So we’re supposed to be getting back to normal, they say. Don’t be afraid to fly, to go into tall buildings. Keep up consumer confidence so the economy won’t tank, support the airlines and the stockbrokers.
I want to help New Yorkers, but Mayor Rudy says to stop sending blood and stuff. They’ve got enough and it’s just getting in the way.
I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t have anyplace I want to go right now. I still feel like I should be staying close to home. Of course I’m always willing to do my bit for the economy–well, not a new car or a refrigerator–so I went to Bloomie’s, flashed my plastic and left with a few gifts and a new wallet. No money to put in it, but I’m doing my part for America. I also donated to the garden center, schlepping home bags of shredded bark, some fall bedding plants and three bags of daffodil bulbs.
Few things feel more normal than fall gardening. Birch and red bud trees are turning yellow, Virginia creepers are blazing red, maples are crimson and orange, smoke bushes are deep purple. Even the California buckwheat blossoms have turned to rust and golden blooms tip the rabbit brush.
I spent half a day potting up herbs and chrysanthemums, deadheading lavenders and harvesting poppy and salvia seeds. There’s nothing so life affirming to me as the feel of warm sun on the backs of my legs. So what if I looked up every time a plane flew over.
While I dig in the dirt, I’m sorting out my priorities.
Spending three hours at a specific plan meeting to make sure the county doesn’t rezone our canyon –probably a waste.
Spending three hours with my tush crammed into a second-grader’s desk on Grandparents Day –worth every minute.
I resolve to keep in touch with old friends, spend more time with family. Stop hassling the New York publishers for not sending the book I was supposed to review this week.
In my newfound spirit of volunteerism, I drove three hours to Sequoia National Park to help pot up to 2,500 baby trees. It seems these seedlings were being stored bareroot in a cooler that malfunctioned, raising the temperature overnight from 35 degrees to nearly twice that and forcing the trees out of dormancy months before they could be planted outdoors. Nothing like saving native trees to get one back to basics, though they’re much too tiny to hug.
Driving east out of the San Joaquin Valley into the foothills, Highway 198 cuts through granite that looks like a cubist painting, past silver olive and deep green lemon groves. Water levels in the lakes and rivers are lower than 70 percent of normal this year. At Horse Creek, a sign warns against fishing and diving from the bridge though there isn’t a drop of water below.
The park entrance is a few miles past Three Rivers, surely the most patriotic little town in California. Every house, store, barn, roadside mailbox and even a few tractors sported flags. The park nursery, a makeshift greenhouse and shadecloth-covered potting area, is a short hike down from the visitor center, where we met Melanie Baer-Keeley, a U.S. Park Service horticulturist in charge of the nursery and the park’s revegetation program. A veteran of the Theodore Payne Foundation in San Fernando Valley, she helped Bob Sussman set up his Malibu nursery specializing in California native plants.
In short order she organized two dozen raw recruits into teams of potters, damp soil shovelers and wire screen cutters (to fit inside the bottom of the deep plastic pots). Those with strong arms and backs loaded trays of pots into a pickup. Another team would off-load and stack them in huge wire-bottomed beds, where they will be watered and cared for alongside other species waiting to be planted in the forest later in the fall or early spring.
We separated the seedlings– Giant Sequoias, Jeffrey and Lodge Pole pines–which were soaking in huge buckets of wet polymer, and gently placed each one in its prepared pot, filling and tamping the damp soil around the long roots. We had to be careful to keep all the green needles above the pot rims to catch the sunlight and to firm the soil around the roots. We worked from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., taking just a short lunch break, sometimes trading jobs to use different muscles.
By quitting time, there were more than 1,000 baby trees, row upon row of two-inch green tufts that could some day tower 100 feet tall, replenishing the forest. Awesome.
I vowed to go back and help plant them in the ground, maybe hike up into the Giant Forest where the biggest trees in the world are. I think I’ll take my grandson, camp overnight at Powisha and explore Crystal Cave. It would be good for him to see what was here in the land of the free before our ancestors arrived. Kids don’t always understand the concept; having to do pretty much what they’re told restricts most of their freedoms.
But seeing those majestic trees, actually helping the seedlings take hold, might give him a sense of why freedom is worth protecting.
It sure helped me set some things straight.