Trees

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

The nights turn cold and the days can't make up  their minds.  Crow flocks, raucous in the foothills, plan to stay over, while the sky practices for the rainy season by clouding up part of every day. On the road to Healdsburg, fog follows the Russian river all the way and blankets the wine country town with its posh plaza, tasting rooms, galleries of art.  Except for the hours of  cloud practice, Cloverdale stays clear. Our low mountains seem higher, magnificent in their gold jackets of winter grass and the rising river fog over their shoulders.

Along the back roads, light flushes the creek banks. In the dried grasses, whatever moves rustles, size indistinguishable--lizard? cautious step of a deer about to startle at my presence? a walnut falling, or a dried branch?

The trees turn late, moving quickly from yellow to maroon and then to brown, with none of the slow brilliance of last year but a new beauty. Along the creek trail in our "wilderness," the stream begins to trill with the early rains, and the hills look like China in their draperies of fog and river mist. In the vineyards, the turning has begun, and each wine grape adds its own color to the striped fields of leaves.

The tampering with time that goes on every year at this time has invited darkness into the late afternoon and light a little earlier in the morning."Spring forward, fall back." Time, already so arbitrary an invention, now gets pushed around into a change of schedule as though it were real. "Real time," we say, forgetting that we made it up back in the days of the serf, who kept "time" by the sun. The lords of the manor thought a clock tower beyond the fields would do a better job

I had a couple pieces included in What Redwoods Know, a book assembled by Katherine Hastings (and printed by her, and bound). We've begun a series of readings in Sebastopol, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz for the first round. Each work within the book reflects inspiration from a California state park, those that are destined for permanent closure next year. Most are in Northern California (a very few in the South), and many are oceanside. For one-tenth of one percent of California's budget, 70 parks will be closed, among them one of my favorites--MacKerricher on the coast north of Fort Bragg. It holds fragments of the California landscape--a three-mile sandy ocean beach with dunes, a small lake (or a large pond) with a trail through the woods with birds aplenty and a boardwalk around one end, a meadow, bluffs, and the rocky resting places of the harbor seals, white in some seasons. Otters swim on their backs in the shallows and gulls rest on the posts of the trailside decks.

Talk now is of real estate development on these lands, many given to the state by those who lived on them. Jack London's home will no longer be protected. Several parks have beat the deadline for closure, and more have closed campgrounds and visitor centers. This is what the redwoods know. Protest, if you will, to Governor Brown, your congressional representatives and senators, and support the Coastal Commission, which is endangered as well.

Redwood lumber yards make up a good hunk of Cloverdale's job possibilities.

Meanwhile, the maroon madrones and the manzanita (little apple) go about the business of growing up the hillsides and, on the golden hill, the live oaks still echo in their shadows. Trees. Burning in South America. Dying of this disease or that across the country.

Three redwoods stand at the edge of the buildings of senior housing where I live, patterning themselves against the sunset in silhouette. They are relatively young, but still they know. They've heard rumors about the lumber yards and the empty stretches of blank where the trees have been cut and hauled out, stark deforested areas hidden behind a few rows left standing. Circles of time trace the cuts, time by years and centuries, not the arbitrary shifts of light we humans bear with the season's change. After a time, our body clocks settle into the differing hours.

I've stood in the circle of redwoods, grown up around a fallen grandfather, and listened to them breathe in whispers, reaching for the sky. They almost reach it. Their electric presence trembles through me in the silent preserves that will no longer be available to those who love their beauty.

Photographs by Luna Zeffer