Gentle giants

If you want perspective to smack you up the side of the head, go to Northern California’s redwoods country. No, smack isn’t the right word. The trees that seem to rocket out of sight don’t offer a rude awakening, but a gentle, beautiful reminder: Life is shorter than you imagine.

Mountains may be forever, but redwoods are alive. They grow, they live, they die – it just might take a thousand years or so.

All the books of Zen meditation bring me less peace than I feel while sitting among the redwoods at Richardson Grove State Park on a quiet afternoon, with nothing but the sound of the wind through the branches.

There are the young redwoods rising from the ferns; the mature kings of the stand scarred with black swaths where lightning struck; the toppled old giant gathering moss on the forest floor.

Many years ago, my then-preschooler son, surveying the scene, turned to me with a comment worthy of a wise man: “Big trees fall down.”

Driving up Highway 101, I pass through Willits, the “Gateway to the Redwoods.” What a small empire it has become.

Once, more than 2 million acres of old-growth redwoods flourished on the north coast between San Francisco and the Oregon border. The gold rush brought legions of loggers beginning in 1850.

By the time of the creation of the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1918, just over 100,000 acres were left. Philanthropists bought up pockets of redwoods, which were named after them – like the Rockefeller Forest.

State parks were set aside after World War I, followed by the creation of Redwood National Park in 1968. The park was expanded in 1977, and in 1994, the national and state parks were recognized as a World Heritage Site.

Though 95 percent of the north coast redwoods are gone, there is still big money to be made from old giant trees, and the cutting of old-growth stands in private hands remains controversial.

One of the most recent battles was over my childhood haunt, Hartsook Inn. The lodge smack on the Eel River, just south of Richardson Grove, is where my family stayed throughout the 1960s.

After years of struggling, the owners shut down and talked about logging the huge trees on the property. The Save-the-Redwoods League bought them out in 1998, and in June sold the property to the Heartwood Institute, a New Age-style bodywork and massage school.

The redwoods – including the 13-foot-diameter Hartsook Giant – will be protected. An apparent happy ending for the old place.

When Hartsook fell on hard times, my family started staying at the swankier Benbow Inn. It’s a 1920s-era, Tudor-style inn that had been a favorite of Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin and others who motored north on vacation.

There’s always a roaring fire in the lobby and sherry on the nightstand. It’s where I took my Boston-born wife for a romantic trip when I was trying to lure her to live on the West Coast.

It’s where my kids learned to skip rocks on the lake next door. We’d ramble over to the old stone arch bridge, which acted like an echo chamber for our hoots. My parents just celebrated my father’s 80th birthday with a trip there.

Despite the increase in noise over the years from the widening of Highway 101, the lodge remains a cozy, friendly place which exudes the peace that I prize in the redwoods.

To liven things up, we usually visit Garberville, with its funky cafes and earth-mother-type shops, fueled in part by the “entrepreneurs” who were said to have bought their new four-wheel-drive vehicles on profits from illicit things that go up in smoke.

I remember one Thanksgiving night when the Garberville radio station played an extraordinarily long tape of a Grateful Dead concert so that its staff could go home for dinner and get back before it finished.

No trip, be it in 1965 or 2008, would be complete without the 32-mile drive up the Avenue of the Giants. This is the oldest of old Highway 101, back when engineers didn’t lightly uproot the giants, but instead swung the road around them, more blacktop path than highway.

The route starts near the Chimney Tree in Phillipsville and winds into Humboldt Redwoods State Park, where the best groves are found between the hamlets of Miranda and Pepperwood. My kids love Myers Flat, where they are able to climb around the Two-Story Tree House, then jump back in the car to watch as Dad gingerly guides the station wagon through the Shrine Drive-Thru Tree.

This tree has a natural cleave in its base that was widened in pre-environmental movement days so that a small- to medium-size car can squeeze through. There are two other drive-through trees, both created by cutting: the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree, to the south near Leggett, and Tour Thru Tree near Klamath to the north.

The Riverwood Inn in Phillipsville is a classic 1937 roadhouse along the Avenue of the Giants that is the best spot for lunch (or a beer) along the way.

The attractions and inns are fun, but my favorite thing to do along the drive is to pick an empty turnout (there are dozens along the way) and walk one of the groves.

On my last visit, I was alone. It was spring and few cars were on the highway. It was wet, muddy, empty and silent except for the occasional woodpecker or roar of a SUV speeding by. But most of the time, the peacefulness was there amid the ancient trees.

From childhood to middle age to whatever later years bring, I know the places are there. I can return again and again. The redwoods will be waiting.