Stay put right here a minute, because you are standing next to a body. That is the honest word for it. The Dyerville Giant is lying in Founders Grove, and I want to tell you how it came down.
In its life it stood three hundred and sixty-two feet when they last put a tape on it — some say it reached three hundred and seventy — taller than the Statue of Liberty with her pedestal under her. It was the national champion coast redwood, reckoned the third-tallest tree in the world, and somewhere around sixteen hundred years old. Think about what that means. That tree was already a big tree when the Roman Empire was still running. It was standing here through the whole of the Middle Ages. Columbus, the Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars — the Dyerville Giant stood right here through every bit of it, adding a ring a year, minding its own business.
Late March, nineteen ninety-one. Seventeen inches of rain had fallen that month and turned the ground to soup — and remember, a redwood has no taproot, just a wide shallow plate of roots, and it holds itself up mostly by holding hands underground with its neighbors. A big tree about fifty yards off went over first, and it clipped a second one and left it leaning. That leaning tree stood there, tilted, for about a week. Then it came down — and it took the Giant with it.
The rangers tell it this way, and everyone here repeats it: folks living a mile off heard the crash and thought a train had wrecked. A long, tearing roar, then a boom that came up through the floorboards and shook the dishes. What they heard was five hundred tons of tree hitting the earth. It threw mud fifteen feet up the trunk of a redwood standing fifty feet away, and it registered on a seismograph.
Now walk down to the root wall — that great torn dish of roots standing on end, two stories high, with the dirt still gripped in it. Then walk the length of the trunk, and keep walking, because it goes on and on and on through the trees, longer than a city block. Here's what I want you to notice: they left it. Nobody hauled it off. Because in this forest a fallen giant isn't garbage, it's a nursery — it will lie there for four or five hundred years, feeding seedlings and salamanders and fungus, with young trees rooting along its length in a straight line. So it isn't dead, exactly. It's just doing the second half of the job. Go put your hand on it. You will not touch anything else that old today.