For Juliette

   A few years ago I bought my friend Juliette a book about the Sierra Nevada. Just before I mailed it off I flipped through the pages and quickly found several inaccuracies. And I thought, just because you're writing a kid's book doesn't mean you can just make stuff up about natural history. I didn't want Juliette to think wolves and grizzly bears were lurking around Wawona. So I started this little story that I just came across in an old file of other silly stuff. I had forgotten about it.
 The next time I saw Juliette I told her not to take the book I gave her too seriously. And that someday I would write her a better one. She said, "Ok!" Well, finally, here it is.



 There are many ways it could have happened. The Cedar Pine was old and only a few pine cones were clinging to its uppermost branches. A strong wind could have blown one loose. Or a squirrel or a raven could have been eating seeds and while shaking the limb the pine cone could have fallen to the ground.
  When the cone hits the forest floor one of the seeds was jarred from the hard protective shell. This tiny seed, one of more than a million that the old Cedar produced in its lifetime, landed in the dry soil and became lodged underneath other pine cones and needles and the fine soft dirt of the Sierra mountains. This all happened far from any road and with no human eye watching. It happened a long time ago, before you, or I, were even born. In fact, it happened before anyone living right now was even born. Imagine that!
  This one lucky seed landed in the best place possible. It could have landed on a rock and dried up only to be blown away to the nearby river where it would flow down stream to a place were Cedar Pines could not grow because the weather is too warm. Cedar Pines need hot Summers and cold Winters. That is what they are best adapted for.
  This little seed, just a spec really, could have been eaten by that squirrel. Or by a Stellar Blue Jay. Stellar Jays love the seeds from many of the different trees of the Sierras.
  Our seed ended up in a spot that was perfect. The soil was rich in nutrients and moisture. Soon it didn't look like a seed at all. It developed small string-like roots and a fragile stem that would slowly poke through the duff on the forest floor looking for sunlight.
  A few lucky years pass by. The Summers are warm with just enough rain and the snows of winter aren't too deep and the young tree is not buried by any terrible blizzards. It grows steadily enjoying a delicate mix of water and sunlight. By the time it is six or seven years old it looks more like a tree than a shrub. Its bark is a beautiful light brown color and its needles glisten green.
  The tree grows on and up. Seasons come and go. Our Cedar is now older and stronger. It has withstood a few very cold winters that heaped snow and ice on its branches. A few of its thinner branches near the tree top would snap off after a particularly big storm when the wet snow was too heavy. If you were a raven and landed in the tree top you could see where the branches were broken and the color of the inner wood would be white.
  One summer had many thunder and lightning storms. Lighting struck the meadow near the Cedar and a fire burned in the woods for several days. The bark of the tree was scorched a little bit. But the bark is very fire resistant and protected the tree. For many years you could see the scars from that fire in the form of a black patch on the otherwise brown bark. They are still noticeable even today.
  Our Cedar tree smells. The needles have a crisp and fresh scent to them. The bark has a dustier odor. Like the earth itself. The combination of smells are unforgettable if you have ever been in a cedar grove. It's hard to describe but it is a wonderful smell. It has an unmistakable wildness to it.
  Many animals have wandered through the grove. Off and on for many years the now mature Cedar has provided refuge to squirrels and birds. Squirrels have nested in the hollows of its broken branches. Ravens have lingered in the limbs croaking at each other in their language that we will never understand. Woodpeckers have poked holes all up and down the tall tree's massive trunk.
Nuthatches have inspected the pine cones looking for seeds and insects. These tiny birds do something very strange. They face the ground when they are clinging to the tree so that they are upside down.
  For a few years a black bear lived nearby and for some reason obscure to us liked to use this particular tree as a scratching post. The bear would lean her back against the bark and rub up and down until her itch was gone. Sometimes, on warm summer afternoons when giant white clouds floated across the blue sky the bear would take a nap in the shade of the Cedar. It was a good life in this forest with plenty of berries, bugs and roots to eat and a cool place to sleep. Bears are wanderers. One day she climbed up the side of the slope that faced west and kept going to the other side of the mountain. She found a secluded alpine meadow and lived there for a long time.
  And our tree grew a bit taller. It was now over one hundred feet tall. And it was seventy years old. It had seen a lot in that time. But it would see so much more.
  There was a ten year drought. It was a long hot dry spell. Again though, the Cedar was lucky. Its roots were still strong and had grown deep. They were able to drink up all the moisture trapped underneath the soil. For those years with no rain and very little snow the Cedar became semi dormant and the rings that were added to the trunk were very thin. Its very survival depended on its ability to conserve every precious drop of water.
  And then finally there came a winter with many storms and the snow piled up high. The drifts reached ten feet up the trunk.
  And in spring, when the sun shone longer every day, the dry earth absorbed all that snow melt like a thirsty hiker on a dusty trail. The Cedar nourished itself and the luster of its needles glowed dark green in the summer sun.
  One day a forest ranger came along. She was studying the woods and trees. Her name was Laura. She wanted to know more about the Sierras. Laura measured how tall the trees were and took ground samples of the forest back to her laboratory and looked at the dirt through a microscope. She found out that the earth was living. She found tiny bugs and worms and little rootlike plants. So many creatures move through a handful of soil and she found it amazing.
  Laura drilled into the Cedar and took a core sample so she could count the rings. She counted one hundred and thirty-three. She thought about her grandmother who was eight-one. When her Nana was born the Cedar was already over fifty years old. Laura was twenty-five. And she marveled at the fact that the Cedar was over a hundred years older than she was.
  Laura was a good forester and she loved her work. Every year when her job took her near to where the Cedar grew she would take an afternoon off and have a picnic underneath the great pine. It became a tradition and a personal holiday when she celebrated the wonder of life. When Laura retired from the forest service she thought that the Cedar hadn't changed that much over the years. It looked pretty much the same. Whereas Laura now had smile wrinkles at the corners of her grey eyes and her red hair had streaks of white. She had changed so much and the Cedar so very little. And when Laura was too old to make the hike up that steep hill she still had dreams of her beautiful tree standing tall and swaying gently on an evening breeze.
  A pair of great grey owls made a nest in the Cedar at the crook of its biggest branch where a patch of mistletoe grew. Great grey owls are very rare. They are an endangered and therefore a protected species.
  Nights in the forest are so dark. But there are animals that are active. Raccoons scamper around scavenging for food. They have big appetites and will eat many different things including nuts, frogs, moths, roots, birds and carrion. They are wandering opportunists and they are very active at night. So are coyotes who also patrol the woods looking for food and like raccoons they will eat almost anything. Black bears, too, come alive at night and hungrily inspect their surroundings ready to fill their growling stomachs.
  If you were to stand near the Cedar after midnight it would take your eyes a while to adjust to the darkness. You would hear noises beyond your limited vision. There's a rustling in the low growing manzanita and mountain misery. A coyote might howl. Branches of the sugar pines will clack together as a raccoon makes it way from limb to limb. An owl screeches seconds before it scoops up a frightened mouse. Wind sings in the treetops. The night is every bit as alive as the daytime.
  One thing you won't hear is a mountain lion. They are too stealthy and silent. If there is one nearby you would never know it. Unless they wanted to eat you, but by the time you hear its paws in the duff it is too late.
  But if you were one of the great grey owls perched on the top branches of the Cedar, relaxed but alert after a big dinner of mice and voles, you could look up to the stars. The Cedar grows on a wide sloping hill many miles from the nearest road. The closest house is over fifteen miles away. At night the only light is from the moon, planets and stars. You can look out into the Milky Way and see more stars than you'd ever be able to count. Chinese poets called the Milky Way the River of Heaven. It is the galaxy we live in, our home.
  Something else happens every night that you can rarely see from the city where the night lights are so bright. You will see meteors burn across the sky. They will light up briefly and then flair out to darkness. All this space dust coming to earth every night can make you wonder just how big the universe really is. The vast night vistas of immeasurable distances makes even the giant Cedar seem tiny.
  And as time continues its flowing we can wonder how many times meteors glowed in the sky above the stoic tree, a witness to so many of Nature's silent acts of shear beauty.
  Our beautiful Cedar passes its one hundred and seventy-fifth birthday. It is a mature tree and has let fly on the breezes millions and millions of seeds. Scattered throughout the forest are many of its offspring ranging in height from a few feet tall to soaring giants that reach ninety feet into the sky.
  So much of the forest looks the same as it did when the Cedar was a fragile sapling. But much has changed. And it's amazing to think that in all that time only a very few people have set eyes on it. Probably less than ten.
  Out in the other world change comes too. All manor of life plays out as humanity prods along from one decade to the next. Politicians, movie stars, famous musicians and authors come and go. New fads rise and fall away as fast as summer snowmelt in the peaks above our Cedar. Our memories try to hold on to everything but as new experiences are fresh in our minds the older ones become slightly more faded. We grow, we mature, we become the sum of everything that has ever happened to us.
  At over two hundred years old our Cedar is the one of the oldest trees in the grove. At one time it was the tallest too but it lost some of its topmost branches in a heavy ice storm. It was the beginning of an inevitable decline. As its roots grew older they became more fragile. And it became harder and harder to pull nutrients and moisture out of the soil. Some of the largest and oldest branches became more dormant which allowed for some newer growth at the tips of those that received more sunlight. But finally there came years of no growth at all and a reversal started. Less and less sap flowed up the trunk. The tree was now in old age and its strength was diminished. Then there came a summer where the last of the needles received no nourishment and one by one drifted down to the forest floor. And then something amazing happened. Not only did the flow of those nutrients stop their upward journey but they changed course and gravity pulled them back into the soil where they found their way into the young roots of the next generation of pine trees. In its last year our majestic Cedar helped promote new life and added to the health of the ecosystem.  And one of those saplings would thrive and grow far into the next century becoming part of a story that spans hundreds of years.
 But our tree wasn't done yet. It would stand for a while longer. In fact, quite a while longer, almost thirty years. But it would little resemble the tall majestic pine with tawny bark and many thick branches full of sharp green needles that it once was.
  The higher and smaller branches will break off first leaving only the thicker limbs to hang on. The once strong bark will start to flake off leaving a pile of detritus at the Cedar's base. Mice and the occasional snake will find shelter in the rotting scraps of the tree's old skin. With the bark gone the inner wood takes on the color of pale iron. Smooth and still very solid.
  A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers find the dead tree to be a perfect place for a home. They make a hole sixty feet above the ground. From there they survey their world with a keen awareness of the ways of the forest. You can hear their knocking on the trunk from a half mile away. Their long strong beaks are perfect for digging out bugs and carpenter ants deep in the old heartwood. Big and flashy with their scarlet crowns and black and white heads the woodpeckers are unique characters and their bold cries carry far through the trees.
  And, like so many of life's moments, this one comes without warning or fanfare. On an early Spring morning when the last patches of snow are melting and forming tiny rivulets that are absorbed into the soil and a slight warm wind carries a hint of Summer that ruffles the tree tops, our beautiful Cedar tree crashes to the ground. It falls upslope. It crushes some smaller trees and manzanita bushes. The hillside shakes as if a small earthquake rippled through its depths. The trunk shatters into three large sections of about thirty feet each. The dead branches scatter in every direction. The noise brings a momentary stop to the birdsong. Other animals pause and turn their ears toward the great noise. For a brief few minutes the forest is silent. And then slowly the life of the hillside resumes it pace and continues on toward unforeseen ends.
  But there's more, there always is. The next melody of a long symphony is about to start. It takes a tree about as long to decompose as it did to live. Our tree now starts a new process of decay. Instead of being a home to squirrels, owls or woodpeckers the once hard wood begins to feed and shelter smaller life forms. Bugs, beetles, ants, but mostly bacteria and they all begin the job of breaking down the nutrients that make up the fallen trunk. Eventually everything will be returned to the soil. But it takes a long time. In a hundred years there will still be a barely visible mound where the Cedar fell. The soil there will be rich in the stuff of life. For a time that spot will have the first Spring flowers blooming there in a straight line looking as if they were planted purposefully. But they weren't. When the old tree fell it left a big open area that allowed more sunlight to penetrate the undergrowth. It didn't take long for forest flowers to flourish. Indian pink and purple lupine decorated the clearing with both color and fragrance. Bees, butterflies and moths took advantage of their sweet nectar and for several years the patch of flowers was a hidden garden.
  Then another amazing and random thing happened. A seed so small you would hardly notice it. So small you could hide twenty of them under a penny. So small it drifted on a summer wind and landed on the last remains of our once giant Cedar. But let's not be fooled by size. Great and wonderful things, even world changing things, can come from the smallest beginnings.
  The tiny seed starts to grow. Ever so slowly. I think you know what happens next.