Sitting with Stumps 1
Chicago Stump, Sequoia National Forest
I stopped in front of the massive stump, starring at the blackened wood. It was huge, the tallest stump I’d seen, more than three times my height, and almost double that in width. The wood directly in front of me was flattened as if the outer portion of the tree had been burned or peeled way. Much of the surface was slightly rippled. In places my eyes could follow the thin grain lines rising vertically—thousands of years etched into the tree. On either side of the flattened surface, the wood flared out to a much wider base. It was almost as if the central portion was flanked by a thick mane of flowing hair. Behind, or should I say above this mass of wood, I could see the foliage of a fir and several cedar trees. But if I looked straight ahead, I was engulfed in wood—the intricate texture and endless curves and hollows formed over thousands of years.
Not knowing how to be present the stump, I proceeded to circumambulate around it three times, as I would a Buddhist stupa. The stump itself was a relic to time. For its age alone this stump merited veneration. Before its demise, the tree that once stood here was estimated to have been 3200 years old. Reduced to a stump, it’s presence commemorated the act of massive slaughter that accompanied the colonizing and settling of the west by Europeans.
Circling around the tree, I saw that the other sides weren’t flattened, but that the trunk flared out immensely in the last several feet before it reached the ground. The gnarled base of the tree was much larger than the straighter trunk that emerged several feet up. Much of the higher trunk and some of the base looked burnt, but that is common for sequoias.
As I approached the stump, the interpretive sign stated that it would have taken eighteen men with arms outstretched to encircle the “Chicago tree,” as it was called. It was cut down at considerable expense a hundred and thirty years ago and shipped off to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 to prove that such a large tree existed. In order to ship, it had to be cut into many pieces and reassembled. Fair goers weren’t convinced, calling the reassembled tree the “California hoax”.
Reading this I wondered, just what was this “California hoax, the locus of belief and disbelief?” That a tree could be this large, or this old? That humans were capable of cutting down such a tree? That humans would dare to cut down such a tree? That cutting down such a tree was celebrated at the time?
After circumambulating three times, I sat down facing the stump. This tree was felled a hundred and thirty years ago, but yet this ginormous stump was still here, palpably present. I sat, alone, with this massive stump encircled by ferns. I sat and exhaled, sharing my breath with this immense stump that no longer respired, taking in its presence. I sat and inhaled, as deeply as I dared under the clear blue, but smoky sky.
At some point my mind flitted back to the journey to get to this place. I arrived at Kings Canyon the day before. This morning I’d driven through a short stretch of the park on to Sequoia National Forest and turned down a dirt road which seemed passible, a bit dubiously so, by my small passenger car. Long stretches of the road was perched somewhat perilously near the edge of a cliff. In normal times, if there is such a thing, I imagined that there would be wonderful views of the hills below. But today all I saw was a thick smoky haze. I had debated a lot about making the trip. My worry about Covid-19 abated when I learned that many facilities were closed and that the available campgrounds always kept bathroom doors open, only to be replaced by a concern about air quality. My arrival was planned for two weeks after the spate of northern California August fires ignited by a series of lightning strikes. Day by day I kept hoping that by the time of my departure these fires would be largely under control. But even though it was hard to find news about every fire, my obsessive monitoring of air quality information kept yielding warnings of very unhealthy air. I persisted, thinking that it would be nice, a privilege, to see the park with fewer tourists and that at 6,000 or 7,000 feet the air couldn’t be that bad. While there were less visitors, stopping at overlooks, or even glancing out over the cliff line as I drove, was harrowing. Expansive views were shrouded in smoke. I looked out into a grey emptiness. The whole drive through the Central Valley and up into mountains was eerie. I passed by mile after mile of vineyards and orchards of almonds and fruit trees all suffocating in the still, thick, almost impenetrable murky air. I had climbed above some of the smoke, but it was never far behind.
Fires had been here as well. Along much of the morning’s drive all I saw was dead trees, barren trunks and branches streaked with black. The underbrush was thick with ceonothus and other shrubs that return after fire. An interpretive panel referred to a McGee fire in 1955, but what I saw was more recent. On my return home, research revealed that the Rough Fire had burned through much of this area five years ago, in 2015.
Driving along the dirt road, I kept wanting to turn back. I have been walking with dying trees for years, bearing witness, being present, sitting with grief. But between the smoke, the unknown rutted road, the fear of getting stuck or driving over the edge, the terror was too close. It was hard to imagine that this inhospitable place was part of Converse Forest, once the home to one the largest grove of sequoias in the world. Finally, I parked and began down the trail to the stump. I was so relieved to quickly come to a green grassy meadow, replete with skunk cabbage, a signal of prime sequoia habitat. The meadow was ringed with stumps. I kept walking until the trail ended at the most massive of them all.
So here I sat, letting my thoughts drift into space with my out breath. Let them go, I told myself. I could make sense of it all later, when writing this account. Now I just wanted to be with the massive form, with all of its myriad of textures, crannies and curves in front of me. The blackened stump contrasted to the greenery of the forest or the few dead trees, with their spindly branches, firs I think, that stood to one side. I sat and felt the presence of the tree, the immense solidity of this corpse of a tree. I ran my eyes along the surface wondering what it would reveal, trying to stay present to feeling. What did this tree have to tell?
This tree, or this reminder of a tree, had stood for over 3000 years. I struggled to imagine that far back. I thought of the rise of the Anasazi and their cliff dwellings in the southwest. The Anasazi didn’t begin to develop farming villages until this tree had lived over half of its life, but further south, when this tree began to grow, the Mayans were already cultivating maize, beans, squash and chili peppers, and beginning to develop sedentary communities. As for the local indigenous peoples, I imagined the annual cycle of their movement, migrating to the mountains in the summer and warmer lower elevations in the winter, periodically setting fires to clear the soil, and aid in the germination of redwood seedlings and gathering the fruits of the forest.
I thought also of the ancestors of the settlers, or my own ancestors. The goddess culture of the Minoans was still flourishing in Crete during this tree’s youth, but the Indo-European warlike patriarchal cultures were sweeping through Europe. Three thousand years ago the Buddha had yet to be born. The Hebrew Bible was being written, the same Bible that the settlers carried—the “civilized truth” imposed on the native peoples as they came to this land.
Even deleting a zero, three hundred years ago was well before the establishment of the missions along the California coast. It was doubtful that any of the native peoples that lived or passed through these lands at that time would have encountered Europeans. Had prophecies, or word of such encounters reached these parts? By two hundred years ago, tales of cruelty of the mission life might well have drifted to the sequoia groves.
Then in 1848 gold was discovered in the foothills to the north. The sequoias were “discovered,” a few years later in 1852, when word of these giants rapidly spread to the eastern US and Europe. Their rapid fame led to earlier claims of discovery—most likely Europeans had first seen these trees in 1839. Time marched quickly after the settlers arrived. Land was suddenly privatized. Logging in this grove started in 1880 severing mycorrhizal networks by which the trees communicated. By the time the tree was cut down, both the native peoples and the grizzly bears, fellow inhabitants of the forest throughout the tree’s life, had been largely exterminated.
After three millennia, as the tree came thundering to the ground, time stopped. Death did not likely come quickly but torturously slowly over the days that it took to bore into the tree with awls and saw through the thick bark until finally the tree was ready to fell. Did the settlers who cut down this tree even think about the historical perspective that was tumbling to the ground? Or was the immensity of the tree, more than its long historical view, what captured their imagination?
While those in Chicago may’ve considered the tree a hoax, the stump has remained here, frozen in time, while change in the surroundings accelerated, standing for a hundred and thirty years as a monument to the tree’s destruction. The article in the Los Angeles Times where I’d learned about the Rough Fire, was headlined, “Famed ‘Chicago Stump’ sequoia threatened by massive California wildfire.” When the whole forest was burning, why did this stump garner so much attention? Living sequoias are very resistant to fire. Their fire-resistant bark is two feet thick and they lack pitch or resin. Without the protection of a living tree, the article described valiant efforts to save this stump from the flames that eventually burned 138,053 acres. Fire crews cleared the brush nearby, ringed the tree with fire retardant, put three sprinklers on the stump and wrapped it in fire-resistant reflective foil that wards of radiant heat.
I’d love to think that the fire crews were directed to preserve the Chicago stump as a memorial to the poor-judgment, hubris and myopia of early settlers, who cut it down, who thought to reduce it to a trophy of its grandeur. Instead it appears that it was all too easy to fetishize the stump. Even in its demise, did the dead stump stand as a testament to the logger’s ingenuity? In an article describing these valiant efforts, the National Geographic deems the stump, “a national treasure.” The nearby trail also passed by numerous other large stumps. What was the fixation on preserving this magnificent stump? Because it was larger than the rest? Or older than the rest? Because there were photos documenting its demise? Was the act of preserving the tree, an act of identification, an affirmation of human power, that these firemen could preserve this fetish of grandiosity while the living forest went up in smoke? Was these efforts evidence of the human tendency to prize the singular oddity over the whole? Or was it a bit of all of the above?
Nonetheless, I am grateful that this piece of history survived, and that I had the opportunity to sit with it. Looking around, it is not clear that the fire got to the tree in any case. The blackened surface of part of the stump could’ve been from the Rough fire or the countless other fires that the tree had witnessed during its lifetime. It is possible the dead trees on the hillside above the stump were damaged by fire, and not as I assumed from a quick inspection, by the drought and bark beetles that have impacted so many trees in the Sierras. But the trail to the tree from the parking area passed through luxuriant meadows and lush forest that showed no evidence of fire.
After sitting with the tree for some time, I walked up and touched the stump, at first with hesitation, but then letting my hand linger. Was it alright to touch this tree? This was not a museum specimen. The damage had already been done. If this stump had stood for a hundred and thirty years, the oils on my hand were insignificant. The surface that had looked so hard was surprisingly soft to the touch. It had give, although not as much as a living tree. Unlike a corpse the surface was warm. Letting my hand linger, I touched in tenderness and tears.
On first thought, this massive stump, the much smaller one to the left, and all the stumps that ringed the meadow felt like a grim monument to death and wanton destruction of the sequoias. But yet this stumps sand all of the others were still standing as if welcoming my presence and those of the countless others who must’ve trodden this trail. They stood almost unchanged, a monument seemingly immune to the relentless passage of time.
However, as I sat with the tree, I dared not inhale too deeply. The stump may’ve survived previous fires, but a stump, unlike a living sequoia, is very vulnerable to fire. The same forces that propelled the felling of the tree are causing a continued warming of the climate, the acceleration of change and increasing the likelihood that there will be another conflagration that consumes the stump.
I am grateful that I was able to sit with this stump, this relic of longevity, of the arc of time, of a being that began their life so long ago, more than a thousand years before the common era. And yet fire, the fire that has become so feared, is necessary for the sequoia’s cones to open and the seeds to germinate. It is the fire that will eventually consume this stump, that will create the conditions for a new generation of sequoias to grow. It is fire that will bring new life, that is, if the climate has not changed so rapidly that conditions will no longer be hospitable to growth.