City of Hermits - Softcover

Covina, Gina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0960962611 ISBN 13: 9780960962617

Publisher: Barn Owl Books, 1983

Synopsis

Book by Covina, Gina

About this title

About the Author

Gina Covina was born in 1952 in Janesville, Wisconsin, grew up in Southern California, and migrated north to her true home in northern California in 1970. She writes about plants, environmental issues, and gardening for magazines and newspapers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

September is the saddest time of year for Guerneville's redwoods. The rains have not yet begun, and it is the one month in which the fog does not drift up the river valley every night to swathe the big trees in moisture. The green of their branches looks dull; what is left of the underbrush is brittle and browning; and even the tree trunks are coated with grey-white dust.

The hermit has a favorite place in the redwood grove: a burnt flat stump nearly twenty feet across, ringed now by hundred-year-old sprouts. She squats there and peers out at the grazing horses. She lies on her back and watches the circle of saplings converge into blue sky high overhead.

Hundred-year-old redwoods are babies, the hermit explains. Hundred-foot-tall babies, grown to one-third of their possible height, and alive so far for one-twentieth of their natural span. The hermit smiles at my incredulous look. "I can tell you stranger things than that," she says in her flat Okie drawl.

"Please do," I say, and I lean back against a redwood trunk and gaze into the branches before me. I'm not sure what she says next. I remember the dark green, and the tips of the branches moving in still air, and the wonder growing in me, and the sense of ancient awareness all around. I remember the sadness alongside the immense vitality, but I don't know whether it was the hermit speaking or the trees themselves.

So long ago we lived: before humans, before horses, before birds or mice or flowers. We lived before these continents formed, before these mountains had risen into place. We were not giants then; no. In those days all life was big. The times were exuberant, and steamy, and new and odd and bold. Winged reptiles perched in my swaying crown, hissing across the treetops, while dinosaurs chewed fern fronds far down below. All the green creatures grew loudly, with the enthusiasm of innocence. Animal experiments emerged daily from the sea. We were full of our own becoming. The world was so new, hope had not yet been invented.

I began to spread, then; by the time the continents had formed as they remain today I lived in every northern one. By the time the flowers arrived, and the mammals, I capped the north pole; I lay in one green blanket across the top of the world. I was a giant, by then, and ancient. Everyone knew me well.

It didn't last--nothing does. The pole iced over, and the ice moved south in cold slow fingers, felling every tree of me, burying my green beneath its hard white weight. In one narrow stripe of North American coast I remain; in a pocket of California's Sierra Nevada my close cousin lives still; and in a remote province of China a third relative survives. We are the last.

The hermit lies face down against the huge stump. Her breath is ragged and her back shudders with the effort it takes to cry silently. Here is the sadness I feel--not in the ice that buried the great forests and left a small echo of a history ancient and vast--no, but here, in our living present the sadness gathers. Even the narrow band of redwood trees left by the ice is almost gone, and that within a hundred years. Grape stakes and lawn furniture. Railroad ties, shingles, and planter boxes. Ninety-seven percent of the redwoods chopped down. At first it took twenty men a hard day's work to fell one tree; today it takes one simple hour for two men with a chain saw. The hermit is crying. I don't know a way to comfort her, so I say, "Handy? Do you think the redwoods hear us?" She sits up.

"Not only that," she says, red-eyed but looking at me steady, her face splotched with muddy tracks made by the alchemy of tears and September dust, "but these trees love us. They can't help it." Her gaze shifts into the branches, and I shift too, puzzled. More than puzzled--my gut is knotted in the turmoil that precedes revelation, and I look at the hermit, and the trees, from one to the other with confusion rising 'til that hermit looks back to me and something in her eyes gives me the clue.

A redwood tree is a simple creature though ancient. It can only say yes. The evolution of free will lets us choose not to love; the plants are way behind us: they have no choice. Their love goes out like the oxygen they create, to whoever can breathe it.

I look at the hermit, and at the blur of redwood trees behind her. I look into her eyes, and her hermit's eyes beam back to mine. I begin to feel her meaning. Like one redwood tree to another, like a hermit to a redwood tree, like a redwood tree to my heart, like one human being to another--I begin to beam back.

Edition details

• Publisher: Barn Owl Books
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0960962611
• ISBN 13: 9780960962617
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 219