Cathedral Forest

Bonsai Mirai, a bonsai studio and garden near Portland, Oregon, publishes original essays that inspire people to think deeply about our interdependence with trees.

Their multimedia series Mirai In the Wild explores wild spaces in the Western United States through video, still photography, and writing.

For this series, I visited Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Humboldt County, California, to research, photograph, and observe the coastal redwoods biome and its intricate relationships.

My essay and photographs will be published on BonsaiMirai.com in 2023.

0. Watched

Lying alone in my tent, just after nightfall, in the Northern California redwood forest. I haven’t seen another person all day. But I feel watched.

A wind rises later in the night. I wake and cinch my down sleeping bag tighter. It’s cold. The wind through branches sounds like breaking waves.

There’s something, some new way of seeing, that I came here to find. I can barely but palpably sense it now.

I shut my eyes again but can still see these trees, silhouetted against the stars. These redwoods. Breathing as I breathe.

I. Fire

Fire gives life to redwoods, to this entire coast redwood forest. Its work is visible everywhere at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

Midday, midwinter, on a cool forest trail that winds along a ridge and valley northwest to the Pacific Ocean. Mounds of deep green ferns dot the forest floor. Overhead, a rope of clouds rolls in from the ocean, announcing the slow predawn delivery of fog to the forest.

All around, hundreds of warm grey redwood trunks rise like marble pillars. Every tenth tree, maybe, is scarred by fire, some as deeply black as yakisugi boards. Yet they sprout young green foliage.

Nearby stands a blackened hollow stump, encircled by its slender and flat-needled offspring.

Stepping inside the scorched heart of one of these burned trunks is like entering a cave or a well. It is soundless, still, dark. It smells like soil. The charred bark has no expected scent of smoke. Reach out to thumb the creases in the black bark and taste, beneath astringent carbon, a faint minerality. Like a cut on my finger.

Wildfires release nutrients and minerals back into the soil. Fire clears the understory of detritus and tanoak, hemlock, Douglas fir, cascara, and other species that grow around mature redwoods and compete for resources, shade the soil, and inhibit redwood seed germination. Its heat dries and cracks open green redwood cones, freeing seeds to take root.

Nestled at the damp foot of a rise, a redwood fell years ago, then burned, then gave itself over to fungi and seedlings. Tiny ferns are establishing a bright colony sprinkled along one edge. Their whole world spans the length of my arm. Fire as placemaker. As creator.

All along the trail, unopened seed heads crunch underfoot. Waiting, in their way, for the fires that will eventually come.

Alone among the Sequoia sempervirens, the silence is both stranger and more substantial than I could have imagined.

Cathedrals and temples and shrines feel sacred even to nonbelievers because they hold silence and honor what otherwise slips by unheard.

This stillness, too, among these redwoods isn’t silent or empty. It is filled, receptive, waiting. A vacant theater. The roar of a mountain river bottled up in a frozen waterfall.

All day, the only other people on the trail are a pair of hikers and a solitary runner. We’re going in opposite directions. We smile but don’t or can’t speak.

A small varied thrush startles from her hiding spot beneath a clump of western hemlock at the base of a young redwood. She flutters her mottled wings and hops deeper into the understory and my breath comes back.

Deeper into the forest, nearly sunset. No wind. Columns of sunlight as sharp as steel beams. Out of nowhere, directly above, a woodpecker hammers a cadence like a zen student hammering at a slab of hardwood, slow then fast: Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap taptaptaptaptap.

Wake up. Wake up! Don’t waste this moment.

Then silence. I scrape my boots on shallow roots. Inhale. Exhale. Everything else is listening.

III. Water

The second night here I dream of rushing water. Camping beside a rocky stream will do that. Later what wakes me isn’t the cold but a dissonance, a break in the stream’s rhythm. Something is splashing.

Outside there’s enough moonlight to see the slick muscular comma of a salmon struggling upstream to spawn in the section of Prairie Creek where it was born. It thrashes its body against the current, then rests in the rocky shallows a few yards away before fighting its way upstream again.

After it spawns, exhausted, the salmon will die, and the redwood forest will take its body back.

Such back-and-forth rhythms echo throughout this entire biome.

In the morning, fog, having fallen at night as colder coastal air currents are pulled inland by warmer continental air, blankets the redwoods’ upper-story leaves.

Their forms have evolved to capture atmospheric moisture. Some of this captured water falls like rain to water the roots of each tree. Some enters the leaves and travels down the tree in a kind of reverse transpiration, as if the redwood is drinking from the clouds.

As the day warms and the moisture evaporates from treetops, negative water pressure pulls subsurface water up the tree via upward transpiration, as if the redwood is drinking from the earth.

The redwoods’ height is an expression of their ability to capture water. All trees reach for sunlight, yet they can only grow as tall as their ability to deliver water to their highest leaves. Most species hit their height limit at the balancing point between their needs for light and water.

Redwoods evolved a loophole by concentrating higher amounts of water-retaining leaf tissue in their uppermost pinnacle leaves. These treetop leaves can capture and store five times more water, mostly from fog, than they can use in a single day, keeping water high up where the tree needs it and allowing it to grow far higher than others. In part, the moisture-harvesting structure of these specialized pinnacle leaves may make possible the soaring height of the coast redwoods.

This entire forest is similarly made possible by even smaller structures. Redwoods release terpenes, a type of organic hydrocarbon used as chemical messengers and biological process regulators. Aloft on air currents, terpenes also promote cloud formation, maintaining the humidity needed by every species in this ecosystem.

Humidity in a redwood forest can be considered an emergent property, a system that is affected by, relies on, and is greater than the contributions of each individual redwood tree. These effects have helped sustain the coast redwoods for over 20 million years. Like fire, the organizing principles of moving water created this forest.

Knowing these facts is different from feeling them.

Walking beneath these redwood trees, awash in greens and grays, feels like moving underwater. Inhaling this humidity means eavesdropping on the phytochemical conversations among the redwoods. I’m daydreaming about rain. There is no question why.

To be immersed is to blur edges. Water, the universal solvent, dissolves boundaries. Between what’s inside and what’s out; between self and other. I imagine diving among the gigantic marine kelp forests along the Northern California coast, another fragile ecosystem given life by water, catching glimpses of octopus.

This temperate rainforest, too, is sustained by all the interdependent relationships among its member species. The trees—their chemical exhalations, the anatomy of their leaves—catch and hold water and make such a forest possible. This forest—its humidity, its living soil, its predations and competitions and symbioses—gives life to each individual redwood tree. The salmon. The tiny arthropods who live at the base of every tree. The endless ferns and carpets of moss. All are essential. All are indivisible.

It seems impossible to fully understand a place without fully understanding all the forms of life living there.

I stop at a bend in the trail to unshoulder my pack where two redwoods have fallen crossways, one over the other. Atop the nearest trunk, smaller forms of life are hard at work: Decaying bark, pale branching mycelium, moss like dark green felt, a spindly redwood seedling.

Above me, there are plants and animals whose entire lives, birth to death, play out in the redwood forest canopy. Epiphytes—mosses, lichen, even vascular plants like ferns or hemlock—thrive in the overstory, in crevices where organic layers accumulate or where a fire has hollowed out a small shelter. Some wandering salamanders, Aneides vagrans, live year-round in the treetops, protected by damp mats of ferns growing up there. A species of canopy-dwelling lichen has never been comprehensively studied. It may be at least as old as this forest itself.

The redwoods themselves are hundreds, even thousands of years old. If they have a sense of time, compared to humans’, it must be so slow that they experience a year like a single day. The ground underfoot thrums with fungi and microbes and tiny insects. Mites and springtails live under decaying leaves, cultivating the soil at the base of old-growth redwoods. Underground, delicate fungal mycelia connect to redwood roots and act as intermediaries between other trees, letting them exchange information and nutrients as a sort of proxy root system in exchange for access to sugars.

These hidden lives, below in the soil and above in the canopy, are either too buried, too tiny, too fragile, or simply too hard to observe. Realizing this feels like stargazing: dizzying; vertiginous. Are humans primed to understand only what’s visible or exploitable? How could I possibly make sense of the complexities, the intersecting relationships, that make up this forest? Biologists themselves have only begun to. How can I wrap my own head around it all?

Each part reflects the whole. From where I stand along the trail, if I look closely and clearly, the essential interactions animating this forest are all here. The fires that burned these fallen trees. The nitrogen cycling through plants and animals and fungi. The fog and rain. The shallow spreading roots of the redwood seedling growing fiercely right in front of me, whose miniature form is echoed at colossal scale by the older living redwoods surrounding us.

Yet each part is not the whole. Each individual is its own. Each interaction among complex organisms occurs once and never again. My own observations and time here can only ever be incomplete. Hidden lives will remain hidden. Is it enough to just remain awestruck?

V. Watching

This thing I’ve been looking for: Neither new knowledge nor understanding but a practice.

Curiosity in place of certainty. Finding relationships in forms from seed to seedling to adult, from growth to decay to renewal. A practice of moving quietly among quieter lives. Observing. Simpler yet harder than I ever imagined.

This forest cathedral. This place to fall silent. To be altered.