
I don’t cry easily, and that’s been true as far back as I can remember. Numbness comes more readily than tears, a sort of stoic deadening I hide behind when emotions start to bite, but that didn’t happen when I visited the Harris Creek Spruce back in 2018.
It was my first truly giant tree, a Sitka spruce of a startling, almost grotesque diameter, untapered from root to canopy. Its bark had so completely surrendered to time that no useful distinction could be made between the flesh of the tree and the blankets of lichen and bryophyte embedded therein, generations of Witch’s Hair that couldn’t have been excised with a scalpel.
This titan is tucked in the regrowth of an 1893 clearcut in southwestern Vancouver Island, and while the surrounding forest has recovered admirably from the axe – already larger and wilder than any I’d yet seen – the Harris Creek Spruce is separated from its neighbours by centuries of experience, much of it with loss.
[Read more…] about Sleeping in the Trunk – A Special Big Trees Vancouver Island Road Trip