On Sequoia Time | Page 2

on it. So he drove carefully, and made three miles before the terrain got so rough that he decided to hike the rest of the way. Driving across the desert floor like that raised up a cloud of dust that hung in the dry still air behind him like a long rope; when he got out of the car the dust trail was still visible all the way back out to the road.
He walked the last mile and stood at the entrance to the box canyon. The entrance was not wide, only about forty yards across. The way Grandpa told it to me years later, the instant he first stood there he knew he was home. A spring just inside poured up and over its borders, turning into a slow-moving thread of a creek that ran westward down the length of the canyon. Charles walked the canyon from end to end that first day, even though it was afternoon when he found it and after dark when he left. It ran over a mile and a half wide, and four miles long. Because of the spring, there were bushes and shrubs growing inside, and even a pair of small trees. He saw one rabbit that hid from him quickly.
He was a city boy, then, but he figured that if he saw one rabbit, there were probably twenty he didn't see, and he was right about that.
As he was hiking back up out of the canyon the wind hit him. It came up slow and gentle, a breeze that moved the warm, still desert air pleasantly. Then it got both stiffer and colder, and by the time Charles reached the entrance to the canyon he was leaning into it, shivering, pushing for each step he took.
When he left the canyon it stopped with remarkable abruptness.
After he looked at the lay of the land he realized what was happening. What was no more than a gentle breeze outside the canyon was being channeled and tightened by the converging walls of the two mesas, until the breeze, moving across several dozens of square miles, turned into a small hurricane at the entrance to the canyon.
That was why he planted the trees, of course--as a windbreak.
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HE NEVER COULD tell me, or anyone, why he'd come looking for the canyon in the first place. The one time I asked him why he'd spent an entire summer looking for something he'd seen just once, when he was only seven years old, Grandpa looked at me with those wise blue eyes, scratched his bald, leathery skull, and grinned at me. "Danny, damn if I know."
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CHARLES CAME BACK to the canyon permanently in 1951, with his wife Laurinda and their three children. One of them was my mother.
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I FIRST SPENT the summer with my grandfather in 1975, when I was twelve years old.
Grandpa was fifty-seven then, and Grandma was fifty-two. I don't believe I knew their first names then.
The only people at the ranch were my grandfather and grandmother; all the children had left long ago. The ranch, the desert surrounding it, the mountains rising up above it, were both fascinating and very foreign to a boy from Los Angeles.
There are two kinds of sequoias; I don't specifically remember having seen one of either kind before then, though surely I must have. The tree was not impressive, the first time I saw it; just about my height, and struggling.
Over the course of the years Grandpa had planted several rows of trees at the entrance to the box canyon, staggered to muffle the wind. It worked; the trees at the entrance to the canyon got shaken up every afternoon when it got cold and the wind came up, but the trees away from the entrance were barely stirred at all, and back at the ranch house the wind was never worse than a gentle breeze.
Five rows of trees had been planted when I stayed that first summer. Lots of them were fruit trees--apple trees mostly, because Grandpa liked apples and apple pie. There were a couple of citrus trees too, though because of the cold they never did so well. (It gets very cold in northern Arizona at night, and during the winter you get snow and ice.)
Grandpa ended up planting seven rows of trees before he died. There were orange trees and apple trees, oaks and a couple varieties of evergreen. There was even, for a while, a cherry tree, but as I recall it died the second or third summer I spent at the ranch.
The sequoia stood in the fifth row of trees, with scraggly orange trees on both sides of it, well back from the wind. Grandpa had just planted it that summer, and it was still small and thin, about five feet tall, but you