for this stirring poem, TYJ! I was so moved by it that after reading it, I spent the next couple of hours learning about these magnificent trees that were once called the Mother of the Forest.
Upon their discovery in 1850:
Gale was not a lumberjack, nor did he own a sawmill or a lumberyard. He was about to become involved in show business, and in the tree he saw the biggest attraction of his career. But the Mother of the Forest did not die easily. After Gale's men bored holes through the trunk of the giant sequoia with a long auger, they worked saw blades from one hole to the next. The sawyers, cautious of a 300-foot tree falling on them without notice, continued with great care. The five men worked 25 days to complete the task. According to one account of the event, the tree was so "straight and balanced" that it remained upright, even after it was sawed completely through. Wedges were forced into the cut with hammers and sledges; the trunk was smashed by a crude battering ram, fashioned from nearby lumber, but the Mother of the Forest did not topple.
Not until a wicked gale blew up, in the dead of night, did the tree begin to "groan and sway in the storm like an expiring giant and it succumbed at last to the elements..." Sounds of the crash of the giant sequoia carried 15 miles away to a mining camp; the tree buried itself 12 feet deep into the muck of a creekbed. Mud from the creek splashed 100 feet high onto the trunks of nearby trees. Later, forestry experts in the East estimated that the sequoia tree was 2,520 years old.
...Stripping of the bark was done "with as much neatness and industry as a troop of jackals would display in cleaning the bones of a dead lion." The rest was left to rot. The tree was so immense -- and stored enough water in its system -- that five years passed before its leaves turned brown and died. http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/envhist/mother.htmlThanks again for your poem, TYJ. Very poignant. Sad.
Edit: I was mistaken in thinking I'd spent a couple of hours learning about the trees, but I did visit a handful of websites with information about them, and I learned A LOT. When I'd finished, I thought I'd surely been at it a couple of hours at least.
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