Forest for the Trees

They had come up the hill in a Volkswagen for a look at the most famous big trees in the land. He drove into the Round Meadow parking lot and stopped right next to a strange, two-trunked set of sequoia twins known as Ed By Ned. She sat in the back of the van and ate a spinach salad. He stood at the base of the trees, stared straight up, whistled. There is not much to say in the shadow of living organisms older than Christ, broader than a highway, as tall as a football field.

This was Monday. The sky was gray and a breeze was up and the park seemed almost melancholy. Another season was done. Only a handful of tourists prowled Giant Forest, one of the prime attractions. The week before, the rustic village of cabins, lodges and stores had been closed for winter--and, in some cases, forever.

There was more, however, than the imagined echoes of summer frolic to be heard. The bang of hammers and mechanical whine of backhoes and bulldozers bounced through the trees. Hard-hat workers scurried about the lodge, knocking out windows. A huge dumpster was parked outside the dining room. Orange plastic fences marked off a construction zone.

“Doing a little renovation, right?” the man asked a ranger who happened by. No, she explained, they were taking the structures down altogether, cabins, restaurant, the works. The village was being uprooted, removed from its almost century-old setting.

“The idea,” the ranger explained, “is to make things better for the trees.”

The visitor looked almost startled. Once more he whistled in wonder.

“What a concept,” he said. “What a concept.”

*

With little outside notice, something extraordinary has started here amid the mighty sequoias. Yosemite, this park’s more famous companion to the north, was making headlines this week with a proposal to start the long process of reducing automobile traffic on the valley floor. Here, however, the actual work of yanking out development already was up and active.

The idea, most simply put, is to relocate the Giant Grove village to a less precious site eight miles away. Down will go the buildings. Out will come the sewer and power lines, the asphalt. William Tweed, a 20-year park employee and now chief of interpretation, describes this as a park “turning point” with potentially broader implications: “The long-term welfare of a natural treasure is taking clear precedence over short-term convenience.” To which he might have added: For once.

There is, of course, nothing simple when federal bureaucracy and national parks politics come into play. The path that led to this moment was a switchback, twisting back in time to the early 1920s. That was when a superintendent named Col. John White began to buck a national trend and lobby openly against park development. White battled pony rides, peewee golf, movie theaters, cable lifts--a real spoilsport. He also fought, and lost, against automobile traffic through the grove. On his tombstone, it is said, he wanted this epitaph: “He was an obstructionist.”

*

It took 70 years before White’s vision took hold. The task of promoting a retreat became easier after a massive tree fell and just missed the crowded dining room. Over time more subtle dangers and signs of damage became visible. Roots were ripped up by roads and pipe repairs. Few seedlings sprouted: The absence of uncontrolled wildfires stunts the grove’s ability to reproduce itself. And when yet another giant tree was hacked down to protect cabins so people can come see giant trees . . . well, as one ranger put it, “everybody looked at each other and said, ‘You know, that didn’t feel right. . . .’ ”

Proponents are not yet fully out of the woods. The replacement village is nowhere close to completion. And funding for any federal project--a few weapons systems and farm subsidies excepted--is no sure thing any more. Finally, while public support has been strong, there remains the threat of late charges of elitism: If this idea is perceived as an effort to make the trees accessible only to a smaller audience of presumably more enlightened Gore-tex environmentalists, the politics will get messy fast.

Tweed is sensitive to this point, taking pains to note that the best way to ensure preservation is to promote use. Put another way, a forest without a constituency is a timber harvest. In the end, though, what sets these trees apart from, say, the rocks of Yosemite is that they are alive and, in the way of all living things, fragile. Yosemite’s granite wonders surely will outlast the humans that scurry about below like so many ants. The same cannot be said of Sequoia’s ancient trees. No trees, no forest. No forest, no park. What a concept.