Huge Trees, Small House

Next morning, we grabbed some breakfast rolls and sandwiches for our pre-evening meals and headed back to the forests.  Much to our delight, we found them as we left them and as they had been for millennia.

In writing classes, students get instructions to write in active voice, using verbs that describe actions, and I try to abide by those dictates.  This serves a couple of different purposes, active voice tends to hold the reader's attention, and active voice tends to be more objective; I might believe a sunset majestic, but I cannot conclusively know how you would perceive it, I will therefor merely tell you that light illuminated the clouds and danced across the sky.  However, redwoods are, as they have been.  Their majesty is not subjective, their power lies in their being.  As I began writing this, I realized how appropriate the 'be' verbs are to describe these majestic trees.  Sure, they could 'tower' or 'loom' or 'project', but that does not imbue the reader with the true sublimity of the experience.

Thus we hiked in a sort of sacred space whose chief quality was its absolute being.  Jeremiah speaks of being brought into the throne room of God, who was, and is, and is to come.  God, speaking to Moses through the burning bush, says "I AM WHO I AM."  Those Bible passages shout anew how glorious a God we serve after the experience of walking in the Land of Being.  If the lifespan of these eternal trees are but a vapor to God, how eternal he must be.  If a single tree can sustain entire ecosystems, how much more our benevolent God must be able to sustain us.  If I cannot see the tops of 300 foot trees, if the entire geometry and magnitude of a redwood is more than I can take in at any one time, how much more unfathomable and mysterious and infinite must be my loving God.

"Surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel, 

Will I dance for you Jesus, or in awe of you be still?"

I still don't know how I'll react to seeing my savior.  In that ground, I know that Alex's response was that she couldn't stop giggling.  It was altogether an odd yet appropriate response, a recognition that the typical mental shortcuts we all take in response to our stimuli  just doesn't work here.  We were awed by the silence and enamored by the random streams of light that occasionally found an opening through the treetops to where we were down below.  

Eventually, the landscape gave way to new formations.  The ocean, another object imbued with possibilities to describe the infinite, roared in the distance.  We passed through "Fern Canyon", so named to describe the foliage occupying the entirety of the canyon's two walls.  Apparently parts of "Jurassic Park" were filmed here, and indeed, a brontosaurus would not have been out of place here.  

The ocean beckoned us on, and a wonderful memory is the delight of our lunch: simple grocery sandwiches and chips eaten on a piece of driftwood as the Pacific serenaded us with it's never ending aria.  Alex doesn't care much how the food tastes as long as there is a good atmosphere;  on this particular case the atmosphere could have seasoned most anything into the most delectable of meals.

And so was our hike.  After eating, we packed up and headed back through the Land of Being to our car and the open road again.  A couple hour's drive brought us to Stout's Grove, a particularly old grove of redwoods that were among the first protected during the early American conservation movement.  It too was a Land of Being, a place of majesty and glory.  

Our day ended at our next Airbnb: a tiny house in a small grove of redwoods.  Tiny houses are just what they sound like: this one was perhaps 200 square feet.  The master bedroom was up in the loft, and the lue, shower, and kitchen were along on the outside, sharing a wall with the single main room the house enclosed.  Complete with a composting toilet, this was a neat experience for us to see how others are making efforts to live more simply.  We called it a day fairly early and spent some time just reading; Arthur fittingly found a book full of philosophical essays on what objective beauty is.  Thus ended our day.  Omnia Vincit Amour.

Giants

After an excellent breakfast comprised of last night's leftover pizza, we headed down to the beach.  With the day still young, we had a beautiful walk on the beach, where Alex, every the physical therapist, critiqued Arthur's gate pattern as documented by our sand tracks, and seagulls dodged the tide, searching for morsels brought in by the seas.  Judging from the crab exoskeletons left behind, the seagulls enjoy quite the diet.

We stopped back in Point Reyes to pick up some bakery good and coffee, then began a couple of hours driving through some beautiful country.  As the day started, we passed dairy cattle enjoying the early morning cool, and quietly passed into wine country.  Our next stop for the day was the Hopland Solar Living Center, a fascinating educational center for sustainable living and a natural habitat for hippies.

Ironically, immediately after hanging out with our more hippy brethren, we choice to dine at an In And Out burger joint.  After our experiences in Point Reyes and San Francisco, I started to believe all Californians must be environmentally conscious.  Up to this point, no one offered us straws.  We saw compost bins in city streets.  At the bakery in Point Reyes, the coffee stirrers consisted of thick strands of pasta.  Well, In And Out Burger hearkened us back to the more laissez faire attitudes we generally find ourselves in.

At last, we found ourselves nearing the draw of this vacation: the humongous redwoods.  My are they grand!  Scale just doesn't make sense in this world.  Imagine driving along pastureland and noticing that the cows were four times bigger than the largest cow you ever saw.  An animal that should hit you in the chest now looms over you 20 feet in the air.  That feeling you're imagining is what happens when you take any one object in a landscape and multiply it by orders of magnitude, and that's what these giants are.  All of a sudden, you are Alice in Wonderland, shrunk to the size of an insect.  The sensation, though I just described it, really isn't describable.

We took a short walk in the giant trees, understanding that our big hike was tomorrow.  There is no wind in a redwood forest; at any point the wind is blocked and dissipated by the trunks of trees 15 to 20 feet in diameter.  The silence is profound.  Redwood forests contain the greatest biomass per acre of any habitat in the world, more than the densest rain forest, yet all that mass is above you, there really isn't much undergrowth in these forests, and that allows you to see things around you really well.

I'm sure we'll talk more about the sensation later.  For now, we had to somewhat ruefully leave the enchanted forest behind for supper.  We were not rueful about leaving once we got to the Samao Cookhouse.  At this restaurant, you don't order, they just come out with course after wonderful course of delectable food.  We feasted on huge rolls, Parmesan chicken, and lemon cake.

It was quite a day for our industrious adventurers.  We headed to our Airbnb and drifted off to dreamland thinking about the wonders we had seen and the wonders to come.  Omnia Vincit Amour.