If you look through any book on the history of the Pacific Northwest, or walk into one of our regional natural history museums, you’d almost certainly see a photograph similar to the one above: Someone standing near a huge tree.
Sometimes the person photographed is a logger and he’s posing with a tree he just cut down; and sometimes he/she is a hunter or a hiker on a trip in the backcountry wilderness. Whatever the circumstances of the picture, though -- and whether the picture was taken a hundred years ago or just yesterday -- the visual elements are always the same: Small human being, dwarfed by Big Damn Tree. The picture has been done so many times over the years, it is a Pacific Northwest photographic icon.
Last month when Leah and I made a three hour drive out to the Washington coast to spend a night at an historic lodge in the Olympic National Park, we saw a kind of odd sign along the roadway: “Big Cedar Tree, one mile.” We two are accustomed to big cedar trees -- we have several nice-sized cedars on our own property -- so we wanted to see, up close, a tree worthy of its own US National Park roadside parking area and nature trail.
Oh my! What a tree it was! We walked around the tree, and we studied it. We checked out its amazing, vein-like texture, and were even able to step inside. I sweet-talked my photographically reluctant mate into letting me take her picture (I wonder how many camera-shy wives have stood in that same spot over the years, posing in that same way, for photo-enthusiast husbands.) A Park Service sign near the tree said this:
Big Cedar
Western redcedar has been the art and sinew of coastal Indian village life. The trunk is house plank and ocean-going canoe; branches are harpoon line; outer bark is diaper and bandage; inner bark is basket, clothing, and mattress.
Tree size expresses climate -- heavy annual rainfall and the nourishing damp of ocean fog. In a scramble for growing space, other tree species are using the cedar as a standing nurse log.
Western redcedar has been the art and sinew of coastal Indian village life. The trunk is house plank and ocean-going canoe; branches are harpoon line; outer bark is diaper and bandage; inner bark is basket, clothing, and mattress.
Tree size expresses climate -- heavy annual rainfall and the nourishing damp of ocean fog. In a scramble for growing space, other tree species are using the cedar as a standing nurse log.
This week we learned that high winds and heavy rain from recent, late-winter storms have split the tree, and a part of the rainforest matriarch has fallen over. The news saddened us, but as I thought about it, I understood that this is the cycle of life in Nature.
Here’s a link to a news story about the tree:
http://exotichikes.com/olympic-national-parks-kalaloch-cedar-destroyed-by-storm/
