Surely He’d Want Me to Stay for a Moment

Because sometimes there is nothing else to be done.

Hello Beautifuls,

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The redwoods were the reason I left him waiting in the car for an hour.

I didn’t mean to. I thought he meant it was just a five minute walk down the hill to the pond. We’d started down the path through the oak trees together, but he decided it was too uneven, making his balance even more out of reach. I said I could just hop down the trail later, but he took that to mean now. He said he’d just wait in the car. I figured, how long could it take if he’s willing to wait?

I jogged just to make it shorter, but as I kept rounding corners, staying on the ridge line and not heading down, I kept thinking, I should turn back, then, Maybe I’ll see the pond from just the next turn. I was high enough up the mountain I could see the Stanford tower, a dollhouse replica in the distance, and something that might have been the old military hangars at Moffett Field.

The Bay Laurels gave off their sharp, earthy scent and I followed them down the hillside, as they gave way to the madrones, red alders and redwoods. I jogged onward, sure that I was just around the corner from the pond, otherwise known as the old Schilling Lake. Yes, that Schilling. The spice magnate purchased over 100 acres in the early part of the last century and turned it into his summer home, including a lake he created by damming Dennis Martin Creek. The land was purchased 20 years ago by conservationists. The pond is being left to fill in with water plants, the damn is being slowly dismantled.

As I continued down into the valley, all of the other trees were replaced by redwoods. I was in a redwood grove, sacred and still. I slowed down, took in the damp, cool smells of ferns and redwood detritus on the forest floor. I thought of the man I’d left in the car, but surely he’d want me to stay for a moment. To stand in these redwoods for both of us, now that he no longer could.

Redwood tree tops. It’s nearly impossible to get an entire redwood in one image—and these are just babies.

The Pond, or what once was Schilling Lake.

Schilling Lake, circa 1920.

Stanford tower, way off in the distance.

My Loves,

I’m working on a project with a very lovely human who spent half of his life working to save and create more open spaces here in the Bay Area. He has invited me to listen to his stories of how these hills and valleys and shorelines that I love came to be protected, one parcel at a time. There are many conservation organizations in California, but he was affiliated with Mid Peninsula Open Space, which now maintains 70,000 acres of land around the Bay Area from wetlands to redwood forests to coastal grasslands.

If I have my way, when I move back here, I will be lucky enough to carry on this work in some way, whether with Mid Pen or another organization. The redwood forests of the coastal Bay Area were decimated in the 1800s by logging. Approximately 1.5 million acres of coast redwood forest in this region have been logged—at least once.

This little essaylette is the beginning of a much longer work (I hope!) telling the stories of this land through the lens of conservation.

I also owe a debt of literary inspiration to the inimitable

Kendall Lamb

. She began an essay with this stunner of a first sentence, “The tsunami warning was the reason we ran out of food.” I’ve had that sentence in my head since I read it weeks ago. It’s brilliant. She goes on with a first paragraph that keeps up with its intro. Here’s the whole thing:

The tsunami warning was the reason we ran out of food. That, coupled with the fact that Hannah smoked a blunt after the evacuation to calm her nerves, and she’d been in charge of packing our provisions. God love her, she was a bit flighty even when stone cold sober, so we should have seen that coming. The fact that we didn’t double check was definitely on the rest of us.

You can read this entire essay here. I highly encourage it. Kendall’s stories are wonderful and she is a masterful writer.

Thank you Kendall, for that opening line and I hope you don’t mind that I used it as inspiration for the beginning line of this little piece.

With so much love,

j

xo