Heart of Dankness by Mark Haskell Smith

Author:Mark Haskell Smith [Smith, Mark Haskell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3971-3
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Natural’s Not in It

The next morning Crockett took me to see a giant sequoia called the General Grant. I’m not really sure what it means to name a massive, ancient, and awe-inspiring sequoia after the whiskey-soaked curmudgeon on the fifty-dollar bill, but it certainly is an impressive tree. It stood more than 270 feet tall, which is up there, but what was truly mind-blowing was the size of the trunk—it’s 107 feet in diameter. It’s as wide as a house and looks a lot like a cross between a magical tree in a Miyazaki film and a large booster rocket NASA might’ve built. The General Grant is just under two thousand years old, a relative teenager for a giant sequoia. Some of the other sequoias are thought to be more than three thousand years old. That means that around about the time the Roman Empire ruled the world, these trees were already well established in the Sierra Nevada.

I’d been thinking a lot about plants and what “dank” might mean. From everything I’d learned so far, it seemed like dankness was a kind of natural perfection, the peak expression of a plant’s genetic destiny: a perfect peach or a tomato picked at the absolute moment of ripeness. Dankness could mean a flower at its fullest bloom—which for a flower would be its sexual peak—or maybe it could be a massive tree that has watched over the mountains for more than two thousand years.

Crockett and I sat at a picnic table under a grove of tall sugar pines. He smoked a cigarette while I watched a handicapped squirrel forage for food. The squirrel looked like he’d been run over by a car at some point in his life—perhaps during his careless teen years—and now his back legs didn’t work. But the excess baggage didn’t slow him down; he cheerfully dragged himself from trunk to table and back again, leaving skid marks instead of paw prints.

I jumped when I heard a loud crack. A pinecone the size of a bowling ball had just come crashing down, cratering into the dirt like a meteorite. I looked up at the trees and noticed that they were full of pinecones. These weren’t the cute, decorative pinecones that you spray paint gold and arrange as a festive centerpiece for your holiday dinner. These were killer pinecones, the size of footballs, dangling on branches more than a hundred feet in the air.

“Should we move?”

Crockett laughed and stubbed his cigarette out in the dirt. “The big sugar pinecones, now they won’t hurt so much ’cause they’re opened up and dry, but in the winter, when they’re big and green and the snow weighs them down, they send people to the hospital every year.”

He looked up at the trees and grinned. “But, hey, this is where the biggest stuff in the world grows.”

A loud squawk reverberated through the forest.

“We also have the world’s biggest woodpeckers.”

Like I said, he’s a mountain man. But I wanted to get him back on topic.

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