Boone's deep-time tale — walking a listener through the thousand years of human history that passed while a single Muir Woods redwood stood in one spot.
Come off the main path a step and put your hand flat on this bark — go on, it won't mind. Ranger Merrick, at your service, and I want to do something with you that'll bend your mind a little. I want to walk you back through the life of this one tree.
Say this redwood is a thousand years old — and plenty here are older. That means somewhere down under the duff, at the very center of this trunk, there's a ring of wood that was the whole tree once, a slender green whip no taller than you, back around the year one thousand. Now hold that in your head and let the world happen around it.
When this tree was a sapling, there was no England as you'd know it — the Normans hadn't yet crossed the Channel. It was already a good stout tree, taller than a house, when the knights rode off on the Crusades. It had a few centuries on it when a fella named Marco Polo went walking to China. It stood here, drinking this same fog, through the whole of the Black Death an ocean away, and never knew. It was ancient — six hundred, seven hundred years old — the morning Columbus bumped into the far side of this continent, and it stood here, unbothered, through every year of everything that came after: the conquistadors, the Pilgrims, the Revolution, the wagons coming west, the Gold Rush down the hill, two world wars, the whole long parade. Kings were crowned and hanged, whole empires rose up and rotted away, your great-great-grandparents were born and died — and this tree just stood here, adding a ring a year, growing quietly toward the light.
Every human being it ever outlived thought their troubles were the center of the world. And they were, for a flicker. Then the fog came up the canyon the next morning, same as it had for a thousand years, same as it did this morning, same as it will when you and I are long gone. There's no moral in it, friend — I don't deal in morals. There's just a tree, still growing, that was here before your whole civilization and has fair odds of being here after it. Take your hand off the bark now, gentle. And walk a little quieter the rest of the way, knowing what you're walking past.
Photo: Dale Cruse - 11M SF views from San Francisco, CA, USA · CC BY 4.0
