The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [124]
I drove for two hours on lofty roads through boulder-strewn mountains. Snow was still lying about in broad patches. At last I entered the dark and mysterious groves of the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum, according to my brochure). The trees were tall, no doubt about it, and fat around the base, though not fat enough to take a highway. Presumably they would get fatter as I moved deeper into the forest. Sequoias are ugly trees. They soar up and up and up, but their branches are sparse and stubby, so they look silly, like the sort of trees three-year-olds draw. In the middle of the Giant Forest stands the General Sherman Tree – the biggest living thing on Earth. Surely the General Sherman was the one I was looking for.
‘Oh boy, Chevette, have I got a treat for you!’ I called out and patted the steering wheel fondly. When at last I neared the General Sherman, I found a small parking lot and a path leading to the tree through the woods. Evidently it was no longer possible to drive through the tree. This was a disappointment – name me something in life that isn’t – but never mind, I thought. I’ll walk through it; the pleasure will last longer. Indeed, I’ll walk through it severally. I will stroll and saunter and glide, and if there aren’t too many people about, I might well dance around it in the light-footed manner of Gene Kelly splashing through puddles in Singin’ in the Rain.
So I banged the car door shut and walked up the trail to the tree and there it was, with a little fence around it to keep people from getting too close. It was big all right – tall and fat – but not that tall, not that fat. And there was no hole through its base. You might just about have managed to cut a modest road through it, but – and here’s the important thing – no-one ever had. Beside the tree was a large wooden board with an educational message on it. It said ‘The giant General Sherman is not only the biggest tree in the world, but also the biggest living thing. It is at least 2,500 years old, and thus also one of the oldest living things. Even so, it is surprisingly boring, isn’t it? That is because it isn’t all that tall and all that fat. What sets it apart from other redwoods is that it doesn’t taper very much. It stays pretty fat all the way up. Hence it has a greater bulk than any other tree. If you want to see really impressive redwoods – ones with roads driven through their bases – you have to go to Redwood National Park, way up near the Oregon border. Incidentally, we’ve erected a fence around the base of the tree to keep you well back from it and intensify your disappointment. As if that were not enough, there is a party of noisy young Germans coming up the path behind you. Isn’t life shitty?’
As you will appreciate, this is somewhat paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. The Germans came and were obnoxious and unthoughtful, as adolescents tend to be, and stole the tree from me. They perched on the fence and started taking pictures. I derived some small pleasure from wandering in front of the cameraman whenever he was about to click the shutter, but this is an activity from which it is difficult to extract sustained amusement, even with Germans, and after a minute or two I left them there jabbering away about die Pop Musik and das Drugs Scene and their other adolescent preoccupations.
In the car I looked at the map and was disheartened to discover that Redwood National Park was almost 500 miles away. I could hardly believe it. Here I was 300 miles north of Los Angeles and yet I could drive another 500 miles and still be in California. It is 850 miles from top to bottom – about the distance between London and Milan. It would take me a day and a half to get to Redwood National Park, plus a day and a half to get back to where I was now. I didn’t have that