Sherman
by Titus Gee
The largest living thing on planet Earth is named Sherman – General Sherman.
At least that’s what it said on the sign in front of a tree by that name in the Sequoia National Park, east of Visalia, California.
I rode the Nighthawk up there last week, over the Grapevine and out across the sweltering farm plane, to rendezvous with old friends in the shade of the big trees.
Sherman is nearly 275 feet tall, 36 feet across at the bottom and has a tiny crack in one side that I can stand inside while straightening my arm above my head.
I’m 6’3”.
Gave me flashbacks to Tom Bombadil and Old Man Willow
They say it’s not the tallest or widest tree on earth but manages a combination of dimensions that dwarf all others by sheer bulk.
Amazing that something so enormous could manage to look stubby while putting to shame the very mountain that rises beside it.
Conversation died as we approached, stepping into the aura that seems to linger about its base. It is hard to fathom that something so old and large could have no awareness of the centuries that moved around it, year by year, as it soaked water from the earth and light from the sun and turned them into living wood. The very solidity of it seemed to mock us as puny and transient creatures.
There’s kind of a clearing around it, as if all the other mammoth trees had taken a step back in deference to the titan that already was two centuries old when Christ first drew breath. The space is littered with fallen branches, each hundreds of pounds, seemingly cast off to conserve energy for building the great trunk. Each time I looked up it seemed I could see further, but never to the top.
I just couldn’t stand behind the barrier and look at it. Something so singular demanded to be touched. I hopped the fence and padded among the tree-sized deadfall, treading on a carpet of fine wood fibers.
The gnarled trunk looked like something out of a ride at Disney, worn smooth by the passing of more than two millennia, as though by the fingers of a million passing park visitors.
Did my hand tremble as I reached out to it, or is that a trick of memory?
My fingers brushed the bark and found it . . . delicate – like a thick layer of stiff foam molded into mounds and valleys. Fine, brown fibers like hairs made the surface soft and came free at the slightest touch, fluttering down to gather in notches lower on the trunk. It was millions of those tiny hairs that had created the thick loam on the ground beneath me. I could break off hundreds with one finger.
It didn’t seem right that something so huge should feel so fragile.
I walked around its perimeter, trailing my hand ever so lightly across the bark. ‘Round back I found the first scar, where the covering had pulled back like a blanket that is too short. Soot clung to the upper edge, the mark of some historic fire, and below that the steel gray wood – hard as stone and cool to the touch, its grain twisted and whorled like a great muscle clenched solid as it gripped the Earth.
The bark had fallen easily to the flames, revealing the secret strength that upheld the titan through thousands of winters and other fires. Yet they say the bark is the place the tree is most alive, that it manufactures the wood one millimeter at a time, year after year, fragile but somehow responsible for the whole life of the mighty tree.
Perhaps that great pillar of life did not literally emit an aura of awareness, as I stood there with one hand pressed to its cold wood and the other to its gentle bark.
But even so it had something to teach me about living.
