Inspiring Giants of the California Landscape

GIANTS IN THE EARTH: The California Redwoods, Edited by Peter Johnstone, Heyday Books: 384 pp., $18 paper

“The big tree,” as the California redwood is sometimes called, can be inspiring for some, unsettling to others, even terrifying to a few. “Magical” is how biologist Verna R. Johnston describes a redwood grove at dawn; a “dismal forest prison” is how explorer L.K. Wood describes the redwoods of Humboldt County; and the Yurok people of northwestern California regarded the redwoods as the physical incarnation chosen by spirits at the very beginning of time--if wounded, they believed, a redwood would bleed.

All of these qualities are explored in “Giants in the Earth,” a well-chosen and provocative anthology of poetry and prose that shows how the redwood has impressed itself on the human imagination over the last 200 years or so. The usual suspects are here, of course, ranging from John Muir to Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, along with several generations of explorers and environmental activists, naturalists and nature poets. But there are some surprises too, including extracts from the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Tom Wolfe, Czeslaw Milosz and Armistead Maupin, all touching on the subject of the redwoods.

“The history of writing about redwoods might ... be viewed as a quixotic effort, a noble and sometimes pathetic attempt to recover some sense of human proportion and meaning,” explains Peter Johnstone, editor of the anthology, “which, along with the gift of speech, the godlike plant has stolen from mortals who dare to measure its breadth and length.”

Twenty-five million years ago, we are told in “Giants in the Earth,” redwoods stretched across all of the northern hemisphere. Today, only two varieties remain--the Sequoiadendron giganteum of the southern Sierra Nevada, and the Sequoia sempervirens, whose range is limited to the Pacific coast, all but eight miles of which is located within Northern California. And the best explanation for their powerful appeal is found in the superlatives that have attached themselves to the California redwoods.

The redwoods of the Sierra are the tallest trees in the world, reaching a height of more than 360 feet, and the coastal redwoods are the widest in circumference; a portfolio of historic photographs selected by Peter E. Palmquist makes the point. And, famously, some redwoods are more than 1,000 years old, a fact that figures memorably in both ranger talks in our Western parks and in a crucial scene from “Vertigo,” in which Kim Novak shows Jimmy Stewart the span of her prior life on an ancient tree’s exposed rings.

“While forty, perhaps fifty generations of humans lived and loved and fought and died,” muses essayist Francois Leydet about one of the oldest redwoods, “this tree always stood in this very place, aloof and mindless of human antics.”

Significantly, the redwoods did not (and do not) always inspire reverence--the first Europeans to encounter the big trees saw them as a commodity, and so do the loggers of our own times. That’s why Julia Butterfly Hill climbed to the top of a 1,000-year-old redwood and stayed there for two years--but her exploit was not merely an act of eco-activism. “People no longer had any power over me,” writes this latter-day anchorite about the revelation she experienced atop the big tree. “I was going to live my life guided from the higher source, the Creation source.”

Hill’s manifesto is an example of what Johnstone characterizes as the “apocalypticism” and “anti-humanism” that can be found in the latest writing on the redwoods, a sense of “unease, pessimism, or panic on the issue of the rapidly disappearing redwood forests.” Not every contributor to “Giants in the Earth” is quite so strident, of course, but virtually all of them--the scientists and historians no less than the poets and special pleaders--are inspired to express themselves in language that owes more to metaphysics than politics, economics or natural history.

Annie Montague Alexander is best remembered, when she is remembered at all, as the heiress who endowed museums of zoology and paleontology on the UC Berkeley campus in the early years of the 20th century. But Barbara Stein, author of “On Her Own Terms,” is intent on rescuing Alexander from such obscurity and presenting her to the world as nothing less than a feminist icon.

“She was an intrepid explorer, world traveler, amateur naturalist, farmer, philanthropist and founder and patron of two natural history museums, all at a time when women did not have the right to vote and few had any involvement in the world outside their homes,” writes Stein. “She was a woman of vision who loved women and believed firmly in their capabilities. She lived passionately and, perhaps most importantly, she dealt with the world on her own terms.”

Born in 1867 to a wealthy sugar planter in Hawaii, Alexander moved with her family to Oakland when she was a teenager. Accustomed to the freedom and adventure of life in 19th century Maui, Stein insists, Alexander found life on the mainland to be “oppressive”--she was sent to a finishing school where gloves were required and bloomers were forbidden; she struggled with migraines and eyestrain so severe that it threatened blindness; and she was so discouraged by her early efforts at art that she destroyed all of her paintings and drawings.

But Alexander insisted on reinventing herself, starting in 1899 with a 10-week horseback trek through Northern and Southern California in the company of a young woman named Martha Beckwith, the first of several women in whom she recognized a “kindred spirit.” She began to audit paleontology courses at UC Berkeley, and she saw fieldwork as an opportunity to escape from the empty tedium of life as a rich man’s unmarried daughter in turn-of-the-century America. By the end of her life, she had collected thousands of specimens of flora, fauna and fossils throughout North America.

“Perhaps if I had a husband and family I should not be running after strange gods,” she confided to one of her kindred spirits. “I do not want to be selfish yet it seems to me we have the right to a considerable extent of disposing of our lives as we think fit.”

Stein deals frankly, if also compassionately, with Alexander’s sexual orientation and, in particular, the lifelong relationship with her “partner,” Louise Kellogg. “[S]he was a lesbian,” one of Alexander’s colleagues told Stein, “[b]ut we didn’t talk about such things in those days.” In fact, hardly a single word in the correspondence between Alexander and Kellogg--or, even more remarkably, the private journal that they jointly kept throughout their years together--betrays the secret of the love they shared for some 40 years.

“If the object of such discretion was to protect their families, or protect themselves from their families, then perhaps they succeeded,” writes Stein, “as neither set of relatives ever suggested that their relationship was anything more than that of close friends.”

One of the telling facts revealed by Stein is that Alexander was the financial sponsor of the scientific expeditions that she accompanied into the field. The thought occurs that her achievements would have been even more extraordinary if she had achieved them with only ordinary means. But it’s also true that when Alexander writes of what it takes to succeed at fieldwork--”pure grit, pluck, dogged perseverance”--she is describing her own gifts, too.

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Jonathan Kirsch is a contributing writer to Book Review and the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People” (Viking).