The Giving Trees

The Giving Trees

In the 1893 inaugural volume of the UC Berkeley Botany Department journal Erythea, William P. Gibbons, M.D., gave this doleful arboreal post-mortem:

” … the Oakland Hills, being exposed immediately to the influences of the sea-winds and fogs, bear—or at least once bore—a group of redwood trees about five mile square … This isolated group at one time included some of the most gigantic tress of the species. But for the sad havoc wrought there forty years ago by lumbermen and wood choppers, these Oakland Hills … might still have presented one of the noblest natural parks conceivable.”

Some of the larger stumps he measured were from 12 feet to 22 feet in diameter. One was fully 30 feet without bark—nearly the cross-section of the Campanile, and larger than any currently living coast redwood. Then there was a stupendous triple-trunk that had merged to span 57 feet of solid wood. What trees those must have been! Today, even their stumps are almost all gone, long ago grubbed out for firewood and reduced to smoke and ash.

I love big, old trees. They humble and inspire me, having survived and thrived for so much longer than my life, so very much longer than any of my problems. John Steinbeck called redwoods “ambassadors from another age.” The rest of us are merely passing through. Old trees inhabit a splendid world quite beyond the realm of human accomplishment or ability. No amount of money can create a great tree in place. It takes sunlight, rain, air, the divine spark of life, and far more time than any one of us has been given in this life.

One virgin tree in our hills did survive. To see it, drive up Redwood Road and turn right on Campus Drive toward Merritt College, then turn left into the parking lot of Carl B. Munck Elementary School. There a plaque points the way, across the valley, to “Old Survivor.” It’s grizzly, shaggy, misshapen, not a tree that ever thrived. It survives precisely because it’s perched on a steep, rocky slope, has had a hard life, and so is not very big for its age (now about 460 years, based on a 1969 core ring count). It’s our one truly ancient neighbor and probably the oldest tree for quite some distance around. There it stands as a silent witness to all that was lost.

If I could change the past and bring the virgin forest back, I surely would. But would doing so preclude my own life? My ancestors didn’t come here for natural wonders. In just a few generations after the Gold Rush, American settlers and an assortment of immigrants had prospered here and built the growing new towns and cities that became a destination of hope for my grandparents. Without the wealth that was created on this land, I would not be here, and not be near these trees both living and gone that so inspire me.

So I can’t fully begrudge the lumbermen and woodchoppers responsible for what was California’s first clear-cut. Yes, they could have been more respectful of the Ohlones and the Californios, less full of their Get Rich Quick presumptions, and earlier to recognize the enduring value of natural wonders. But many of them had to worry about sheer survival in ways I’ve never had to. Contemplating big trees is pretty high on Maslow’s pyramid. Here I stand in some untraceable line of benefit, however long and indirect, to the cash and construction value of the trees that once were here. If they need forgiveness, I do, too.

In my native boosterism I revel in the daydream that the world-famous Oakland Redwoods are still standing, far greater than Muir Woods, perhaps even including the World Champion Redwood. I imagine a cable car mounting the crest of one of those overbuilt hills across the Bay and the knowing tourist looking eastward to see the mightiest sylvan skyline of any city in the world. What a treasure that could have been! For now we have our second- and third-growth forest of memory and preservation. And we lament what was once in the hills overlooking what became our home.

I’m thankful I wasn’t born a century earlier, when the slopes above my city Oakland were still denuded and the ugly scars of clear-cutting were still open and bleeding. I envy those who will come of age here two and three centuries from now, who may once again have an ancient forest by which to contemplate their lives. Of course, now all hangs in the balance with climate change off and running. But with the future unknown, perhaps some distant descendent of mine will write this very same essay in another century, after a new era of war, pestilence, and migration takes its toll on these trees. Another season of offence; another occasion for forgiveness.

Meanwhile, the trees reach for the sky, drink up each year’s rain, endure each year’s summer drought, crowd and push against each other, teeter and fall when they lose their balance, and sprout and send up new growth. The forest forgives. God, who made the forest, forgives. And I am learning to forgive.

“I was here.” “We were here.”

White, red, black, yellow, the four directions as reckoned by the sun’s rising over the hills and tall red trees, and setting across the acorn trees, the waters, and the hills and sea beyond.

Underneath the asphalt and concrete, beneath the buildings, in the waters that still flow in the darkness of pipes when all the streams still felt the sunlight and rain, the land.

Here my parents were born and then my two brothers and I. In three or so generations, we’ve gone from grinding village poverty in southern China to all the education, homeowning, and career opportunities we could ask for. And here their hopes for us have been abundantly fulfilled.

But others paid a price for this, others my ancestors probably never met and knew nothing about. I think of these others as I do my laps around Lake Merritt. I think of the struggle and the loss, and the determination not to forget. I pass by the several “medicine wheels” painted on the sidewalks: a circle with quadrants painted white, yellow, red, and black.

These are sometimes also known as the “Hoop of Life” or the “Circle of Life.”

They came because of those who had come from the west: the Americans who variously stole, sold, claimed, developed, and prospered on this land, creating cities that were a beacon of hope.

It’s the last few at-my-limit-and-beyond miles of the Oakland marathon, the path around Lake Merritt that I’ve run hundreds of times. Marking the path is red, white, yellow, black, in a circle, looking like compass points, marking the path, marking the land on which peoples from all over the world now live.

My people came from southern China, Cantonese-speaking economic migrants of an earlier age, some illiterate, some illegal. And now I am part of the third generation to call Oakland our home, the land that produced me. Where else could I be from?

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Russell Yee is a third-generation Oakland native who lives in the Glenview neighborhood with his wife, Lisa, and five redwood trees.

Faces of the East Bay