A hike through a California forest reveals a plain truth about America’s past—and her future.
I don’t notice it at first. The trail is a carpet of clover-like sorrel, trillium, fairy bells, and redwood orchids. The burbling of the creek, the shadows of forest and ravine, cool and inviting, fill my senses. But every hundred feet or so I experience an unsettling sensation, a gentle pull from the forest, like the gravitational tug of a great mass. Giants lurk in the shadows, hiding behind the dense scrub of undergrowth. Every so often through the leafy shade I glimpse a cliff of gray—large, much too large for my Eastern sensibilities. Something is out of scale. That can’t be a tree. Even here in the American West, where everything is big, trees don’t grow as big as mountainsides.
