One more before we run out of big trees, and this one is quiet. They call me Ranger Boone.
You've been passing little signs all day — Bolling Grove, Garden Club of America Grove, the Franklin K. Lane Grove, and hundreds of names you've never heard of. Every one of those signs marks a piece of forest that somebody bought. And most of them weren't rich. That's what I want you to understand. When the Save-the-Redwoods League went out with its hat in its hand, the deal it offered was this: you can't take these trees with you, but you can leave them behind. Put up the money for a grove and it carries your name — or better, the name of the person you lost — and it will stand there, untouched, long after everybody who ever knew either of you is gone.
And people came. A mother who lost a son in the First World War bought him a grove of trees instead of a headstone. Schoolchildren mailed in pennies. A garden club spent twenty years raising the money for one flat of ground. A widow signed over what her husband left her so that a piece of this valley would never hear a saw. The very first memorial grove on this road was bought that way — a family buying trees for a man they'd buried.
So here is the thought I'll leave you with as the giants thin out ahead. Every grave you have ever visited is slowly losing its fight — the stone wears smooth, the letters go soft, and in two hundred years nobody will read it. But these people bought a different kind of monument. Theirs got TALLER. Theirs will be here, and bigger, in the year twenty-five hundred, quietly putting on another ring, with a small brown sign at its foot carrying the name of somebody who died a hundred years ago and is remembered by three hundred feet of living wood. When you pass the next little grove sign, slow down and read the name out loud. That's the whole point of it. Somebody paid so you would.