middle airs

I’ve always been struck by the middle view, the “middle airs,”¹ of the Redwood trees. From a steep hillside trail in the Santa Cruz mountain forests, one is both high above the gully bottom and far below the canopy top. Sometimes the trunks are near, right off the trail, and you can appreciate the bark’s stretched and growing nature, the outer skin of the tree literally ripping and separating in long vertical gashes as the enormous organism continues, unbelievably, to grow. Glancing down, the floor far below. The tree is a mostly straight cylinder, flaring out only slightly at the base. Looking above, it rises up up up in an un-shrinking round far above to the beginnings of a few branches here and there, and the full crown at the top. The view is both a calm examination of the stately middle of these great trees and a dramatic edge-on view of their stupendous heights.

I have sometimes seen this view in a Douglas Fir forest, which might be the only other tree on the west coast that can rival the Redwood in terms of height and size, but the native habitat of that tree is arranged much differently. The necessary verticality is hard to find, and even harder to find is the long term stability necessary to grow trees to such a great height.

So I savor the Santa Cruz mountain’s middle airs, and the rare beauty of the strong straight vertical lines of these trees. The middle part is high above the floor and has much higher to go. I hope they grow even higher in the years to come.

jg