Feels Like Coming Home

I am not the first person to consider a tree a friend. The Giving Tree, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Secret Life of Trees, just to name a few books, are testaments to the reciprocity between trees and humans. I recall a friend from Israel who would speak at length of his childhood, of how he would sit beneath a fig tree and be blessed by the shade of its foliage and by its fragrance—the sweetness of earth and fruit and sunlight. He was clearly moved by the memory. And I think of my friend the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who has written about her Palestinian father longing to grow a fig tree in the back yard of every home the family lived in when she was growing up in the American South. The nationalities of the two men are not lost on me. The figs that each would have enjoyed grew on opposite sides of a boundary. I, too, am somewhere in that story: when I was a young girl, I lived briefly in war-torn Beirut.

It is simple to love a tree, to savor both its boughs and the fruit it offers. And though it doesn’t bear edible fruit, my tree friend is the coastal redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. It is tall and stately. Not one to offer low branches to climb, the redwood seems to have been made for a scale outside––and beyond––that of humans. Mature trees can reach a height of 300 feet and a width of 27 feet, and are protected by fire-resistant bark. The scent that rises when the sun hits that bark is nearly inextricable from everything around it: California bay, poison oak, nettles, blackberry. And yet, I think I can distinguish its signature in the blend. Warm. Earthy. Ample. When I walk through a redwood grove, as I sometimes do in the mountains near my home, I feel as though I am walking through a 2,000-year-old church, arches reaching up into the heavens.

At the entrance of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a diagram of a split section of trunk shows us how old that particular redwood was. Look closely at its rings, each representing a year of its life, and you know the tree had been around since the colonization of the North American continent, the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, even the birth of Jesus.

When visitors come from abroad, I ask whether they would like to go see the redwood trees. And if I am far from home for any length of time, I find myself describing the redwoods to a new friend, or even a stranger. When you are in a distant land, there are many ways to ease your homesickness. You might prepare some of the dishes you are accustomed to, or listen to some of your favorite music, or buy some familiar flowers at a market, but you cannot conjure up a tree, especially one that grows in a fairly limited range—in the case of the redwood, this extends from southern Oregon to California’s Santa Lucia Mountains. My mother, who was born on the island of Barbados, lived for decades in Half Moon Bay, on the foggy crescent of coast below San Francisco, and tried in vain to grow a casuarina tree in the corner of her yard. It’s a lovely tree, easy to find in Barbados. A pine-like tree with long, draping needles and curved branches. Think willow mixed with your favorite Christmas tree and you’ll be in the right neighborhood. Needless to say, the tree did its best but suffered. It thinned a bit more each year. It would never look like the trees from home, and though she knew this, my mother couldn’t bring herself to cut it down.

I have thought about moving to other places, farther south or north, but always wonder what I would do without the redwoods, whether I could ever truly adjust to their absence. How the trees will fare with the ever-hotter seasons is a question that scientists are observing, and one with a discouraging outlook. But I can’t help but hope we will keep overlapping, the redwoods and I, in this narrow band, for whatever time we both have left.

I’d like to think these trees know me, and I speak to them as confidants, as friends. Perhaps it’s because, as a child of immigrants, I am not surrounded by older relatives. Perhaps because I am simply drawn to the company of their steadfast presence. Whatever the reason, when I come home from traveling, I go to the redwoods to pay my respects. I sit in their silent circles. I let them know I’m home.

The post Feels Like Coming Home appeared first on The American Scholar.