Methuselah (the Giant Sequoia) & Me

To re-establish my blogging discipline after a hiatus devoted to writing my novel, BAY LANDS, I decided to visit a real-life being who makes a few brief but critical appearances in the novel. How can I do this when my historical novel takes place in 1874-1875 and all the other real-life antecedents of characters must be dead? Meet Methuselah, a giant sequoia on the San Francisco Peninsula, one of the few survivors of her kind.

Methuselah Tree Reaching for the Light

I stopped by to see her on an early morning bike ride on Skyline Blvd. on the San Francisco Peninsula. As the corroded sign near her root crown tells us, she sprouted more than 1800 years ago. She towered on the ridge at 225 feet until a lightning bolt cut her nearly in half, but it didn't cut her down. Imagine living through that hit. Even more amazing, this fierce tree survived the sawmills of the 1860s-70s in this area, where entire forests of old-growth redwoods were leveled to stumps to build and rebuild the boom town of San Francisco. The growing city did sawyers the solid of burning to the ground six times in ten years. Until the greater lords of enterprise figured out to rebuild it with bricks.

How did this magnificent tree avoid the avarice-blinded enterprise of the early logging entrepreneurs (like Griff Griffin in my story)? Maybe by being too misshapen, perhaps ugly to a logger, with all her huge, twisted burls that can break saws. Burls are like scars on humans: they form over wounds to protect the main trunk from infection and environmental stress. Far more powerful than scar tissue, however, the burls also sequester dormant buds that can sprout clones of the mother tree if she does not survive. Far from being ugly, Methuselah's burls and now her jagged, ripped-off top make her precious and beautiful, a gift of silent strength and a reminder of regeneration.

Methuselah Tree Root Crown

It's hard to get an idea of her scale from a photo – that is always the case with giant redwoods. So let's get a bit of imaginative help from Albert Bierstadt and his Great Trees – Mariposa Grove California:

The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove, California by Albert Bierstadt c. 1864 (Image thanks to the Art Renewal Center www.artrenewal.org

This was originally to be the cover of an early version of my book that I was calling SEMPERVIRENS, which means ever-living. I love the idea of new life sprouting from the roots of those who have left the surface version of life. Redwoods give us hope. They are not invincible, but they make a good stand against thoughtless human ravages to the environment. Even amid drought, they reach their abundant canopy into the coastal fog and make their own rain.

Here is a helpful visual from Peninsula Open Space Trust that gives us a brief tour through the growth rings of Methuselah. Some Things Methuselah Has Seen