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.

The black Tesla is speeding and braking and lane changing and routing around the slower cars. It’s leap-frogging through the light traffic to get ahead and go even faster. At times I’m driving nearly 85; it’s after 7 and we’re all flying down the 85. Just going with the flow. The other side is practically empty, at its natural and quiescent state for this time of the evening. There are a couple of lonesome cars heading toward Mountain View, they have a free hand to choose their own speed in the golden hour glow. On our side there has been only one stretch where we all collectively slow to about 60, and that’s for no apparent reason. Soon we’re back into the high 70s, which is evidently not fast enough for this Tesla. I notice a bright blue Lambo, a fun toy color, heading north on the other side of the cement barrier, just cruising north unhurriedly. On our side the Tesla accelerates and lane changes into a slot between two cars, barely big enough, to edge past a slower Honda (only going 73 mph) in the right most lane. As soon as they are clear of it they lane change back and zoom off to the next car and pass it too.

They had come from behind, before the Bascom onramp, and I lose them around Camden. They either exited or got far enough ahead that I can’t see anymore. What I do see is the North-going lanes of 85 have expanded to five, and they’re all empty. There, a vast ocean of bare and grooved pavement; on our side we are still going fast but there is the jostle of us all together rushing.

They’ve gone on, somewhere, and I wonder when the next ‘black Tesla’ will appear and perform again. Will the next be better at it, or worse? I keep going to my own exit, to become lost to these others jostling with me down the highway.

The uniformed man walked past, straight down the middle of the two rows of chairs, perfectly ordinary. He’s young-ish, he’s wearing a hat, a baseball cap, but I didn’t catch the logo. When he got to the back of the shop, I lost interest in his activities, but on recollection I see that he entered the scene empty handed, which is odd for a delivery person or service man. When I glance at him again something slightly odd is happening. He’s got the carboy out of the water dispenser and is looking at the main body of the dispenser itself. Maybe a repair? The carboy is empty. Everything seems normal. But then I see that the dispenser is unplugged and he’s holding the cord. He picks it up and hoists the whole thing onto his shoulder. My eyes track him, head held still, as Maria continues cutting my hair. The empty carboy is in his other hand and he walks back out right down the dead middle of the chairs with all of it. He doesn’t look left or right, and says nothing to anyone.

They’ve started taking the place apart. Maria says it’s been like this all week. There were some workers out measuring at the front of the shop a day or two ago. “Bro, we’re still here,” she says, gesturing toward the emptying room, the barbers beginning to pack combs and trimmers, the decorations barely still hanging on the wall. One of the other clients leaves a bottle of tequila for them, after his last haircut. I send a larger than my usual tip along with the payment. Maybe I’ll see her again at the next barbershop.

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?

Our pants are getting wet, quite a bit more wet than I had anticipated and the umbrellas aren’t helping much. It’s almost June, June is in 3 days, it doesn’t rain in California in June. Or late May. And yet, it is raining, and windy, and our pants are getting really quite wet, and we continue on our morning walk routine with determination because we have a lot to say and it is still raining. No one else is out on this morning, notably vacant of other pedestrians, pets, and even cars. We are a little earlier than usual but not that much; everyone else has elected to stay indoors. Despite all the water on the ground, in the air and falling from the sky onto our pants, a very NorCal winter looking situation, in contrast to all of that it is a very comfortable temperature out in the flat gray morning light. Just right for a sweatshirt. A perfectly cool temperature. That it looks like winter but is not is a rare sensorial delicacy we found only accidentally and by venturing out into the uncommon and unusual circumstances. The only cost is that I will be changing my pants when I get back home.

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.