The Night the Giant Fell

There is a body lying in Founders Grove, friend. That is the honest word for it. It's the Dyerville Giant, and I want to tell you how it came down.

In its life it stood three hundred and sixty-two feet by the tape, and some say it reached three hundred and seventy, taller than the Statue of Liberty with her pedestal under her. It was somewhere around sixteen hundred years old. Think about what that means. That tree was already a big tree when the Roman Empire was still running. Columbus, the Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars, the Dyerville Giant stood through every bit of it, adding a ring a year, minding its own business.

March of nineteen ninety-one. The rains had turned the ground to soup, and a redwood has no taproot, just a wide shallow plate of roots. It holds itself up mostly by holding hands underground with its neighbors. One big tree went over, clipped a second one, and set it leaning. That leaning tree stood there, tilted, while the ground went on softening. Then on the twenty-fourth it came down, and it took the Giant with it.

Folks a mile off heard the crash and thought a train had wrecked. A long, tearing roar, then a boom. What they heard was five hundred tons of tree hitting the earth. It threw mud fifteen feet up the trunk of a redwood standing fifty feet away, and it registered on a seismograph.

That great torn dish of roots stands on end in the grove with the dirt still gripped in it, and the trunk goes on and on through the trees, longer than a city block. Here's the part I want you to keep. Nobody hauled it off. In this forest a fallen giant isn't garbage, it's a nursery. It will lie there for centuries, feeding seedlings and salamanders and fungus, with young trees rooting along its length in a straight line. So it isn't dead, exactly. It's just doing the second half of the job. Anybody who walks that trail can lay a hand on it, and they won't touch anything else that old all day.