The Man Who Took a Redwood on Tour

Keep your hands on the wheel, friend, because I'm about to tell you about a man who took a redwood on tour, and I mean that the way it sounds.

His name was Charles Kellogg, born on a ranch near Susanville in eighteen sixty-eight, his mother gone before he could know her. He swore he came into this world with the throat of a bird. He didn't whistle their songs. He sang them, and vaudeville couldn't get enough. Twenty thousand people heard him in London. On a New York stage, with the fire chiefs watching, he sang at a flame fifty feet off, drew a bow across a sheet of metal, and the flame went out. The chiefs kept their hoses.

But every trip home to California, there was less forest to come home to. The world couldn't come to the trees, he said, so he kept thinking and thinking how to take the trees out to the world.

Spring of nineteen seventeen, he found his answer lying on the ground at Bull Creek Flats, a fallen redwood eleven feet through. The outfit that handed it to him was the Pacific Lumber Company, the very people cutting this country. He camped beside it, peeled the bark, and took twenty-two feet of trunk. Then he fixed a length of water pipe to a Nash Quad truck and battered the heart out of that log until all that remained was a shell a foot thick and three tons heavy. He drove the truck down into a trench and eased the log onto the bed.

Windows. Beds. A little kitchen. Electric lights. He called it the Travel Log, and by most tellings he crossed the country with it four times, eighteen miles an hour at the top of its speed, parking a piece of California in front of folks who had never imagined such a tree, and telling them what was happening to the rest.

By nineteen twenty-one the touring was done. That log went into storage for seventy-five years. Kellogg died in nineteen forty-nine, and the world that paid to hear him forgot him.

The log came home, though. It sits at the park visitor center near Weott, about four miles from where he camped, a house with no place to go. I've put my ear against it. I couldn't tell you what I was hoping for.