Sequoia

 

We walk down the paved trail with a thousand other supplicants, most or all unaware of what we do, thinking it mere tourism. A woman coming up the path: They don’t look any bigger than the rest.

The heat is sedentary on the mountain. We peer between younger trees for our first glimpse. The kids show their excitement by leaping along the rocks at the path’s edge.

At last out of the forest it appears, so obviously superlative. Many times the size of the ponderosa pines and incense cedars around it. Its trunk knuckles down onto the mountain stone like the foot of a mammoth. Larger than mammoths, or whales. Larger than any other single living thing, and older than all but the oldest trees. Two thousand years and more.

Rusty haired bark covers its spreading base, which widens to meet the ground like rolling flesh or cooling lava. Higher up the trunk goes scaled and gray. And then there are its branches, thick and gnarled, hundreds of feet from the ground, larger than trees themselves. The foliage, a burst of gray green, is indistinct at this distance, a cloud halo around the crown.

So huge there ought to be but one in the world, yet many stand side by side on this mountain slope. Like columns in a cathedral, whose roof is the sky. Around their bases, we are teeming like ants on our paved paths. Yet unlike the echoing space in a cathedral, the thick forest floor and the warm air and the furred bark of these giants absorb sound, so that our chattering is muted. Our human sounds are made appropriately small, like the speech of squirrels or jays.

The trees have stood here silent and enduring since Rome was young. We are brief sparks flickering around their feet. Though their long-term survival is in question, because of us – our climate-warping gases, the crawling pests we bring – their trunks contain the wood of millennia. They are lived time made flesh.

Last night we slept in the open on the mountainside. The forest dark was silent as the far stars, so that our steps in the pine needles seemed loud as thunder. In our future lies the desert, wind clawing the sage brush, the road like a streak of ink on the white hard-pan.

I lift our child

I lift our child

from the couch where she
has fallen asleep,
my hands warmed
with whiskey,
and carry her over
the smoking threshold
to the bed shrouded
in sea mist
that comes in each night
to relieve the heat
and inscribe with its
taste of salt
my small place
where I hold all the world’s
longing, fear, and care.

Dark Mountain 17 Available Now

I'm very pleased to announce that Issue 17 of Dark Mountain is available now.

I worked as a prose editor on this issue, as well as contributing a short piece of fiction and an interview with artist and author Obi Kaufmann (The California Field Atlas). You can read my piece, Inauguration Day, here.

May we each find work – real, good, regenerative – to do in these trying times.

My best always,

Neale

Manifesto on Deep Adaptation

The children will play games with balls of tanned hide and sticks they carved themselves, on fields mown with a scythe. They will run along cliffs over ocean coves. Their schooling will be listening to acorns to know when they are ready to fall. Their work will be to pry mussels from the rocks, and to roll up plastic turf to reveal the soil beneath.

Our work will be breaking up the stone streets with rusted pick-axes. We will build the rubble into dry-stone shrines, beside the oak and laurel saplings we plant. We will imagine the trees aged to one hundred years and more. We will measure our age by the number of times our hearts have been broken.

Recent Work

I was very happy to be invited to contribute to the tenth anniversary edition of Dark Mountain, Issue 16: Refuge.

Also, a collaboration between myself and artist Robin V. Robinson can be found in the online edition of Dark Mountain here.

Many thanks for reading.

The Things You Name

You say ocean. You say rock and you say tree. You point to these things, and the birds flying or diving in the surf; you make their cries. Your face shows worthy amazement, brilliant recognition.

You are the things you name.

You reach your arm, your hand stretching, effort to connect; the rock and ocean reach out by the reflected rays of the setting winter sun. The tree reaches out by its branching shadow, the wave by its spume and thunder. You are breathing them in, speaking the names breathing out. The waves speak your name as they break apart upon the worn stones of your coast.

Tonight the sea mist will come in and blanket you while you sleep.

Letters to California: Holy Fire

My daughter, this land you were named for is ablaze. The maps on the weather report are red. The satellite images of the smoke show it blanketing the continent.

Here at the coast we are somewhat sheltered. The heat inland draws the onshore breeze from the vast Pacific, her fog muffling us in the damp. It burns away by midday, and on the horizon I can see the sickly haze.