Remembering the Redwoods, Remembering Us

A Meditation on Trees

The “Mother Tree” in Santa Cruz.

I had the good fortune of being reunited with an old love at the start of this year: a more than 1,200-year-old redwood tree just an hour outside of San Francisco. It was the first time I’d seen a redwood and yet, I remembered it. It always starts with trees. 

Have I ever told you about why we moved to Inwood? It all began in a Brazilian forest a long, long time ago.  

As part of my undergrad curriculum, I had to complete a certain amount of science requirements. I was still working through a story in my head that told me I was not good at math or science, that Catholic school had endowed me with beautiful penmanship, and a love of mythology, but no discernible skills in logic or empirical evidencing. And so, when I heard there was a course referred to as “science for poets” offered in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, I signed up.

We spent five weeks over the summer of 2004 studying biodiversity and ecological conservation by exploring the surrounding rainforest. I walked alone for hours through the forest, hiked up mountaintops and sat beside ponds filled with countless lily pads, listening to toads croak a summertime love song beside me, pulling literal ants out of my pants. 

At first I was afraid to be alone in the forest. I’d become accustomed to the din of people in the city at all times. I mistook the racket of the trees as a threat. But when I allowed myself to receive the song of the frogs, cicadas, kiskadees, crows and turkey vultures, I settled into a quieter relationship with myself. I had six years in recovery from drug addiction at that time, and was just learning to be quiet in a very noisy world, most importantly, how to be quiet within. We visited the coastal rainforest of Picinguaba, complete with miraculous mangrove trees and oceanic bioluminescence. I turned 30 skinny dipping in the araucária mountainside-ocean under a dark new moon sky as the plankton twinkled a reflection of the sky. I was healing and ecstatic.   

When I came home from the summer in Brazil, twenty years ago this summer, I told Ben I didn’t know how I could readjust to living in a city, separate from nature. Even though we lived a couple blocks from Central Park and right near Riverside Park, it just wasn’t the same. I wanted to feel enveloped by the green, a wildness that would soothe me daily. So, Ben took me uptown to Inwood Hill Park, the only natural and prehistoric forest in Manhattan, land of the Lenape Indians. We walked from Broadway to the winding paths to the top of the hill (at that time I fancied it a mountain) and stood quietly under the canopy of green leaves and cacophony of birdsong. I let out a sigh and felt assured I could find my way in the city if I knew something like that calm existed, even if 100 blocks away on the subway.  

It took a few more years before we actually moved to Inwood. We explored Brooklyn, even Queens, but I constantly found myself counting the few trees in the neighborhoods we could afford, wanting for the wilderness of green we’d experienced. Three years later, we bought our place. Over the years, in our backyard we’ve watched:

1. constellations of bright stars normally hidden by city lights;

2. a flying squirrel jump from one tree to another, it’s saucer eyes seeming to surprise the three of us in the dusky light;

3. a full lunar eclipse in the baseball fields at the base of the hill Ben had introduced me to years before.

Although all of this felt so foreign and new, the truth is I’d always been drawn to the magic of nature. As a little girl I spent hours playing in the grass with my brothers, making bird nests out of dried grass and twigs and pretending to cook meals made of dandelions and clover. I regularly explored the creek at the end of our block. And when my maternal grandfather, Lalo, had us choose a favorite tree in the 217-acre park I basically grew up in, I chose a gangly, yet symmetrical, tree near Route 1. It was one of the last gasps of the park before the roar of traffic. I would strain my eyes and neck to watch it each time we drove past. Over the years I watched it grow toward the sky with unusually perpendicular branches that gave the tree the posture of a superhero. 

The tree is long gone. One day I drove past when I was in my 20s and realized the area had been cleared of trees to make way for a new traffic pattern. I still watch for the now razed area, half expecting the tree to reappear and say hello. All these years later, I hold it in my mind’s eye, in my heart.

It is in these formative relationships with nature that we are rooted. When I met the 1,200-year-old “Mother Tree” redwood this January, named for its central role in bringing water and nutrients to surrounding trees through fungal networks in the soil, I could hear a familiar hum. The scent of the air reminded me in some vague way of Argentina, perhaps the cyprus smell of the redwoods? The bay laurel trees that grew along the path, distant relatives of the Mediterranean.

The redwoods make their own “rain” by capturing fog on their leaves, creating a “wet forest” just miles from the city scrum of San Francisco. The scent is of spiced earth. The song of the forest is like the pumping electricity of blood through my arms, legs and heart.  

Beneath the Mother Tree (poetically named as redwoods actually grow male and female parts on the same tree), a sign reads: 

“The Mother Tree: For more than 1,000 years, the Mother Tree – elder of this cathedral – has filtered nutrients and wisdom to the younger trees. Through underground root systems, she hosts conversations that increase the resilience of her entire community and remind us of our interconnectedness and shared resources.”

Under the tree’s impossibly-thick trunk and towering canopy, I imagined what it would be to sleep under its branches, to climb to the top and drift off where endangered marbled murrelets are said to nest, to be the top branch of the tree, born so many years ago, looking out across the forest, toward the Pacific Ocean and feeling so strong and rooted in the knowledge that you are part of it all, central and beautiful, giving and receiving life force.

And then I took a deep breath, placed my infinitesimally small hand on its trunk and quietly gave thanks before wishing it well, until next time. 

At home.