Last August I flew out to Santa Cruz, California, to attend my nephew’s wedding. It had been nearly twenty-five years since I had been out West, and even longer since I had seen some of my relatives.I flew into the San Jose airport, rented a car, and drove across the Coast Mountains into Santa Cruz. Even as a dyed-in-the-wool Easterner, I could feel the strong attraction of this landscape. The hills and mountains are so much larger, so much more muscular, than anything we have here in New England. Thy seemed to ask for a loftier response than do our modest contours at home. The trees, too, of course, are of a much larger scale – the ponderosa pines, sitka spruces, Douglas firs, sugar pines, incense cedars, and, of course, the redwoods.
The day after the wedding I drove up to the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, just a half hour out of Santa Cruz. Here can be found some of the largest and oldest old-growth redwoods in the world. One of these, a mammoth known simply as “The Giant” is 17-feet in diameter – larger than my living room – and nearly 300-feet high. Another redwood, known as the Fremont Tree has a fire-hollowed base in which the explorer John C. Fremont is said to have spent a night in in 1846. When Fremont returned to the site decades later, he was asked about the veracity of this legend. “It’s a good story,” he said. “Let it stand.”
My kind of guy.
All the cliché adjectives come unbidden when standing in the presence of such organisms: majestic, monumental, mythic, titantic – but they all seem inadequate. Indeed, it is hard to think of such presences as trees. They seem to belong to another world than out modest oaks, pines, hemlocks and maples. Yet they seem appropriate to the oversized landscape in which they grow.
Standing before these giants, I found myself wondering how our history would have been different if, instead of settling this continent from east to west, the European pioneers had settled it from west to east? Forget for a minute how this might have come about – just consider the ramifications. What if, instead of first encountering the rocky shores and scraggly trees of New England, they had encountered the fertile valleys, and the majestic forests of California? Instead of abandoning the hardscrabble hill farms of New England as soon as they could manage it, would these settlers have instead thought, “Why go any further? What could be better than this?”
At the least, I think, it would have slowed down the advance of European settlement. And then suppose, that after a time they had begun to push east? After encountering, and finally surmounting the magnificent peaks of the Rockies, it would all have been downhill, literally and metaphorically: trudging down the endless, slowly descending plains, plodding eastward through the ground-down mountain ranges and closed-in forests of the Appalachians, and finally to the low sandy hills and impoverished soil of Cape Cod itself.
As it was, the historical settlement of North America from east to west likely created in our pioneering ancestors a racial sense of a growing wave, an accelerating movement into larger and increasingly promising landscapes, which in turn may have fed their belief in a Manifest Destiny. On the other hand, had this continent been settled from west to east, it might have created in us a sense of diminished expectations and lowered horizons, even a certain humility. In realizing that the best was already behind us.
