Generation Y, or Look What the Velociraptor Dragged In
This is off the cuff, as I eye the clock tick to 4:04 and realize I could have left four minutes ago, so don’t hold me to it. I thought maybe I would belong to one of the first generations of people who didn’t feel the need to ask questions like, “Does our generation amount to anything?” or “Where are we going?” or “What do we stand for?” I was probably wrong about that, though. It seems as if we’re starting to wonder who “we” are, and anytime that happens violence or cases of genital warts are bound to break out.
I am going home to write a paper on how teachers can avoid getting sued. Stop if you’ve heard this before, but EDUCATION ABOUT HOW TO EDUCATE IS INELUCTABLY FUCKED.
Sometimes it is worth doing difficult time-intensive things that occasion displeasure and bouts of reflective self-inventory taking, just for when it comes time when you no longer have to do those things. The relief is so palpable it’s almost like having relief balm secrete into your soul’s skin. I did write that last sentence, yes I did.
Science seems to be the new Thing About Which I Wish Kid Version of Me Had Been More Curious. There was an article on redwoods in the New Yorker awhile back, and I relocated it via the electronic database access I forgot I had. It’s somewhere around 10000 words, and I found it glorious. I'd be happy to send it to you if you email me, and if you dont know the email you probably dont know me so you should maybe not be here, huh? Ha. Here is the article. Email is too much effort.
The coast redwood tree is an evergreen conifer, a member
of the cypress family, which grows in valleys and on slopes of mountains along
the coast of Central and Northern California, mostly within ten miles of the
sea. The scientific name of the tree, which is usually simply called a redwood,
is Sequoia sempervirens. A coast redwood has fibrous, furrowed bark, flat
needles, and small seed-bearing cones the size of olives. Its heartwood is the
color of old claret and is extremely resistant to rot. It has a lemony scent.
Redwoods flourish in wet, rainy, foggy habitats. The realm of the redwoods
starts in Big Sur and runs northward along the coast to Oregon; fourteen and a
half miles up the Oregon coast, the redwoods abruptly stop.
The main trunk of
a coast redwood can be up to twenty-five feet in diameter near its base, and in
some cases it can extend upward from the ground for more than two hundred and
fifty feet before the first strong branches emerge and the crown of the tree
begins to flare. The crown of a tall coast redwood is typically an irregular
spire that can look like the plume of a rocket taking off. Very few trees of any
species today other than redwoods are more than three hundred feet tall. The
tallest living coast redwoods are between three hundred and fifty and three
hundred and seventy feet high-the equivalent of a
thirty-five-to-thirty-seven-story building.
In its first fifty year of life,
a coast redwood can grow from a seed into a tree that's a hundred feet tall.
Redwoods grow largest and tallest in silty floodplains near creeks, in spots
that are called alluvial flats. There, a redwood can suck up huge amounts of
water and nutrients, and it is protected from wind, which can throw a redwood
down. In its next thousand years, it grows faster, adding mass at an
accelerating rate. The living portion of a tree is a layer of tissue called the
cambium, which exists underneath the bark. If the cambium of one of the bigger
coast redwoods Were to be spread out into a flat sheet, it would be nearly half
the size of a football field. Each year, a coast redwood can add one millimetre
of new growth to its cambium, or the equivalent of one ton of new wood.
As a
young redwood reaches maturity, it typically loses its top. The top either
breaks off in a storm or dies and fails off. A redwood reacts to the loss by
sending out new trunks, which typically appear in the crown, high up in the
tree, and point at the sky like the fingers of an upraised hand. The new minks
shoot upward from larger limbs, travelling parallel to the main trunk, or they
emerge directly out of the main trunk and run alongside it. The new trunks send
out their own branches, which eventually spit out more trunks through the crown.
The resulting structure is what mathematicians call a fractal; botanists say
that the tree is forming reiterations. The redwood is repeating its shape again
and again.
With the passing of centuries, the reiterated trunks begin to
touch one another here and there. The trunks fuse and flow together at these
spots, like Silly Putty melting into itself. The bases of the extra trunks bloat
out, and become gnarled masses of living wood called buttresses. In the crowns
of the largest redwoods, bridges of living redwood are flung horizontally from
branch to branch and from trunk to trunk, cross-linking the crown with a natural
system of struts and cantilevers. This strengthens the crown and may help it to
grow bigger, until it can look like a thunderhead coming to a boil. There are
often blackened chambers and holes in the trunks--fire caves, caused by big
forest fires. The tree survives and regrows its burned parts, and it continues
to thrust out new trunks.
Botanists judge the size of a tree by the amount of
wood it contains, not by its height. By that measure, the largest species of
tree is the giant sequoia, a type of cypress that is closely related to the
coast redwood. The biggest living giant sequoia trees have fatter and more
massive trunks than the coast redwoods. But the coast redwood is the tallest
species of tree on earth.
Extremely large coast redwoods are referred to as
redwood giants. The very biggest are called titans. Currently, about a hundred
and twenty coast redwoods are known to be more than three hundred and fifty feet
tall. Eighty per cent of them live in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, along the
Eel River, in Humboldt Count, in Northern California. No one knows exactly how
old the biggest coast redwoods are, because nobody has ever drilled into one of
them to count its annual growth rings. Botanists think that the oldest redwoods
may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old. They seem to
be roughly the age of the Parthenon.
One day in early 2003, I arrived at the
office of Stephen C. Sillett, on the campus of Humboldt State University, in
Arcata, a coastal town in Humboldt Count. Winter storms had been passing
through, and Arcata smelled of redwoods and the sea. Sillett is an associate
professor of botany, and he is the principal explorer of the redwood-forest
canopy, the three-dimensional labyrinth that exists in the air above the forest
floor. He is one of the world's better tree climbers. One reason I had come to
Humboldt was to see Sillett climb a redwood.
Sillett conducts his research
with a group of graduate students and a few other scientists, whom he trains in
advanced tree-climbing techniques. I had never met Sillett, and didn't quite
know what to expect. "Steve can come across as brusque, but it's because he's so
focussed," his brother, Scott Sillett, explained to me one day on the telephone.
Scott is an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.,
who studies songbirds. "Steve is one of the most passionate and curious
scientists I know. I love birds, but even I can get sick of them. Steve never
seems to get sick of trees."
I found Steve Sillett in his office, a
windowless room with white walls, stretched out in a chair before a computer,
working on some data from the canopy. He was wearing olive-green climbing pants,
a pullover shirt, and mud-stained climbing boots. Sillett is thirty-seven years
old, of medium height, and he has a lean body with flaring shoulders, huge
forearms, and adept-looking hands. His hair is light brown and feathery, and his
eyes, set deep in a square face, are dark brown and watchful. Sillett's manner
is usually laid-back, but he can act fast. He once fell out of the top of a big
redwood named Pleiades I, which is three hundred and ten feet tall. Dropping
through the air, he reached out and caught a branch with one hand. This ripped
his shoulder out of its socket and tore a bit of flesh out of his hand, but it
also stopped his fall. He ended up hanging from the branch by a bleeding hand
and a dislocated shoulder, twenty-eight stories above the ground and feeling a
bit surprised with himself. "We're primates. Those opposable thumbs are
awesome," he explained.
The forest canopies of the earth are realms of
unfathomed nature, and they are largely a mystery. They are also
disappearing--they are being logged off rapidly, burned away, turned into
fragments and patches--and they are perhaps being altered by changes in the
earth's climate caused by human activities. Sillett said, "We want to try to
understand the basic biology of the redwood canopy, because it will give us a
blueprint for how things should work in an old-growth redwood
forest."
Redwoods are able to reshape the local climate and environment in
which they live. They change the chemical nature of the soil, and they assume
control of vital resources in the forest, particularly sunlight and water.
"We're trying to get a feel for how much water is stored in the canopy--in the
trees, in their foliage, in the canopy soil, and in other plants that live in
the canopy," Sillett said. "There's a lot of water up here. These trees axe
controlling the movement of the water in this forest. How do they do that? What
will happen to these forests as the climate changes with global warming? The way
the world is going, our work in the canopy could be just a task of documenting
something before it winks out."
In 1995, Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany
from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present
job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy. No
scientist had been there before. The tallest redwoods were regarded as
inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since
the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground.
From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that
no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time-this was
just eight years ago--was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood
desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.
Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.
The
old-growth redwood-forest canopy, Sillett found, is packed with epiphytes,
plants that grow on other plants. They commonly occur on trees in tropical rain
forests, but nobody really expected to find them in profusion in Northern
California. There are hanging gardens of ferns, in masses that Sillett calls
fern mats. The fern mats can weigh tons when they are saturated with rainwater;
they are the heaviest masses of epiphytes which have been found in any forest
canopy on earth. Layers of earth, called canopy soil, accumulate over the
centuries on wide limbs and in the tree's crotches--in places where trunks
spring from trunks---and support a variety of animal and plant life. In the
crown of a giant redwood named Fangorn, Sillett found a layer of canopy soil
that is three feet deep. Near the top of Laurelin, or the Tree of the Sun, which
is three hundred and sixty-eight feet tall and still growing, Sillett found a
huge, sheared off trunk with a rotted, damp center. Masses of shrubs are growing
out of the wet rot, sending their roots down into Laurelin.
Sillett and his
students have found small, pink earthworms of an unidentified species in the
beds of soil in the redwoods. A Humboldt colleague of Sillett's named Michael A.
Camann has collected aquatic crustaceans called copepods living in the fern
mats. The scientists have not yet been able to determine the copepods' species.
Sillett said, "They commonly dwell in the gravel in streams around here." He
can't explain how they got into the redwood canopy. A former graduate student of
Sillett's named James C. Spickler has been studying wandering salamanders in the
redwood canopy. The wandering salamander is brown and gold, and it feeds on
insects, mainly at night. Spickler found that the salamanders were breeding in
the redwood canopy, which suggests that they never visit the ground--this
population of salamanders appears to live its entire life cycle in the redwood
canopy.
Old redwood trees are infested with thickets of huckleberry bushes.
In the fall, Sillett and his colleagues stop and rest inside huckleberry
thickets, hundreds of feet above the ground, and gorge on the berries. He and
his students have also taken censuses of other shrubs growing in the redwood
canopy: currant bushes, elderberry bushes, and salmonberry bushes, which
occasionally put out fruit, too. Sillett has discovered small trees--wild
bonsai--in the canopy. The species include California bay laurel trees, western
hemlocks, Douglas firs, and tan oaks. Sillett once found an eight-foot Sitka
spruce growing on the limb of a giant redwood.
Over the years, forest-canopy
researchers have developed a variety of techniques for gaining access to forest
canopies. These include towers, walkways, balloons, high-powered binoculars (the
researcher looks at the canopy but doesn't go there), direct tree climbing
(which is what Sillett does), and construction cranes. There is, for example,
the Wind River Canopy Crane, which is situated in the Gifford Pinchot National
Forest, in southwest Washington. The crane has a gondola at the end of a long
arm, which can deliver a scientist to any point in the canopy that's within
reach, including to the tips of branches, and the gondola can go as high as two
hundred and twenty feet above the ground. The disadvantage of a crane is that
it's expensive to operate, and it's rooted in one spot. The Wind River crane is
able to penetrate roughly one and a half million cubic metres of tree space.
Steve Sillett and his colleagues are able to explore roughly twenty billion
cubic metres of old-growth redwood forest. In any event, the Wind River crane
wouldn't be able to get a person into the crown of the taller giant redwood
trees, since many of them are mostly or entirely above the highest reach of the
crane.
When Sillett and his colleagues are aloft in redwood space, and moving
around from place to place, they make use of tree-climbing ropes and a safety
harness called a tree-climbing saddle. They wear helmets and soft-soled boots
(spikes can damage a tree). Tree climbers normally hang suspended in midair in a
harness attached to ropes looped over solid parts of the tree above them called
anchor points. The ropes are attached to the climber's saddle by means of
carabiners, which are strong aluminum or steel clips. Tree climbers often move
very lightly over branches, keeping most of their weight suspended on their
anchor ropes. A skilled tree climber can travel horizontally or at diagonals
through the crown of a tree while he's hanging in midair, and not even touch the
tree with his body. He may toss a length of rope here or there, getting the rope
over a new anchor point, and then he can pull himself to a different place in
the tree.
Tree climbing is quite different from rock climbing. Rock climbers
move upward over a vertical surface of stone by using their hands and feet to
obtain friction and support. They are not suspended from taut ropes (except
sometimes in the type of rock climbing called aid climbing). A rock climber
advances upward while a safety rope, held by a person called a belayer, trails
loosely below him. The rope is there in case the rock climber loses his grip on
the stone and falls. In tree climbing, the rope is used as the main tool for
gaining height and for moving around. The bark of a tree is crumbly and soft,
and a climber can't get any kind of secure grip on it with his hands and feet.
The branches of a tree can snap off.
The method by which Steve Sillett and
his colleagues climb redwoods is known as a modified arborist-style climbing
technique. Arborists, or tree surgeons, get around in trees using a special
soft, thick, strong rope. When the rope is passed over an anchor point, it is
formed into a long loop or noose, which is tied with a sliding knot called the
Blake's hitch. The Blake's hitch was invented in 1990 by a tree surgeon in
California named Jason Blake. He popularized it among arborists. It looks a
little bit like a hangman's knot, though it functions in a different way. It is
a friction knot--it can grip securely on a length of rope, or it can slide on
the rope, depending on how the knot is manipulated. By sliding a Blake's hitch,
a tree climber can shorten or lengthen a loop of rope over an anchor point, and
move upward or downward. A climber can also lock the Blake's hitch, and thereby
hang motionless.
In the late nineteen-eighties, Sillett was a biology major
at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and had already decided that he wanted to
become a canopy scientist; for his senior thesis at Reed, he began climbing tall
Douglas fir trees. A few years later, when he was a graduate student at Oregon
State, he got a telephone call from an arborist named Kevin Hillery, who had
happened to read Sillett's college thesis. Sillett told him that he was using
boots with spikes, called climbing spurs, and a short rope called a flipline to
get himself up the trunks of the trees--he was climbing the Douglas firs in the
way that-an electrical worker climbs up a telephone pole. Hillery said, "If you
need spurs to climb a tree, you shouldn't be climbing trees." He offered to
teach Sillett the arborist-style climbing technique. Sillett soon began
developing his own style of climbing. Sillett's method differs from the
classical arborist technique in that he ascends into the crown of a redwood
along a single strand of rope called the main rope. Once he gets up into the
crown, he detaches himself from the main rope and moves around using a shorter
length of rope. (Most arborists don't ascend trees on a main rope, since most
trees aren't tall enough to require one.)
The process of getting into the
crown of a tree is known to tree climbers as the entry. To accomplish an entry
into a redwood, Sillett ties a fishing line to an arrow and then, with a hunting
bow, shoots the arrow over a strong branch somewhere in the lower crown of the
tree. He then ties a nylon cord to one end of the fishing line. By pulling on
the other end, he drags the cord over the branch. He ties a rope--which will be
the main rope--to the cord and drags it over the branch. Now the main rope is
hanging in an upside-down U over a branch in the crown of the tree. He ties one
end to a smaller, nearby tree, and then he climbs up the loose, hanging end of
the rope using mechanical ascenders (of the kind that rock climbers and carets
use). Sillett says, "You loft yourself into the lower crown on a main rope, and
then you detach yourself and move from branch to branch."
To do so, Sillett
uses a complicated rig of rope and carabiners, sixty feet long, which he calls a
double-ended split-tail lanyard, or a motion, lanyard. The lanyard works in the
same basic way as does Spider-Man's silk. A climber can attach either end to an
anchor point. By attaching alternate ends, he can move around while always
staying attached to the tree by at least one strand of rope. Sillett is not
immune to a fear of heights. At odd moments when he's aloft in the deep canopy,
often when he's hanging from a branch on a motion lanyard, a kind of waking
dream flashes over him. For a second, he seems to feel something break, and then
he seems to feel himself turning in space as he falls for twenty or thirty
stories along the trunk of a giant coast redwood.
The crown of an ancient
coast redwood can bristle with rotting extra trunks, and it can be crisscrossed
with dead limbs that may be up to several feet in diameter, and there can be
broken off dead branches hanging in the foliage, which are called widow-makers.
The twitching movement of a climbing rope can stir loose a widow-maker, and a
falling branch can tear Off other branches, triggering a cascade of spinning
redwood spars the size of railroad ties. A falling branch can spike itself five
feet into the ground. Redwoods can have pieces of dead wood in them that are
bigger than Chevrolet Suburbans. Sillett carries a little folding saw with him
and uses it to cut away any small, hazardous dead branches, "but with the big
hazards we just have to rely on hope," he says. Redwoods occasionally shed whole
sections of themselves. Sillett calls this process calving. The tree releases a
kind of woodberg, and as it collapses it gives off a roar that can be heard for
a mile or two, and it leaves the area around the calved redwood looking as if a
tank battle had been fought there. A calving event would obliterate any humans
in the tree. Sillett told me, "The thing I fear most is a falling branch that
hooks on my rope. It would slide down the rope into me, and it would tear
through my body cavity. You are a grape hanging on a vine, and a falling branch
can pop you."
The tallest living part of a tree is called the leader. The
leader of a coast redwood is often a delicate spindle, covered with papery bark,
and its branches are brittle. When Sillett reaches one, he sometimes takes off
his boots and socks and hangs them on a branch, and then he climbs barefoot to
the top. "It makes sense to have a form of communication with the tree," he
says.
In the summer of 2000, while Sillett was attending a scientific
conference, he met a canopy scientist named Marie Antoine. They started climbing
redwoods together, and were married soon afterward. Antoine, a slender woman in
her late twenties, was born and raised in Canada. She is an expert in lichens
and a lecturer at Humboldt State. Sillett and Antoine live in a small yellow
house in the hills overlooking Arcata. They keep their tree-climbing gear in the
garage.
In the eighteen-forties, when American settlers arrived in Northern
California, the redwood forest amounted to roughly two million acres of virgin,
old-growth trees. Loggers began cutting down the redwoods with axes and
handsaws, using the wood for making barns, houses, fences, and railroad ties. In
the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the introduction of logging machinery,
chainsaws, and Caterpillar tractors vastly increased the speed of logging along
the northern coast of California, and the old-growth redwood forests began to
disappear. Most of these forests ended up being owned by timber companies. As a
rule, they carried out clear-cutting operations, in which no tree of any worth
was left standing. In all, close to ninety-six per cent of the virgin redwood
forest was cut down. Some botanists, including Steve Sillett, believe that
during the logging a number of redwood titans were felled that were bigger than
any of the living giant sequoia trees are today. In other words, before the
logging, the coast redwood was probably the largest tree on earth, not just the
tallest.
About ninety thousand acres of old-growth redwoods have remained
intact, in patches of protected land. The remaining scraps of the primeval
redwood forest canopy are like three or four fragments of a rose window in a
cathedral, and the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away. "Oh, man,
the trees that were lost here," Sillett said to me one day as we were driving
through the suburbs of Arcata. "This was the most beautiful forest on the
planet, and it's almost totally gone. This is such a sore
point."
Conservationists won a major victory in 1999, with the signing of a
deal known as the Headwaters Agreement, between the federal government and one
of the largest redwood-timber companies, Pacific Lumber, which is a subsidiary
of Maxxam. The agreement, and subsequent deals, gave the government title to a
large part of Pacific Lumber's old-growth redwood tracts, including the
seventy-five-hundred-acre Headwaters Forest, half of it virgin redwood, in the
mountains southeast of Eureka, California. The government paid Pacific Lumber
three hundred and eighty million dollars. However, stretches of virgin redwood
forest left on private timber-company lands continued to be logged.
Today,
the timber-company lands in Northern California--owned by Pacific Lumber, Green
Diamond Resource Company, and others--are managed for high-volume production of
young redwood trees. The tracts are logged off on a schedule, typically every
fifty years or so, It is increasingly difficult to find any redwood trees
growing on timber company land which are more than eighty years old. Sillett has
climbed in these trees. Their crowns are nearly devoid of life. They are a
redwood desert.
In his office, on the day I first met him, Sillett tapped on
a mouse, and a computer-generated image of a grove of redwoods appeared on the
screen. "You need to look at some redwood architecture," he said. The grove, he
explained, is named the Atlas Grove, and it is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State
Park, which is a sliver of protected old-growth redwood forest that hugs the sea
along the northern part of Humboldt County. The computer image was a
three-dimensional map of the crowns of the trees in the Atlas Grove; he had made
the map from data that he and his associates had gathered in years of climbing
them. The Atlas Grove is tiny--it is about three hundred and fifty yards long by
thirty-five yards wide--and it is a jam of monstrous redwoods with reiterated
crowns. The Atlas Grove may be the oldest grove of living redwoods; although
Sillett isn't sure exactly how old it is, judging by the height, the amount of
rot in the dead parts of the trees, and the types and abundance of epiphytes, it
seems to have come into existence around the time of Julius Caesar. The Atlas
Grove was discovered in 1991 by a tall-tree explorer named Michael Taylor, who
is a friend of Sillett's. Discovery, in the case of a giant tree, doesn't
necessarily mean that the tree has never been seen before--the grove had been
known to some park rangers. It means that nobody has understood the tree's size,
or has measured it.
Sillett named most of the trees in the grove after Greek
gods. (Generally, the discoverer of a redwood names it: Sillett often gives the
tree a name only after he's climbed it and gained a sense of its character.
There's no formal process--the names are private, known mostly to the botanists
who study redwoods.) "That's Prometheus, that's Epimetheus, and that's
Atlas--they were all brothers," Sillett said, pointing to the screen. The trees
looked something like witches' brooms standing on their handles. He tapped the
mouse again, and the images began to rotate. "Atlas has these three huge trunks
in its top, like a trident," he said. "Atlas is so flail of soil and plants that
you get this overwhelming sense of a tree holding up the earth. Here's the
Pleiades. And that's Kronos and that's Rhea."
The biggest tree in the Atlas
Grove is a redwood titan named Iluvatar. Sillett named the tree after the
creator of the universe in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion." "Iluvatar is so
complex that you can't tell much about it just by looking at it," he said. On
the screen, Iluvatar rotated slowly, as if we were flying around it in a
helicopter. The crown of Iluvatar contains two hundred and ten trunks, and it
fills thirty-two thousand cubic yards of space. It took Steve Sillett, Marie
Antoine, and four graduate students roughly ten days of climbing apiece to make
a 3-D map of the crown. With these data, Sillett, along with an expert in giant
trees named Robert Van Pelt, performed a calculation that shows that Iluvatar
contains thirty-seven thousand five hundred cubic feet of wood. Iluvatar is one
of the largest living things on the planet.
I asked Sillett where the Atlas
Grove was, exactly.
He gave me a guarded look. "It's something you can't
print."
Botanists are secretive about the locations of rare plants. They fear
that any contact between humans and rare plants can be disastrous for the
plants. Sillett is particularly worried about recreational tree climbers.
Recreational tree climbing is an evolving sport, or emerging oddity, which is
practiced by a thousand or so people in the United States but is rapidly growing
in popularity. It apparently got its start in 1983, when a certified arborist in
Atlanta named Peter Jenkins began teaching all sorts of people, including
children, how to climb trees safely using a rope and a harness and the arborist
climbing technique. He founded a tree-climbing school called Tree Climbers
International. The classroom of Tree Climbers International consists of two
white-oak trees on a plot of land near downtown Atlanta.
Sillett is widely
admired by recreational tree climbers, but his feelings about them are laced
with foreboding. "Not only are redwoods sensitive to damage from climbing but
the whole habitat of the redwood canopy is fragile," Sillett explained, that day
in his office. "It cannot survive without damage if people start climbing around
in it for recreational reasons." He believes that recreational climbers would
try to climb the biggest and tallest redwoods if they knew their exact
locations, and they wouldn't bother to get anyone's permission. Climbing a tree
without permission is an accepted part of the culture of recreational tree
climbing. It is called doing a ninja climb or poaching a tree.
The U.S.
National Park Service is in charge of issuing research permits for the parks
where most of the remaining giants and titans among the coast redwoods stand.
Sillett and other canopy scientists are allowed to climb in the parks only
between the middle of September and the end of January each year. During the
rest of the year, the National Park Service closes the redwoods to climbing in
order to allow the spotted owl and a seabird called the marbled murrelet to nest
in the redwoods without being disturbed.
Sillett closed the view of the Atlas
Grove on his computer, and stood up. "So, have you seen enough?"
"Not really.
I was wondering if I could climb in the redwood canopy with you.
He didn't
answer. He looked me over with a kind of professional coolness. His eyes seemed
to focus on my face and neck, my torso, and my hands. "Are you a tree
climber?"
"Yes, I am."
"These trees are gnarly. All it takes to get
yourself killed is one mistake."
I told him that I knew something about
climbing trees. I'd come across the Tree Climbers International school one day
while I was surfing on the Internet. I had never really thought about tree
climbing; it sounded weirdly appealing. I got a flight to Atlanta, and I began
to learn the art of movement in a forest canopy. By the time I met Steve
Sillett, I had had about twenty hours of basic training. In addition, I had
climbed half a dozen trees near my house, which is in New Jersey. But, in
Sillett's view, I knew essentially nothing about climbing redwoods. I had never
heard of some of the advanced equipment that Sillett uses, like the motion
lanyard; in fact, many professional tree climbers have never heard of it,
either.
Sillett said that while he was happy to have me walk around on the
ground in the redwoods with him and his colleagues, he was not interested in
taking me up into the canopy, at least not immediately. (His brother, Scott, who
climbs with him every now and then, explained later, "It's definitely true that
Steve doesn't trust the climbing skills of others. It takes such focus to climb
safely.")
And so I returned to Atlanta for further training. One day in
April, I found myself seventy feet above the ground, dangling from a branch on a
rope like a Christmas ornament, practicing the skills needed to get oneself
safely from place to place in a tree. It was a cool, blue day, and the wind was
blowing. I was suspended at the point of a V formed by two loops of ropes. By
sliding Blake's hitches, I shortened one loop while I lengthened the other. This
changed the shape of the V, from an asymmetrical V oriented toward the left to
an asymmetrical V oriented toward the right. In this way, I travelled
horizontally in midair to a different place in the tree. In the distance, the
rectilinear towers of Atlanta glittered in the sun.
Back home in New Jersey,
I ordered from an arborist supply company sixty feet of half-inch tree-climbing
rope, four carabiners, and two split tails, which are short pieces of rope that
are tied with Blake's hitches to the longer piece of rope. When these things
arrived, I assembled a motion lanyard. At first, I practiced with the lanyard
while I was standing on the ground--I heaved its ends up over branches in a
maple tree in my front yard. Then, wearing a climbing saddle and a helmet, I
raised myself into the air with the lanyard, and got about six feet off the
ground. In an ash tree that grows off to the side of my house, I ascended sixty
feet by throwing the ends of the motion lanyard over higher and higher anchor
points---that is, I lanyarded my way to the top of the tree. I extended my
circle of climbing, and began to explore a forest canopy that ranges up a
hillside above my house.
The forest canopy on my hill extends from about
fifty to a hundred feet above the ground. It is composed of the crowns of sugar
maples, red oaks, white oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, ash trees, tulip
poplars, and some tall, beautiful old beech trees. As I became more adept at
movement in trees, I became better able to go laterally, or on diagonals,
through the air. Birds seem to pay little attention to a person hanging on a
rope in a forest, and it's not always clear that they are able to identify such
an object as a human being. Sometimes flocks of birds sweep through the canopy
and divide around a climber or move beneath him. Flying squirrels are tame in
the canopy. I've reached out a finger and stroked their fur on occasion. (They
close their eyes when you stroke them, but they soon tire of it, and plummet off
the branch, catch the air, and soar away.) During climbs into taller trees, I
was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with
reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like
schools of fish.
Sillett and George W. Koch, a tree physiologist from
Northern Arizona University, and a graduate student named Anthony R. Ambrose
have installed electronic monitoring systems in seven of the biggest and tallest
redwoods. The monitoring systems consist of weather stations at various spots in
the trees, and different kinds of bio-probes, and the systems are linked
together with up to half a mile of data cables strung in each tree. The
scientists are trying to learn how redwoods move water through their trunks and
branches and how they manage to grow so tall.
George Koch is a lanky, genial
man in his forties, with knotted arms and an easygoing manner. Sillett taught
him how to climb trees. "I'm like a kid in a candy shop, climbing these
three-hundred-and-sixty-foot-tall trees with Steve," Koch said to me one day
when I visited him in Arcata. "The overwhelming question for me is what
determines the height of a tree. At around three hundred and seventy feet, the
tallest redwoods seem to be approaching a ceiling, which is based on a limit in
height to which any plant can lift water. Why aren't the redwoods six hundred
feet tall?"
Exactly how an extremely tall tree delivers water to its top is a
matter of deep interest to Koch and Sillett. Trees bring water upward from their
roots through a network of microscopic pipes called the xylem. The pipes are
unbroken from the bottom to the top of a redwood. It takes a few weeks for water
that is absorbed in a redwood's roots to get to the top of the tree. A redwood
can move water upward through its pipes against two million pascals of negative
pressure. (The pascal is a standard measure of pressure used by physicists, and
negative pressure is basically a sucking force.) Sillett and Koch have been
looking for an engineered system that sucks water at two million pascals, so
that they can do experiments. But they can't find such a system. Apparently,
redwoods are better at pulling water than any human technology is.
In a spell
of dry years, air bubbles seem to form in a redwood's pipes and stop the
continuous flow of water, and the top dies and usually falls off. In wetter
periods, a redwood regrows its top. "Redwoods have an incredible ability to
reiterate new trunks," Koch went on. "A side branch will take off and shoot
skyward, and in a matter of a hundred years it will become the new leader--the
new tow--of the tree."
In any ecosystem in which they occur, redwoods tend to
dominate. They tower above other species of trees, and they shade them out,
kilting them or making it nearly impossible for them to grow. Trees are horrible
to one another, and redwoods are viciously aggressive. They drop large pieces of
dead wood on smaller neighboring trees, which typically shatters the tree.
Sillett calls this phenomenon "redwood bombing." In this way, a giant redwood
suppresses and kills trees growing near it, including hemlocks, spruces, Douglas
firs, and big-leaf maple trees. A giant redwood can clear a DMZ around its base,
an area covered with redwood debris mixed with twisted and dead trees of other
species.
Redwoods are monoecious, which means that the plant is both male and
female. The female organs of the tree are its round, knobby seed cones. A
redwood's male organs are small, nubbinlike cones, called strobili, which appear
at the tips of branches and release pollen. The grains of pollen contain sperm
cells that fertilize egg cells inside the female cones, and seeds are produced.
Over its lifetime, a redwood can release ten billion seeds. It may be that only
one of the seeds gets lucky and becomes a mature redwood tree. If a redwood is
sheared off at its base, or if it burns to a blackened spar, it can send up from
its roots a circle of small trees, or clones, having DNA identical to the parent
tree's. The clones become a ring of redwoods in the forest, forming a structure
called a cathedral tree.
Redwoods are exceedingly efficient at gathering
light. A grove of redwoods is able to soak up more than ninety per cent of the
sunlight falling on the crowns of the trees. Young redwoods are able to survive
in dark places, where almost no other trees can survive, since they come into
existence in the deep shade of their elders. When an old redwood falls, creating
an opening in the canopy, sunlight splashes onto smaller redwoods, and they leap
upward, rapidly becoming big trees. Little redwoods can sometimes crop up in
thickets of slender trunks.
Scientists suspect that such a group of small
redwoods may be joined at its roots, and also may share a common root system
with a large redwood nearby-but nobody really knows. The small redwoods and the
big redwood may all exchange water and nutrients with one another. It is
possible that the root systems of the redwoods in a forest are fused into a web
underground, so that they can be thought of as a single living thing. These are
all questions that remain unanswered by science.
In the darkness before dawn
on a cold November morning near Arcata, Marie Antoine was hurrying around her
kitchen. She was singing to herself in a dreamy kind of way. That morning, she
wore a gray hooded cashmere sweater, cream-colored slacks, and climbing boots.
She tossed a handful of blueberries into a blender. "Steve, do you want a
smoothie?"
"Definitely," he answered. He and I were kneeling on the
living-room floor, nearby, and he was inspecting a heap of my climbing
equipment, which I'd taken out of a duffelbag. He stood up, and led me through a
door into the garage, where a hank of climbing rope, sixty feet long, was coiled
on a hook on the wall. It was a new rope, and it was bare--it didn't have any
carabiners or knots rigged in it. "This is yours, if you want it. I'll tie it up
for you."
"I brought my own split tails," I said. I carried the rope back
into the living room, and laid it on the floor, and from the duffelbag I took
out two split tails and four carabiners, and I tied up my motion lanyard while
he watched.
He sipped his smoothie. "Dude, you're doing it. Where did you
learn this?"
"I've been practicing a little," I said. I tied the last Blake's
hitch and sat back on my heels.
He inspected the knots. "Sweet," he said. He
picked up the motion lanyard and handed it to me. "You can stuff it into your
climbing bag." A motion lanyard weighs eight pounds. When it isn't in use, it is
kept inside a bag, which is normally clipped to the climber's foot
stirrup.
The blender whirred. "Which tree are we going to?" Antoine
asked.
"I think we need to go to Adventure," Sillett said.
Adventure is
one of the world's largest known coast redwoods. It is three hundred and
thirty-four feet tall, and it contains thirty-one thousand cubic feet of wood.
The main trunk is sixteen feet in diameter near ground level, and it maintains
huge girth nearly all the way to the top of the tree. It has a total of forty
extra trunks. Adventure has four fire caves in its crown, two of which are large
enough for a person to go inside. Much of the center of the tree seems to be
rotten. It is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, a few miles from the Atlas
Grove. The precise location of Adventure is a secret that is known to fewer than
twenty people, most of whom are botanists. Sillett and Antoine asked me not to
reveal its exact location, for fear that recreational tree climbers might try to
poach it.
"Adventure Tree is never exactly my first choice," Marie Antoine
commented. "My first experience climbing that tree was kind of scary."
Later,
I asked her what had been scary about Adventure.
"I got lost in it."
The
stretch of the California coast which includes Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park
is covered with temperate rain forest; it receives eighty inches of rain a year.
Even so, places in the park consist of patches of open prairie, where herds of
elk graze. The redwoods along the edge of the prairie looked like mined Doric
columns. The road went among them, the canopy closed in overhead, and the world
grew dark and quiet-redwoods mute sounds. Adventure lives at the bottom of a
small valley. We parked and put on backpacks full of tree-climbing gear. Marie
Antoine led the way. We went along a trail, and then left the trail and pushed
through masses of sword ferns and walked in zigzags around them. The ferns were
chest-high and were soaking wet--it had rained during the night. The forest
floor consisted of a soft duff of rotting redwood foliage, and it was spattered
with redwood sorrel--small, emerald-green plants that have heart-shaped leaves.
The trunks of the trees soared into remote crowns. Blades of sunlight angled
through the canopy, and they glittered with droplets of water falling from the
tips of branches. The sky was pale blue, without a cloud.
We went down into a
gully and arrived at a small creek A redwood log spanned the creek, forming a
natural bridge across it. Adventure grew out of the bank on the other side: I
saw a megacylinder of wood with a thermonuclear crown.
We crossed the creek
by walking on top of the log, which was slippery, and scrambled up onto the bank
at the base of the tree. Sillett opened his backpack and pulled a climbing rope
from it. He threaded the rope up through an attachment point higher in the tree
and back down to the ground.
The rope was six hundred feet long, dusty black
in color, and just ten millimetres thick It had a breaking strength of three
tons--it was strong enough to lift a car. It is sometimes called black tactical
rope, and it is favored by the Special Forces for vertical operations at night.
The redwood scientists like it because it's lightweight yet superstrong and can
seem nearly invisible. "We like to go low-pro," Sillett explained.
The black
rope hung down the side of the tree which faced away from the stream, a nearly
featureless shaft without any solid branches on it for two hundred and fifty
feet. Sillett took one end and tied it to a small tree. The other end dangled
loosely down from the anchor point, far up in the crown; he would climb up the
dangling end of the rope. This is known as a ground-anchored climbing rope. He
put on his helmet and his climbing saddle. He turned on a two-way radio, tested
it, and put it in a pocket on his chest.
While Sillett was getting ready to
climb, Antoine led me around to the other side of the tree. It consisted of a
towering system of extra trunks, some living and some dead, that ran upward
along the stream side of Adventure for more than twenty stories. Antoine put her
hands in her pockets and stared up into the structure. "The pieces of dead wood
shiver fifty feet over your head when you move around in there," she said,
peering up into it. "The first time I climbed this tree with Steve, he told me
to go to a certain place, and I misunderstood." She ended up wandering among
columns of rotten wood, which wobbled and seemed ready to collapse. Finally, she
tied herself to a live branch and called her husband on the radio and asked him
to come and get her mad show her the way out. It took him twenty minutes to find
her, and when he did she was embarrassed--she didn't like needing to be
rescued.
Back at the other side of the tree, Sillett clamped a pair of
mechanical ascenders to the black rope, and then he began to climb upward,
sliding his ascenders on the rope in a one-two type of motion which climbers
call jugging. A raven called somewhere in the upper canopy. This was followed by
a delicate pip, pip, pip, which was coming from somewhere closer to the
ground.
Antoine picked up her radio. "Steve, was that a kinglet?"
"It
could be a wren tit." He had become a tiny homunculus moving up the bulwark of
the tree.
"Adventure just scoffs at the puny humans who try to climb it,"
Antoine remarked to me.
Sillett vanished into the crown. Time passed. We put
on our helmets and saddles. I sat down under a fern, and picked up a sprig of
dead redwood foliage. Two mushrooms grew on it.
Our radios crackled. "O.K.,
Marie, you can go ahead and release the anchor."
"O.K., I'm going to untie
the anchor, Steve. I will let you know when it's done." Their radio talk was
precise. Any mistake in communication could result in someone's death. (Sillett
once saw a climbing companion fall ninety-six feet from a Douglas fir. The
friend was a professional climber who had made one small mistake. Miraculously,
he lived.) Antoine went over to the small tree and untied the knot. "The anchor
is now untied, Steve."
Sillett, up in the tree, tied a knot near the middle
of the black rope, and then anchored the knot around a branch, so that both ends
of the black rope hung down along different sides of the tree. Antoine and I
would simultaneously climb up the opposite ends of the rope.
"You guys can
start moving up," Sillett said on the radio.
I clamped my ascenders to my
length of the black rope, and I clipped the bag containing the motion lanyard to
my foot stirrup. Then I began to jug upward on the rope, along the basal flare
of the tree. Twenty feet above the ground, the tree's bark was charred and
pitted with fire scars--a small fire on the ground had made the scars, perhaps
within the past two hundred years. I kept on jugging. Seventy feet above the
ground, I passed a burl, which is a type of benign growth that occurs on trunks.
The burl was the size of a pumpkin. I continued climbing upward, along a
furrowed wall of wood. Marie Antoine was climbing somewhere around the horizon
of the trunk, out of sight.
I reached a height of about a hundred and thirty
feet. I was now forty feet higher than I had ever climbed in the canopy in New
Jersey, and I was just entering the lower edge of the redwood crown. The light
began to brighten. The rope to which I was attached ran straight upward into the
crown, and it vibrated with tension from the weight of my body. When canopy
scientists want to travel in a circle around the trunk of a large tree, they
swing like a pendulum at the end of a long rope. I decided to try it. I planted
my feet against the tree, and pushed off. I drifted a considerable distance
outward, floating gently away from the trunk. On the forest floor below, the
clumps of sword ferns looked like green stars. They turned around--I was
spinning. I drifted back to the tree, and kicked off again, harder, and drifted
farther away from the tree. It seemed, perhaps, like walking on an asteroid,
where there is only slight gravity. The curve of the trunk formed a horizon like
that of the small worlds in "The Little Prince."
Marie Antoine appeared--she
had circled around the tree to see how I was doing.
The bark was covered with
a lumpy white crust that looked like sugar frosting. "What's this stuff?" I
asked.
"It's Pertusaria. It's a lichen."
Pertusaria is also called wart
lichen. I moved my eyes closer. The warts were mingled with splotches of a
grayish-green dust, which was sticking to the bark. The dust, Antoine explained,
is another lichen, called Lepraria. It is supposed to resemble the infected skin
of a leper. The Lepraria, in turn, was mixed with fingering spurts of a lichen
called Cladonia. The Cladonias are among the most beautiful of lichens. They
come in wild shapes--trumpets, javelins, stalks of pinto beans, blobs of foam,
cups, bones, clouds, and red-capped British soldiers. This Cladonia looked like
pale-green tongues of flame. Scattered near it were clusters of orange disks
that looked like tiny pumpkin pies. It was a lichen called Ochrolechia, Antoine
said. The cracks in the bark were lined with pin lichens--tiny black dots
standing up on stalks, like the heads of pins shoved into the wood. It occurred
to me that in order to see a giant tree you need a magnifying glass.
We
climbed side by side for a distance, until we arrived at a stob--a dead,
broken-off stump of a branch. It was surrounded by huckleberry bushes and
leatherleaf ferns. The ferns trembled in a breeze that flowed up the side of the
tree. The stob was home to what looked like a miniature Japanese garden, about
six inches across. We hung suspended in the air before the garden, while Antoine
pointed out its sights: "That's Lepidozia, a liverwort. That's a little
liverwort called Scapania--it looks like tiny ladders." She pointed to tufts of
shimmering, bright-green moss. "That's Dicranum. It's all over redwoods." She
estimated that the garden on the stob was several hundred years old.
I
climbed for a while on the other side of the tree. I wanted to see the array of
trunks which looms over the creek, on the dark side of Adventure. I pendulated
in that direction. When I arrived there, I found myself in the middle of a
Gothic tower of fusions, bridges, and spires, held up by flying buttresses. The
zone was crisscrossed with branches, and the trunks ran out of sight in both
directions, upward and downward.
Directly in front of me, at a height of a
hundred and eighty feet, was a fire cave. It is called the Upper Fire Cave, and
its mouth is plastered with dirt-canopy soil. By gripping on ridges of bark, I
was able to pull myself to the edge of the cave. It proved to be a sort of airy
chamber in the underside of a flying buttress, and it opened downward into empty
space--it is more like a fire ceiling than like a fire cave. I ended up hanging
in midair, a few feet below the charred ceiling, looking straight down to the
stream. There was a faint sound of rushing water. I saw strands of computer
cables emerging from the cave walls, where Sillett and his team had implanted
electronic probes. I touched the wall of the cave. It was moist, and it had a
yellowish color and a musty Smell, and it felt like Stilton cheese.
Two
hundred and fifty feet up, the crown of Adventure billowed into a riot of living
branches. By this time, the ground had disappeared--it was hidden below decks of
foliage in the lower parts of the redwood canopy--and the sky was invisible,
screened by tents of foliage overhead. This was the deep canopy, a world between
earth and air. Steve Sillett was nowhere to be seen.
I was now climbing
fifteen feet above Marie Antoine. Even though we were still far below the top of
Adventure, we were considerably higher than the top of the average
tropical-rain-forest canopy. If the upper surface of the Amazonian canopy had
existed here, it would have been a hundred feet below us. At this point, the
main trunk of Adventure was seven feet in diameter. Now the huckleberry thickets
began in earnest. The species was the evergreen huckleberry, a relative of the
wild blueberry that grows in Maine. In November, in the California rain forest,
the huckleberry leaves were tinged with scarlet at their edges. The bushes were
all over the tree: perched on its branches, occupying its crotches, and popping
out of the trunk. I wormed through them, following the black rope upward.
At
two hundred and ninety feet, I encountered Sillett. He was sitting on a branch
inside a spray of huckleberry bushes, and he had a thoughtful look on his face.
The main trunk had split open near the branch where he sat, and the opening
revealed dead and rotten wood inside the tree. "This beast is full of rot
pockets," he said. "These huckleberry bushes are putting their roots through the
scars into rotten wood in the center of the tree. One summer, we had half the
normal rainfall, but these bushes still put out a full crop of huckleberries.
They're getting their water from rotten wood inside the tree." He pointed to
something on the side of the tree. "Check out that little brown moss over
there."
"Which moss?"
"The one that looks like it's dead."
I hung out
over a branch and looked at the moss. It was a greasy-looking thatch growing
below a wound at the base of a stob. Redwood sap had been dribbling over the
moss.
"It's called Orthodontium gracile," he said. "It's an extremely rare
moss. It often lives below wounds in old-growth redwoods. It likes the resin.
It's nearly gone in Oregon. That's because old-growth redwoods in Oregon have
been slaughtered."
I had reached the upper end of the black rope. Nearby, I
saw the bottom end of a second climbing rope, a white one, which was hanging
down along the trunk of the tree. It wandered upward and out of sight, toward
the top of Adventure. Sillett suggested that I get on. I transferred my
ascenders to the white rope, and climbed up it for about thirty feet, wriggling
through a jungle gym of redwood branches and huckleberry shrubs. The bag that
held my motion lanyard bumped along through the bushes. Then, abruptly, the
crown thinned out, and a view opened across Adventure Valley.
The white rope
came to an end about fifteen feet below the top of the tree. No ropes led to the
top. I took the motion lanyard out of my bag, attached it to my saddle with
carabiners, and threw one end over a branch above me. I pulled it back to me, to
form a noose over the branch, and clipped the noose to my saddle. Then I
detached myself from the white rope.
There is something unnerving about
leaving the main rope behind and going into free motion in the crown of a
redwood tree. The main climbing rope is a lifeline that connects a climber to
the ground, and it is the escape route out of the tree. Once you disconnect from
the main rope, you are on your own. If you wander far from the mare rope, you
can end up moving through a maze of wood as tall as an office building by means
of a short piece of rope, with no way to get down to the ground unless you can
find the main rope again.
With my weight on the motion lanyard, I leaned
back, until my body was horizontal and my feet were planted on the trunk, and I
walked up the trunk of Adventure. I threw one end of my lanyard over a higher
branch, clipped it back to my saddle, and pulled myself up. Suddenly, I hung
near the top of the tree. At three hundred and twenty-eight feet, I found myself
in the middle of a bush studded with huckleberries. I began eating them. They
were tart and crunchy. The branches in the tree's top were festooned with beard
lichens--they looked like the frizzy beards of dwarves. It was a sunny day, and
a breeze was blowing, which stirred the lichen beards, and the air held a tang
of the sea--the Pacific Ocean lay over a ridge to the west. Adventure rocked in
the breeze, like a ship riding at anchor.
The uttermost top of Adventure is
dead. It is a gray trunk, encrusted with lichens, which extends about six feet
above the huckleberry bush, and ends at a sheared-off stump. Adventure used to
be a taller tree. Its top fell off, probably in a storm, perhaps four hundred
years ago, or roughly at the time that Shakespeare wrote "The Tempest." By then,
it had already been growing for a thousand years, or maybe more like fifteen
hundred years. ("Who the hell knows how old it is," Sillett said.)
The
branches around me trembled. A lanyard flipped over a nearby branch, and Marie
Antoine appeared. She trunkwalked up to a kind of platform of branches, and sat
in the middle of them. "The top of this tree is just a big old juicy dead-wood
pit," she said.
The dead trunk at the top of Adventure is a natural water
tank, she explained. Rainwater collects in the broken stump at the top, and the
water runs down inside Adventure, where it saturates the rotten wood like a
sponge. A coast redwood tree seems to have the ability to send out roots from
any part of its tissue, including its top. Advent are may be sending roots out
of the living wood in its top, which run into the dead trunk, and feeding on the
dead parts of itself.
The next day, in the afternoon, I sat down at the base
of Adventure, while Sillett went aloft. He had been having trouble with a
computer system that he had installed in Adventure, and he wanted to try to fix
it. It was getting to be late, and it grew dark on the forest floor, but there
was sunlight in the crown of Adventure. I called Sillett on the radio. "Where
are you?"
"At the Upper Huckleberry Cave."
"Where's that?"
No answer. I
put on my helmet and saddle, and began jugging up the black rope. I found him at
two hundred and thirty feet, hanging from his motion lanyard inside a rampart of
extra trunks, a long way from the main rope, I climbed up the main rope until I
was fifteen feet above Sillett, and then I pulled out my lanyard, flipped one
end oil it over a branch, and clipped it back to my saddle. Then I released
myself from the main rope and dangled on the lanyard. The trunk was a fissured
wall going down into shadows. Suddenly, I was very aware that I was hanging more
than twenty stories above the ground. I lengthened the noose, and dropped
twenty-five feet, until I was hanging below Sillett. I kicked against the trunk,
swung away from the tree, and then came back toward him. I grabbed the end of a
rope that Sillett had left draped over a branch, and, using my ascenders,
climbed up the rope at a diagonal to Sillett's location. When I got there, I
anchored my motion lanyard over a branch, and I hung in the air next to
him.
We were suspended below a cracked and decayed expanse of holes in the
tree--the Upper Huckleberry Cave. Sillett was hanging in front of a fibreglass
box. The box, which was attached to a branch, held a computer controller that
gathered data from all the instruments that were installed in the tree. A laptop
computer was sitting on top of the box, and he was staring at the screen.
He
seemed exasperated. "Every time we climb Adventure, it kicks our butts," he
said. "I think it's cursed." He fished a Leatherman tool out of a pouch and
began tinkering with it inside the box. The sun had set behind a ridge, and an
evening breeze had sprung up. The tree's branches and needles began to give off
a hissing sound. "Do you feel that?" he said. "We're moving."
Adventure began
to do something that felt like slow breathing. Each sway of the tree took
several seconds to complete. The redwoods around Adventure were also tracing
deep, slow sways, and their movements were independent of one another: they were
going in different directions. The trees seemed intensely alive.
Sillett
watched the motion of the redwoods in silence for a little while. "Despite the
difficulty of doing science in these trees, there's always a moment during a
climb when you can lose yourself," he went on. "You perceive time more clearly
in redwoods. You see time's illusory qualities. When you get up into the crown
of a redwood, you stop thinking about your life, you stop planning your future
missions. You start feeling the limits of your perceptions of the world as a
member of the human species. When you feel one of these trees moving, you get a
sense of it as an individual."
"Do you really think of this tree as a kind of
entity?" I asked.
"It's a being. It's a 'person,' from a plant's point of
view. Plants are very different from animals, but they begin life with a sperm
and an egg, the same way we do. This organism has stood on this spot for as many
as two thousand years. Trees can't move, so they have to figure out how to deal
with all of the things that can come and hurt them. This tree has burned at
least once. The fire must have continued inside some of these caves for a long
time--the caves were smoldering orange holes in the tree for weeks. Redwoods
don't care if they burn. After the fire, the tree went, 'Wooaah,' and it just
grew back."
The wind died, and the forest became silent. A fluting call came
from the air near us. Sillett looked around. "Maybe a Swainson's thrush." He
poked with his Leatherman at the electronics. "A tree is not conscious, the way
we are, but a tree has a perfect memory. If you injure a tree, its cambium--its
living wood-will respond, and the tree will grow differently in response to the
injury. The trunk of a tree continually records everything that happens to it.
But these trees have no voice. My life's work is to speak for these trees." He
paused. "Dude, it's getting dark. It's time to go down."
Three hundred and
fifty-three feet above an alluvial flat in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park,
near the top of a coast redwood named Idril, Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine
were sitting side by side in the branches. I was attached to the tree with my
motion lanyard, near them. My lanyard was anchored around the uttermost top of
the tree. Idril is about eight inches thick at that point. The top of the tree
is crowded with wires and instruments and a solar panel--Sillett's gadgetry. We
were at the upper surface of the world's tallest forest canopy.
I tightened
my lanyard, and inched myself up a little higher. The whole top
swayed.
"Watch your foot," Sillett said. I had nearly kicked a bioprobe out
of the bark.
The upper surface of the canopy was a bubbly froth of redwood
crowns, and each tree seemed to have a slightly different color of green. There
were deep greens, gray-yellow greens, brown greens, deep-blue greens, and bluish
grays. "It's because these trees have a huge amount of genetic variability,"
Antoine said. It began to rain, and the colors grew sharper. Here and there,
skeletons of dead tops seemed to glow--these were redwoods entering middle age.
"You can see the Stratosphere Giant," Sillett said, pointing to a green cloud
that burst above the canopy to the east of Idril.
On July 30, 2000, an
amateur redwood researcher named Chris K. Atkins was bushwhacking around in a
little visited stand of redwoods in the park, using a laser range finder to
measure the heights of the trees. On that occasion, Atkins discovered what is
currently believed to be the world's tallest tree. He named it the Stratosphere
Giant. Sillett measures the Stratosphere Giant once a year, each September, when
he climbs it with Marie Antoine, and they run a tape measure along the trunk.
This past September, they found that the Stratosphere Giant was three hundred
and seventy feet two inches tall. It is the only living tree that is known to
have surpassed three hundred and seventy feet, and it is presently growing
taller by about four inches a year. It is eighteen feet across at the base, and
is around two thousand years old.
The rain became steady. We descended Idril
in stages, one by one, rappelling down a rope. Partway down, we stopped in a
cluster of branches, and we left the main rope and anchored off on our lanyards.
With his lanyard anchored around a branch above him, Sillett stepped out onto a
branch, lengthening the lanyard as he went. He was using the lanyard to maintain
his balance and to prevent his full weight from pressing on the branch
itself--this is called branch walking. Sillett walked lightly along the slender
branch nearly to its tip. He looked almost weightless, and he leaned out and
touched the branches of a neighboring redwood. "You could easily get into that
tree from here," he said.
We were now at two hundred and fifty feet, near the
bottom surface of the canopy in this grove. I clamped a descender to the black,
main rope. I released my motion lanyard and tucked it away in its bag. With my
weight now on the main rope, I released the descender brake and began to slide
down. Then I kicked away from Idril as hard as I could. As I swung from the
tree, I opened the brake on the descender full wide. The rope began to rush
through the descender, and I fell out of the canopy on a fast rappel. Huge
columns appeared, the trunks of trees that stand around Idril, and I floated
weightless down through redwood space.
posted by am at
4:27 PM
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