I’ve looked for the poem—the one that haunts me with what was raining down in the ashes after the Lightning Complex Fire of 2020, the fire that consumed Big Basin State Park. But I haven’t found it—through the haze of my mind, and the enormity of the internet. When you see what is familiar—hear the voice of someone closer to the flames—know this is after that.
It may have been 33-years to the day—give or take a few—that my footsteps last pressed into Big Basin’s fallen nests of needles—kicking up a mist of pine and trail-dust into the midday rays.
Placards at the trailhead professed the age of this great forest pre-dated the Roman Empire. Humans accompanied these animals, and birds, and trees going back more than 10,000-years. The Cotoni and Quiroste Tribes were stewards of the land and used fire to promote growth of useful plants, long before Spanish expeditioners arrived.
With this, I imagined into the words and wars ingrained within each of the rings of these giants, as I listened for wisps of history breathed through the pines and falls, and dirt around us.
My brothers and I braided the trail like challah—jockeying to be in front, with our friend David; occasionally falling to the back, in the ebb and flow of reconnection.
I still hear David’s wheezing—walking on his tip-toes, as if the air two inches higher, would be richer, easier to breathe. His head occasionally snapped back with guttural laughter bubbling up through his esophagus, like he was gargling it before blessing it into the world. His arms hinged, thumbs pushed forward in the straps of his back-pack—owning that hike, like we were in his backyard.
David stopped to identify a banana slug—"it has no known predators,” he said, pointing to the swaying wet lump that resembled a jaundiced penis with four antennae wriggling toward the sky.
“Ewww,” I responded, staring for a pregnant moment—chortling before moving on.
We walked amidst a chorus of the red crested, Acorn Woodpecker contributing trills of scratchy “waka—waka-waka,” like a metal rake dragged over leaves; the push-push, pull-pull of the Brown Creepers quadruple-syllabic shrill; and the pygmy nuthatch answering with its rhythmic chirp of tchuu—tchuu, tchuu, tchuu. Furry percussionists tambourined through brush, pushing us to imagine the menagerie burrowing tunnels under the soil.
We were present that day—together in the life of friendship, in the life of the forest, until the sun grew tired and gifted us long shadows in the golden hour.
Nearly 800-miles, and thirty-three years later, the skies of the Salt Lake Valley filled with hazy carbon—the ash of many a forest’s inhabitants. Memories of that hike in 1987 flood my chest—heavy with the weight of mourning. The ash of burnt fur and feathers, pine needle nests, and the bark of those great giants absorbed into the cells of my own body.
There’s a rabbit in me, a buck in me, a wild coyote in me—and my body carries the last fear and determination and instinct for survival that stayed with them, to the last mile they ran, to the last river they sought, to the last hurried, burrowing feat until they laid down and let the fire consume them; until they were lifted into the skies and traveled east to me, on the winds of the jet stream.
I wonder—if I am a great sequoia, or ponderosa, or redwood giant, do I drop my needles in fear, or hold them tight in resistance to contributing them to the kindling? Do I hold my breathe in my core while fire takes up residence on my skin, burning away layers of life for months on end?
At the start of the pandemic, before we humans scurried into hibernation, I stood in the presence of a quorum of giants at Mariposa Grove in Yosemite. I walked under a tree with arms stretched like a candelabra, the same way it stood when flames walked through the corridors below, countless times over centuries. There is evidence of flames that licked the knees of its brothers and sisters, hollowed out their cores, and yet, many of them are still standing.Nearby, a placard explained their resilience, and the necessity of flames—that serotinous cones are naturally glued together and require fire to melt the resin to release their seeds. These forests need fire to propagate.
I imagine these brave giants, meditating through those tumultuous flames. I hear them say, “There is heat. There is sadness. There is fear,” and I imagine them reaching deep into their roots and bringing forward, “there is growth happening.”
