As part of a nonfiction project, I've scoured the used booksellers of the internet and collected about 10 books about the history, ecology, and culture of the coastal redwood regions of California. As someone who split her childhood between the two great coastal redwood regions of the state - the Santa Cruz Mountains and the North Coast - I find it interesting how small the populations are that actually live there. It's a good thing, of course. Too many people spoil the trees, I think. But going through these books, many of the names are familiar to my mother or I, and every single photograph is a place I've been.
The reading list is enticing, and if I didn't already have a lot of reading for a class, I'd be completely submerged in redwoods by now. First up: "Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History," a beautiful full color book with a more scientific bent about the great trees. Then the Save-the-Redwoods-League's "The Redwood Forest" edited by Reed F. Noss. My great-uncle was chairman of that organization for a number of years, and that volume will likely include more details of the long, hard fight to save places that most Americans would be shocked were ever threatened. Then on to the more recent "The Wild Trees" by Richard Preston, a best seller celebrated in the New Yorker which follows the work of a tree biologist in the canopy of the tallest trees of the North Coast. I got a steal on "Giants in the Earth" edited by Peter Johnstone, a compendium of all the literature ever written on the redwoods - fiction, nonfiction, Muir to Keruoac. $7.50 for a fresh copy discarded by the Antelope Library in California. And then "Conifers of California", by Ronald M. Lanner, another full-color delight with Audubon-style illustrations of all of California's amazing collection of trees.
And so I now have a nice collection of works on the redwood coasts. But all these books pre-date the final settlement of the north coast timber wars last year, and with things looking decidedly more optimistic for redwood conservation now than they have in decades, the tone of some of these books might be jarring. There was a long, long time when it seemed like most of nature would have to be lost. It was inconceivable when I was a child that the people who founded the Gap would come in and buy out Charles Hurwitz, ending his destruction of both forests and communities. But there it is.
Finding a subject about which you desperately want to write, and making yourself an expert on it, seems like as good a path forward as any for a writer. I'm not sure about "write what you know", but "write what you are familiar with, but about which you feel you don't know enough" seems more the thing. More updates as I find my way through these books over the next few months.
Below: Redwoods on clifftops overlook Gold Bluffs Beach, Humboldt County, California. Roosevelt Elk graze at center.
