She put a few bucks in her jeans pocket, dug out the windbreaker that served as a raincoat at home and pulled it over her head, grabbed her trail maps, and headed into the park office to pay the fee. It was still raining, and seemed unlikely to stop, but she would dry out eventually.
There was no one at the desk when she walked in, so she rang the bell as directed by the sign next to it. It seems the park service is hard up for rangers, because the sullen, pretty girl who answered the summons seemed barely qualified to be a hostess at Perkins. The rangerette stared at the woman in the windbreaker, forcing her to begin the exchange.
“I need to pay my fee,” she said.
The rangerette said nothing, and neither did the woman, until the rangerette allowed that it’d be $6. The woman handed her a twenty.
“Do you have a one, so I can give you back fives?”
“I don’t. I left it in the car,” said the woman, having decided that a purse wasn’t really required for tromping around a rainforest.
The rangerette was unimpressed, and went to get change, handing her back $14 and a receipt adorned with a piece of scotch tape without a word.
“Do I need to put this in the car?” the woman asked.
“Yeah…driver’s side window.”
“Where are your restrooms?”
“Next building over.”
“Thanks,” the woman said as she turned to leave, pausing momentarily at the interpretive displays.
The permit safely ensconced in the car, she stopped by the big cross-section of a redwood displayed near the building. The tree had been 1,342 years old when it had been cut down, she read, making her wonder why anyone would take down a tree of that age. The toilets were flush, the ceiling dripping rain through the paint, evidencing a roof in great need of replacement. And then she went to the trailhead.
She had a fair notion of where she was heading, his best friend having described in detail where they scattered her sweetheart’s ashes that Sunday after Thanksgiving. They had only walked five minutes, he said, owing to the rain and the very pregnant condition of her sweetheart’s daughter, and had found a spot over right over a footbridge. She was pretty sure she’d found it immediately, but it was off the main loop trail. She stared at the bare roots of a fallen redwood, whole worlds to be discovered in its tangles and burls. In front of her stood a redwood, stunning in its altitude and rectitude, and it wasn’t even the greatest specimen she would see that day. How could something natural grow so straight? Perhaps the pertinent question was, how do so many natural things manage to grow so crookedly?
To stand at the foot of a giant redwood is to truly understand for the first time the concept of “tree,” in all its power and patience. And if you pause and lean in, you can communicate, slowly, with the Ents who whisper in voices your ears hear as a hushed whooshing in the wind and rain. But that is no matter; your soul can hear what is being said without words. You receive perspective in the form of bark and leaves nearly out of view, of a being who has watched generations of people come and go and quietly gone about its tree business, being and growing whether anyone cared or watched or approved. The scale of a single tree is so vast that one cannot contemplate it all at once, nor at close range. The eye cannot hold it all, though it is hungry to. A tree such as this knows the world, the deep earth that holds it, the sky it reaches for, and everything in between, in a way the woman in the windbreaker could not, but desired to. She had never stood so close to immortality.
She leaned against this tree, which became her favorite in the hour she was there, trying to soak up the knowing, trying to feel whatever it was that connected them, and wondering if she were missing it, or if they were, in fact, one and the same, and one cannot tickle one’s self. The bark was wet, dripping, home to uncountable mosses and tiny fern-like plants. It yielded to the pressure of her fingers, yet was stronger than she, so she leaned against it on the far side, cradled in the curve of its massive trunk.
She walked the entire loop path just in case she’d been in the wrong place, because she didn’t feel him there any more, or less, than she felt him everywhere. This was unexpected, and yet ultimately comforting. She’d expected to be overwhelmed, but this day, like so many others, was such a riot of quicksilver emotions that no one inner voice could be captured and named, and the default was quiet acceptance, the peace that cannot be willed, but merely surrendered to in the lack of anything else to be done. She had no illusions that he was the dust they left behind to be washed away in the never-ending rain; mostly, she was sad that she was there without him, as they’d planned to go together. In the end, she felt they had; just not in the way she’d envisioned, or wanted. The rain and the trees themselves were her companions, and she patted them like friends as she walked past them. Looking upward through the rain on her glasses, she could see the raindrops falling past the dark treetops, following them until they landed on her upturned face. They landed everywhere: on the camera lens, in her pockets, slowly attempting to disintegrate the trail map in her hands. The windbreaker that served admirably as a raincoat in a desert was no match for this kind of steady rain, her shoes no protection from a trail that was more puddle than pathway. She was soaked to the skin, but it didn’t matter. One doesn’t turn away from the awesome because of a little rain. Or even a lot.
After making a circuit of the loop trail, she returned to the spot past the footbridge certain she was in the right place now, having found no other bridges on the other path, and she walked a few minutes in both directions to be extra sure, visiting her favorite tree again. Then she wandered past the gnarled roots that had greeted her when she first arrived, into a clearing littered with branches and logs and huge acorns and the carpet of the forest floor. She pet the tiny fern-like mosses growing from trees fallen long before she was born, no doubt, trees that one could call dead, but for the fact that they we so obviously the source of life to countless other leafy green things, and those were only what she could see.
She could’ve stayed all day, but she was running on two cups of apple juice and three tiny packets of airplane peanuts, and the rain was picking up. The City awaited, and the day was far from over. She headed back to the car with an acorn and a small pinecone still attached to a thin branch hidden in her pocket as a remembrance.
She got into the car and peeled down to her shirt, hanging her two jackets on the seats to dry, the hem of her jeans soaked to mid-calf with rain and mud. She was done here. She marveled that she was driving down these roads she’d never been on and getting where she need to go, by herself, thinking “We do what we have to do. We do what we have to do.” When the radio finally came back in, she heard the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn” for the second time that morning, the first having found her on her iPod’s shuffle-play on the plane.
No coincidences. None at all.
