Redwoods Bombed

When I was a kid, I was always reading these huge, ultra thick, prosaic novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Stendhal and the Russian masters such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and I aspired to write like them: voluminously.   When I got to college, I was turned on to Charles Baudelaire, a French poet of the 19th Century.  I had never been much of a poetry fan but Baudelaire had developed a new and unique literary form for his day, the prose-poem.  The prose-poem form suited me very comfortably and I adopted it.  Though I do not consider many of my blog posting to be true prose poems, the following one comes awful close to being a prose-poem, though, perhaps, a long one.  I reprise it, hopefully, for your enjoyment. 

`Ed

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I was introduced to the Point Reyes neighborhood before it became a national landmark, when it was more natural, calm and elegant. I have always been very partial to the cool, subdued light of the natural cathedrals of the deep, quiet redwood groves hidden in the canyons and mountain sides of the central California coast range. Point Reyes is an especially splendid showcase for the redwood groves for its being surrounded by the wide and endless Pacific Ocean on the one side, the finger strand of Tomales Bay on the other and Drake’s Bay on the southern arc.

The one special aspect of this location is that it has never been logged. I have seen pictures of the hillsides in the San Lorenzo Valley above Santa Cruz, where they had been clear cut from the mountain’s summit all the way down to the beach, waiting to be slash burned and replanted with second or even third growth redwood (Cowell Park and Big Basin are the exceptions here). While there are cathedral groves there, they are tiny chapels compared to the huge, silent arches of the old growth groves found on the cape of Point Reyes. The redwood columns rise bare and limbless up past a height above the tops of most other trees. When the deeply green branches inter-mesh so high above the fern covered floor, they are obscured by misty shafts of thinly colored light, so much subdued from their source, the bright, white sun.

For the density of the green, for its shade and its high content of water vapor, the cathedral interiors are cool, the air is thick and heavy and rich to breath. There is no dust. There is no pollen. Some mysterious poison in the redwood world kills off other, inferior, dryer plant materials. There is no pollen and its air is cool and comfortable. Lawns do not grow within the drip ring of a healthy redwood. The mysterious poison keeps the grasses from growing.

(to read the conclusion, click here)