SUNSET ROCK, SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK: 1978

It was the seventies, before we knew how the Earth would die. The theme was nuclear war and they had us doing drills in public school. I can remember hiding under my desk and protecting the back of my neck with my fingers. They warned us that the glass would act like shrapnel. Fifth graders.

That was the first summer that we vacationed in Giant Forest. We left the L.A. basin far behind, driving hours through the San Joaquin Valley before climbing into the Sierra Nevadas and disappearing into a dreamworld of trees that were wide as a house and reached up out of sight. There was no top to it—a sense of limitless scale. It was a place where time stood still. There were only tent sites and timber cabins with cast iron stoves.

This was before our minds had formed the concept of a cellphone or a laptop. There were no TVs up there, no thirty minutes of cold war at night to sublimate, but there were still SALT II headlines that we didn’t read but couldn’t not notice in the morning as we walked past the single metal newspaper dispenser outside the cafeteria on our way to carb-load guilt-free stacks of waffles before hiking up away from the sounds of cars and other people high upon the side of a hill until the massive trunks separated, exposing blue between them like pale crystal shards of heaven.

By the third day, the adults had lost their taste for exertion, resigned to drinking wine from boxes, laughing in small circles, and reviewing the mundane. Free at last, I meant to test the limits of my endurance, mapping in my mind the forest paths, exploring the extent of my ability and courage, venturing beyond the proscribed as I set to work in an organic mental grid pattern to claim the slopes and discover every shadowed crevice and stone formation unknown to those with dimmer spirits.

At the zenith of morning, I came out into a clearing beneath the kneecap of a hill, a massive slab of white granite protruding from the earth like the stone bone of a giant. The bed of dusty forest soil glowed with rust tones under the beating sun. The spice of redwood scent came in heavy waves. I climbed the jutting edifice of layered rock believing in a world designed specifically for me, and at the top I looked up to realize that I was yet beneath the tips of the surrounding trees.

I stood there breathing thin air and drawing metaphors from the situation, penning another page in my literary life that would be read in chapters with lessons well-defined, challenges each overcome like the great round shape of the hill beneath my feet. But as I stood there, the air filled with a shattering thunder, the deafening scream of incoming engines, and reality was torn as my life in that instant was reduced from eternity to a fraction of a second.

Why would they strike us here?

I found myself grasping the earth, surrounded by numbing silence, my terror gracefully replaced by the imagination of a lone pilot’s morning exultation, a cloudless panorama above, a forest of passing giants below, pushing out along a mountain range at the speed of a god.  

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