Tree hugg'n in California

I really screwed up with the pictures in this story.
I started with a small selection of underexposed slides.
Then they are scanned in low resolution and the jpg compression hammered in the final nail to the coffin.
See the pictures as visual aids and not as beautiful things themselves.
Gordon and I will go back and I will make great pictures.

Normal people would probably consider it strange to drive a whole day just to look at some trees.

My friend Gordon and I are:
a) not considered normal people by normal people and
b) we really like trees.

California is covered with wonderful trees in all shapes, sizes and usefulness.
There are some you can eat, some you can smoke but most of them are just really cool to look at.
It is summer, July which means the birds from the Bay Area's numerous bird sanctuaries are migrating to Alaska to warm up a little.
I had been wearing the same jeans for 4 days since I only brought shorts and therefore revealed myself as tourist.
I should have know better.
More than a hundred years ago Mark Twain had warned me in advance: "The coldest winter I have experienced was a summer in San Francisco."

Gordon warned me as well but it seemed so ridiculous that I had decided to disregard all warnings and pack a lot of shorts.
The reality is even much more ridiculous. While as I was fighting off frostbite in San Francisco, all you have to do is drive 15 minutes north and you can see, in scorching heat, all those stalls selling shorts to the dumb tourists who came in down jackets.
Or as Gordon likes to put it: "Global warming my ass."

Marin County, which starts north of San Francisco, right after the Golden Gate bridge is spiked with wonderful big trees.
Redwoods, 80 feet high Eucalyptus, oaks and Bay trees.
Remember those dried leaves you put into your Sauerkraut.
Yes, those are bay leaves and they actually grow on trees.
Standing in a bay leave forest will leave you bathed in their wonderful aroma mixed with the refreshing scents of eucalyptus.
If it weren't’t for all those Sauerkraut stalls it would be a very idyllic place.

But being men of class, Gordon and I decided not mess around with this little shit.
We were going to see the real big mothers.
California has the tallest trees, the biggest trees, fattest trees, the oldest trees, trees you can drive through and trees you can drive on.
Although I can't figure out why anyone would like to drive on a tree.

We were going for the tallest ones.
Gordon had seen them before and he would lead us back to them.
He was 5 years old then and I was hoping that he won't tell me once we are there: "They looked soooo much bigger then, really."

Those trees grow all over the place and we took our pick, Richardson Grove.
You get there by leaving Marin County behind, driving north through Sonoma County of wine fame, cutting through Mendocino County of dope fame into Humbold County.
Sonoma County is covered with vineyards set up by ultra-hip yuppies trying to radiate that Mediterranean flair.
They do look nice though. But you can't really screw up the landscape with rows of dark green wine set against golden hills with the occasional pseudo Tuscan house sticking out.

Behind Sonoma cars gradually evolve from sedans into monstrous pick-up trucks and "Happy rainbow transcendental healing centers" have been replaced by signs for upcoming gun shows.
Then after Novato the hills very gradually start to roll higher and higher and the trees become bigger and bigger.

It took us about 4 hours to reach Richardson Grove.
Just before, there was a big sign leading to the "Drive through tree road". We didn't let ourselves get fooled.
It just didn't look and feel right. It's a tourist trap.
Besides one never stops at the first one.
We drove on until we reached Richardson Grove National Park and this time we took the bait.

At the entrance was a ranger who looked like she is going to sell me some cookies at any moment.
Instead of paying a dollar entrance fee, Gordon, probably unable to suppress his Jewish instincts, haggled for a handicap discount.
The ranger apparently not only just ran out of cookies, she also didn't have any disability discount application forms with her.
She let us in for free under the condition that we had to come back after half an hour.

We asked her about the tallest tree and the one you could drive through. She didn't know anything about a tree we possibly could drive through but the tallest she knew personally.
Unfortunately it fell over a few years back and there was no contender to take over the lead.
The in-house fighting to replace the champion left a lot of bad wood around these forests.
We drove around for a while and at one point where they had some really big trees, we got out and had a look.
They were very impressive but nothing compared to what would come later.
I don't want to talk too much about those trees because I would like to preserve my finest prose for that event.
The irony of that place was that I could see the road behind the trees and every 20 seconds a truck full of huge logs would pass by.
It was like trying to celebrate life by admiring beautiful women with a hearse passing by every few seconds.
Being under time pressure we had to head back to the scout cub before she would hunt us down.
Gordon warned me that those rangers have more power than policemen and are not afraid to use it on delinquent tree watchers.

We drove northward into:
The Avenue of the giants, a stretch of road winding itself parallel, over and under the freeway for 30 miles almost all the way to Eureka. There were supposed to be 7 or 8  groves one can stop and look at big trees.

We reached the first of those stops.
I climbed out of the car and entered a grove which looked like a typical forest from the outside.
Once inside, my lower jaw dropped so low that it started to scrape up dried up redwood leaves from the forest floor.

Absolutely unreal.
I ran back to the car to get my friend who was waiting there.
"Gordon, you've got to see this."
We floated in between the trees, very slowly, very respectfully and very quietly.
The trees were so high that we couldn't see the tops of them.
It had the looks of a normal forest but totally out of proportion,
just enormously big.
I felt like I was shrunk to the size of a mouse.
From that moment on I knew I could never take myself seriously again.
Not that I ever did.
Everything became relative.
Everything became unimportant.
What you considered just a few days ago in your office to be a life or death issue, suddenly lost all meaning and urgency.
It is how I imagine a religious experience to be.
I actually had a religious experience once before but unfortunately I lost her phone number and never saw her again.

We stood motionless for some unspecified time.
Even time had lost its momentum.
At some point my old greedy self woke up which forces me to take pictures even there was no way I could capture the awe that was hanging above us like the huge marshmallow man in the Ghost busters.
When I looked through my camera with an extreme wide angle lens, I was exposed to a second level of abstraction which left me speechless all over again. I wanted to share it with Gordon but he was still mentally chewing on the first impact and wisely refused to even look through the camera.
All I could do was look through the lens with awe since it was too dark to take any pictures and I didn't bring a tripod.

It was a long time before we could speak again.
We were sitting back in the car by then.

We still drove through the whole Avenue almost all the way up to Eureka but we never stopped again.
What was the point? If you just had an apparition of Mother Mary you are not going to stop and try to find one of Jesus as well.
Every few hundred yards would be a mind-bendingly huge tree on the side of the road and at each instance we would get a little warm-up from the sensation we had just experienced.
20 miles before reaching Eureka we turned around. We had reached the end of the Avenue of the giants, it was time to head back to San Francisco and we also hadn't found the tree one can drive through yet.
At a roadside store we filled up on beer and I asked the keeper about the "drive through tree".
He pointed us to the place just before Richardson Grove where it says: "This way to Drive through tree road."
I actually knew that all along.
We reached the place and sure enough they had a tree to drive through. They even had a tree to drive on probably to get an oil change.
It was cute but silly and we were not in a Disneyland mood after what we had just experienced.
Obligingly we drove through the tree and then moved on.
A mystery hill along the road wouldn't trigger more than an excited yawn from the both of us and the hidden springs could have stayed undiscovered for a long time as far as we were concerned.

We made it back to Tiberon just before sunset.
We have just been sitting in a car for more than 12 hours and we were both really exhausted.
But even then Gordon was right with me when I suggested that we have to go back in two days and this time I need to bring a tripod.

We didn't go back to Richardson Grove but discovered something almost as good.

Muir Woods.
Gordon lives, with short interruptions, in Marin County for 50 years.
He was born here and he knew about Muir Woods.
Actually at some point he lived just a couple of miles away from there.
But it had never occurred to him to check it out.
Faced with the prospect of spending another 12 hours in the car with me he suddenly became creative.
Let's have a look at Muir woods. After all Muir was the guy who found all those trees in the first place.
We logged on the Internet and searched for Muir woods. 
According to what we found, Muir woods, a National Monument had all the right trees we were looking for.

A few moments later Gordon's friend Tom a professional photographer walked in.
We got introduced to each other.
My first question was: "Tom, you don't happen to have a cheap spare tripod I could use for a couple of days?"
Tom had just that and we went to Muir woods the very next day.

At the entrance to Muir Woods National Monument Gordon pulled off his disability stunt again and this time it worked so well even I got a two-dollar fifty refund.
This time was not the time for me to awe.
It was pure business.
I had a tripod, lot's of rolls of film and determination.
Gordon decided to just hang in there and gape.
For two hours I tried to shoot those trees from more different positions than even the Kamasutra could suggest.
Towards the end I was approached by a ranger and lectured that I am not supposed to climb over the little, cute fence.

I'll probably still be weeding out the foot paths.
Hey, I couldn't come up with something better to illustrate the size relationship.

I had all the pictures I could imagine I wanted at that moment and we headed back home.
We went to pick up Gordon's 91 year old mother.
She loves trees too.
Gordon takes her out now and then and drives her around to show her the beautiful trees in the neighborhood.
She gets a kick out of those young and juvenile trees which are only 80 years old and only 60 feet high.

Back in Hong Kong I developed the films and I ended up with tons of slides which are mostly black with a few bright green and blue patches in them.

At least now I have a reason to go back. This time I am not only bringing the tripod I will actually use the light meter as well.