chimney tree

The inside of the chimney tree is completely charred black, but the tree’s outside still has brown bark in a lot of places. All this damage looks still fresh; a recent¹ addition to the trail camp and barely changed in the two years since my last visit. Campers haven’t touched and eroded the surface. It’s still a perfect crystalline black; the living cellulose converted to dark carbon and trace elements. Chimney tree is the burned hollow trunk of a large old redwood, still standing upright and enterable at the base. Looking up through the center you see the dizzying clear blue sky above. The top is gone, and a substantial amount of the sides too. From the outside the trunk rises and splits, vertical unsupported cylinder arcs rising 50 feet or more. It stands, still free, amongst the green younger relatives that survived the fire. A giant parent among the youths that rise now above its former shadow. The young ones are barely taller now than the hollow stump that remains.

jg