Steinbeck and Redwoods

I am currently reading Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, 1962.  Like Lee and I, he started his trip from the East Coast (Long Island), traveled west through Michigan, South Dakota, North Dakota (which we didn't), Montana, Idaho, Seattle, San Francisco, and finally to his childhood home in Monterey.  He wrote about Lewis and Clark and the Continental Divide.  He also wrote about how much the country had changed since his last trip through the same areas, 20 years prior.  Like me, he described the widened roads, the increased population, and housing developments expanding up hillsides.   What would he think today, if he were to make this same trip?

I love Steinbeck's use of language, and his description of a redwood forest is exactly what I feel.  He says with practiced craft:

"The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always.  No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree.  The feeling they produce is not transferable.  From them comes silence and awe.  It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.  They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era.  They carry their own light and shade.  The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.  Respect - that's the word.  One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns." 

"There's a cathedral hush here.  Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence.  The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon...  the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade."

"...here in the redwoods nearly the whole of daylight is a quiet time.  Birds move in the dim light or flash like sparks through the stripes of sun, but they make little sound.  Underfoot is a mattress of needles deposited for over two thousand years.  No sound of footsteps can be heard on this thick blanket.  To me there's a remote and cloistered feeling here."

"...these huge things that control the day and inhabit the night are living things and have presence, and perhaps feeling, and, somewhere in deep-down perception, perhaps communication."

Steinbeck goes on to say that redwoods go as far back as the upper Jurassic period, and fossils of redwoods date to the Cretaceous era.  These magnificent trees populated every continent and were widespread.  Then the Ice Age arrived, and glaciers wiped them out, leaving only those few that remain in a thin sliver along the West Coast. There are many redwoods, I am happy to say, between Sonoma County and the California coast.  Most are young though - there are very few old growth forests left.  If you ever find yourself in an old growth forest of redwoods, take the time to soak it in and feel the age of these magnificent beings.  Reverence naturally follows.