched-up car. I stopped halfway and came out the other side to take a picture of my grandmother inside the car inside the tree, like a nesting doll made of wood, metal, and flesh.
From the Redwood Forests, to the Gulf Stream waters,
Rather than being named after a tree or a mountain or a town, the Camry is simply an anagram for “my car.” Perhaps needing more, I chose to name my car Phyllis, as if it was a living pet bestowed into my care. She is very reliable and has lived 26 years, a long time for a car. The Coastal Redwoods can live for over eighteen-hundred years, and are amongst the tallest trees on earth. These giants have lived through thousands of years, mostly untouched except for the rain and the fog.
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
When a tree is cut down, sixty percent of its stored carbon is immediately released into the atmosphere. And though the redwood logging era is over, an estimated seventy percent of the original trees are gone forever. Trees have given us life, and in turn we’ve taken it from them. We are the obnoxious newbies. The gentrify-ers coming to set up shop and find a way to make money off of something beautiful and necessary.
This land was made for
But maybe we are slowly relearning to appreciate what’s left. Maybe the ritual of pointing our cameras at something is our own form of worship. An old photo struck me recently. In it, five loggers sat inside a wedge in a gargantuan Douglas Fir tree, their little legs dangling out of the mouth of the beast they were about to sever. I had never seen a living tree so huge and wide.
you and me.
It’s been nearly nine years since I met the infamous drive through tree, a blink in its long life. Thinking about the redwoods made me wonder what that place will look like in another hundred years, another two thousand years. Will future generations look back at our photos of cars in trees and gasp with wonder? Will the trees still be? Will we?
