« The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any treees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.
(…)
I stayed two days close to the bodies of the giants, and they were no trippers, no chattering troupes with cameras. There’s a cathedral hush there. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith. The dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun is high. Then the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade. After the sun passes zenith it is afternoon and quickly evening with a whispering dusk as long as was the morning.
Thus time and the ordinary divisions of the day are changed. To me dawn and dusk are quiet times, and here in the redwoods the whole of daylight is quiet time. Birds move in the dimlight or flash like sparks through the stripes of the sun, but they make little sound. Underfoot is a mattress of needles deposited for over two thousands years. No sound of footstep can be heard on this thick blancket. (…)
At night, the darkness is black — only straight up a patch of gray and an occasionnal star. And there ‘s a breathing in the black, for these huge things that control the day and inhabit the night are living things and have presence, and perhaps feeling, and, somewhere in deep-down perception, communication. I have had lifelong associations with these things. (Odd that the word « trees » does not apply.) I can accept them and their power and their age because I was early exposed to them. On the other hand, people lacking such experience begin to have a feeling of uneasiness here, of danger, of being shut in, enclosed and overwhelmed. (…) And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geological time as the upper Jurassic period. (…) Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it? »
John Steinbeck, « Travels with Charley », 1962.
