Felton, California was where she went to check out the redwoods.
She sailed into town in a 1954 MG TF 1250, hastily borrowed from a neighbor after admiring it for months. The keys were in the ignition. She figured her neighbor wouldn’t mind being without his car for a month or two.
Her parents had taken her to see the redwoods when she was a little girl. About all she could remember was the rain. How it seemed to fall not from the sky but from the redwood canopy. She also remembered lying on the ground and opening her mouth to drink the rain. She wanted to find out if it tasted any different since it came from the canopy.
Whether it did or not was tough to tell. When she arrived at the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park it wasn’t raining. No fog in the forest in Felton, California for the leaves to condense and turn into raindrops.
Nobody was in the parking lot. She took the opportunity to swap out a fresh set of license plates for the MG. Then she sauntered off to revisit the coast redwoods, the tallest trees on earth, roots stretching out from their trunks for a hundred feet.
She knew just 5% of California’s old-growth coast redwoods were left and she wasn’t happy about it.
She hiked away from the grove to admire other trees, Douglas fir, bigleaf maple, bay laurel, tanbark oak and hazelnut. She found a place to lie down where nobody would see her, folded her jeans jacket into a pillow and looked up at the branches of a tree she didn’t recognize. It could have been a hazelnut tree.
She kept her eyes open and watched birds fluttering up in high branches. Her thoughts drifted off to a similar experience from just a few days before in Griffith Park.
Then a car alarm began to shriek. She took this as a sign to move on.
