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.

Where did that banana slug go? It was just here, in the middle of the campground, but now it’s nowhere. I am scanning the perimeter, checking the trees, looking under my seat, under my feet. It’s just gone. It was making a slow meandering arc near the middle of my camp site. I must have gotten distracted long enough while making some notes for it to get away. I was about to name it Jerry.

There have been quite a lot of the bright yellow slugs this weekend. On the trail, in the trees, trying to get into the food, sliming across the notebooks and plein air artworks, that same slug trying to get in the food again. I’ve been quite surprised at the uncountable¹ number of them, and I only saw the ones that I almost stepped on or passed through camp. That’s an infinitesimal fraction of the number that must be present and endemic in these woods.

Do the slugs survive forest fires? Or do they recolonize the burned zones, diffusing inward from the perimeter after the winter rains return and quench the smoldering ashes? I had visions of Jerry and its clan making deep penetrating expeditions into the scar’s interior, far from the green and unburned edges, to establish little slug dynasties. But I’ve never seen a platoon of slugs. They seem to be solitary, or maybe a pair in the midst of a passing embrace. Solo slugs are all I’ve ever seen. Organizing such slug expeditions is a secret affair, behind closed doors, if it’s happening at all.

Still, Jerry does have some defenses, an anesthetic or analgesic in the mucus along the top of its backs. It’s something, but is that the only reason there isn’t a predator that feeds on this silent sliding abundance? I haven’t seen much other animal life, a curious crow, briefly another camper, and have heard a few other birds. The Santa Cruz mountains can be strangely soundless; my other visits have been similarly silent. Most woods are quiet, but these ones, with their tall redwoods and plentiful banana slugs, they seem especially so. Come to think of it, the silence is strange, eerie even. Maybe I should be concerned, I think as I slowly glance over both my shoulders at the log I’m leaning against. No Jerry there either. I confidently thought I was the apex predator in these woods, but what if it’s Jerry?

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.

The forest is misty at five in the morning, and the air still and quiet. The wind broke sometime late in the night and the air was now only gently drifting. I was returning from the trail camp’s pit toilet, deciding what to do next in the dim pre-dawn gray. The edges of the trees are all softened in the pale atmosphere. Trail camp is at 1580 feet above the sea and I had expected to be in the clouds more than some of this weekend, but it had not happened until this morning, the last morning. There had been only blue skies and the tireless wind, and some thin shreds of white racing overhead, just out of reach.

But the wind had tired of its constant 30 mph or more racing and gusting in the green tops of the blackened red giants. Now it was something much less, something rarely heard and only faintly felt.

The low roar, the distant rumbling that had been noticeably palpable since the wind had picked up the night before last, it’s not gone. Perhaps it is not wind in the trees’ trunks. It could be waves on the coast, or maybe it’s still windy in the trees where the sound is coming from, where the wind has gone for a rest.

The sun is rising. I can see the crinkles in the tent’s rain fly in the grazing dawn light, and the tiny faint dots on the pages of my notebook without the flashlight.

Soon I will go back out, go for a walk in the misty dawn light and look, again, for the landing strip in the still air with the distant low roar. An airstrip is an improbable thing to find on the top of a ridge, in the middle of a redwood forest in the clouds, far away from everything. The map says it is there, so I will look for it.

The wind blew all night in the trees, loud swishing & shushing in the high-high branches of the ridge top redwoods. Corrie had said yesterday that there was a wind advisory for the weekend; I had not noticed it on the forecast when preparing for the backpacking trip. In the morning, Saturday morning, I woke at my usual time, early and in a tent, in the first trail camp at Butano State Park and the sound continued. The sound is really two sounds; there is also a low infrasonic rumble which is much further away.

There was only one time in the night that I heard a branch fall. I had been trying to fall asleep and so I spent the next hour making a big effort to avoid thinking too deeply about what falling branches might imply about my current specific location in the middle of a stand of trees over 100 feet tall with little of substance between my person and heavy things up high and wind advisories and loudly whispering trees’ tops. I was not very good at avoiding thinking about what it meant. Phrases like “he died doing what he loved” kept crossing my mind, and while it is true that I did love doing this, this was not how I had imagined it. But I heard no more branches-falling-in-the-night sounds for a long time even though the wind continued relentlessly.

I somehow thought, while in my tent in the middle of the windy night, that I would be able to do some empirical science in the morning having to do with counting the newly fallen branches per square meter, and perhaps the pattern that they fell in to determine the source tree and if I should only move my tent or remove my person from the park entirely. What I failed to remember during this nighttime exercise in both actuarial warding and failed distraction was that the forest is already completely littered with fallen branches. Even without my glasses, in the dim morning light on my way to the camp pit toilet, I could not avoid noticing this fact. There is a lot of time in the forest for branches to fall.

Corrie had also mentioned yesterday that this particular toilet had been rebuilt numerous times because trees keep falling on it. That observation is much more ominous now, in all this wind, surrounded by all these trees and searching for some statistical evidence to support a decision about what I should do with regard to my personal safety.

Later, after the bathroom, and after not counting any branches, while I was fetching my coffee things from the metal bear box I noticed something and admitted that I had told myself a very different story about the metal twang in the branch-falling-in-the-night sound last night. My water bottle was lying on its side.