On Sequoia Time | Page 2

slowly off the road. The spare in back held
air, but the tread was mostly gone and Charles did not want to take a
chance 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.
Ê
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."
Ê
CHARLES CAME BACK to the canyon permanently in 1951, with his
wife Laurinda and their three children. One of them was my mother.
Ê
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