Olaf was home, working for the summer, and Snorri was in Florida with a friend for the week. They were kidless. Not since Astrid and Bjorn had traveled to Europe in 2000 had the stars aligned for them to take a trip together. It wasn’t much different than traveling with children; Astrid still worried about her sons, but couldn’t do much about it except call and leave messages or texts when she had cell phone coverage.
After breakfast in the hotel, they traveled 101 south again, passing into California, but not before stopping at an agriculture checkpoint.
“Any fresh fruit? Oranges? Apples?” the USDA officer asked. California was very zealous in protecting their agricultural industry from introduced plant diseases and harmful insects.
Bjorn had a banana which passed inspection and they carried on down the highway to Crescent City, California, weaving their way through narrow roads, hair-pin turns and over high bridges to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.
As they followed the winding road flanked with giant trees, she could feel her anticipation growing. It was like waiting to see a long-absent, beloved friend; a friend who you like because you can’t ever understand him completely, in a good-mysterious way. Astrid looked forward to seeing the giants again, to experiencing the unique awe and history ingrained in living wood. When they finally slipped through the narrow paths to a parking place between two giant trees, Astrid was already enthralled with her sylvan friends.
It was a perfect day; sunny, and just warm enough to not notice the temperature. As Astrid walked down the path, she smiled. She had noticed that the farther she got into adulthood, “fun” lost its attraction, to the point where she could not define it for herself. “What is “fun” anymore?” she asked. An inveterate bore, her sedate and nerdy list included: writing when creativity flowed, making things (excluding dinner), learning things, gaining a skill, hiking in woods, growing weird garden plants.
Was visiting giant trees “fun”? No. Being around ideas and people and things that inspire awe was so much better than fun.
As they made their way through the paths, Astrid carried her notebook open, scribbling and glancing in front of her, so as not to trip; walking and writing to get all she needed in words before the effect wore off, always anxious for Bjorn to stop for a photo shoot. Her view was mostly of the prodigious brown-red trunks, because looking up risked falling over a root.
 |
| Sorrel |
Something was being said there in the park, to her, not with words, but with a presence of trees. It was not anything metaphysical or supernatural, but very natural, though she didn’t understand it, not in a way she usually understood things through reasoned thought via words, pictures, pieces of information.
It was as if some giant form of alien life landed on this diminutive earth filled with tiny creatures and humans, and the trees decided to stay despite not fitting in. But as out-of-place, foreign, and over-big they seemed to Astrid, they felt … safe. Their intimidation lie in their beauty and size, but not in a threatening way. (Although, you can\’t deny the damage a tree that size would inflict if it fell.)
Not much grew under the trees, they were too tall and too massive to allow a lot of light to fall to the forest floor. The massive trees caught all the sun in their leafy fingers before it fell to the ground. There were patches of ferns and sorrel in the spots blessed by beams of sun that snuck through the branches. Moss grew on the lesser trees. After walking about a mile, the path started to edge a running stream, the giants grew few and far between, their majestic aura thinned as well, into what was just an ordinary, yet still-beautiful Pacific Northwest forest. They turned back into the redwood forest.
Walking silently, they looked up to see the tree tops, looking, looking, trying to take them all in, trying to understand, trying to keep and take away whatever these trees were saying. It was kind of like trying to see the whole mountain when you were climbing it.
“Looking at pictures from last time (Sequoias), I realize, pictures just don’t do these trees justice,” Bjorn said between clicking the camera.
***
“Holy cow, I look fat,” she mumbled a few weeks later when she saw a picture of herself taken in Oregon. “Well, I look … solid,” she softened the self-deprecation a little. How is it that our personal perspective of reality can differ so much from photographs? She knew she had never worn a thin or efficient body, but was surprised to see the abundance it portrayed in the picture.
There is something about photographic technology that does not record the nuances that humans use to perceive each other, themselves, and their world. Maybe it involved other senses than seeing, maybe the fault was in the camera, maybe it was something else.“But faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualized and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painter’s touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it.” –Essays of Travel, Robert Louis Stevenson, page 145
It’s the same with redwood trees. Being near them adds so much more to just “seeing” them that it feels surreal. Otherwise, it’s just another picture of a tree. Unlike Astrid’s photo, trees usually looked smaller in pictures.
***
“Good morning,” a passerby whispered–and aptly. Whispers seemed most appropriate, as if the park were some very hallowed place. It was something about the trees–their majesty, power, age, achievements–which called for respect and reverence. The trees seemed to absorb the noise, shushing visitors to contemplation and peace.
To leave the park was a small heartache to Astrid, but they couldn’t stay forever, and she knew that even if she lived among them, she could never understand the spell they had over her. Better to preserve the mystery and awe, than overstay her welcome. The two-hour drive to lunch through winding roads thread through mountains and small towns back into Oregon, always a tree lined “V” vista in front of them in a natural forced perspective. Oregon roads often lead the traveler over bridges, and many of the bridges had decorative columns at the ends, in the art-deco or gothic style. Every little town they passed through had a Family Dollar-type store, a Mom and Pop Coffee shop or coffee drive-through, and a dispensary. The farther north they traveled, the towns grew more scarce, but patches of snow more abundant, and fused into mountains of snow as they followed the road to Crater Lake National Park.
Not I 
I feel as if I've been there after reading this!♥️
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I feel as if I've been there after reading this!♥️
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Thanks!
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Thanks!
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