NONFICTION          

Knitted together by coast redwood roots and ivy   -   photo by Weebly.com                                    

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Dirt Road Chic
​Memoir
by  Denize Springer

​I was the one who first brought everyone’s attention to the troubling tree. Its exposed roots were all you needed to see to feel threatened.

Our “non-county maintained” road on the southern face of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California was carelessly built. The hillside it was carved into lines our street in a ragged, six-foot step of earth knitted together by networks of coast redwood roots and ivy. The redwood in question stood closest to the edge of the step. Over time, the earth in which it spread its roots eroded and washed away with rain. Each year, more and more of its front facing roots became totally exposed—hanging over the road like thick, empty fingers. Ten years after our arrival, the tree began to lean over two of the seven houses on our one-lane “avenue.” Were the 100-foot, 3,000-pound tree to fall on our house or the one next door, it would crack it open like a walnut.

I made this point to my husband, Jack, and to Tomas, the man who owned the other house in the tree’s shadow. Neither of them seemed concerned.

“Redwoods root very shallow,” said Tomas, a mycologist.

“But these roots are now totally exposed,” I argued.

“Not all of them,” Jack countered, “There’s more underground behind the tree we can’t see.”
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“Redwoods adapt remarkably well,” concurred Tomas, “I’m not worried.”

The following winter arrived early and persisted through spring with wind that violently parted the heaviest limbs of the tree. In March, one limb broke off and crashed to the road, completely blocking it. We had to chainsaw our way out to get to work.

The next summer Tomas returned from a trip to Europe, months later than expected. The cross-country runner and cyclist now walked with a limp. On the Autobahn, another car inexplicably crossed the road and met head on with the car Tomas was driving. The driver of that car was killed. Tomas, his wife and their two young sons spent months recovering from their injuries.
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Tomas studied the tree—from the wavering limbs of its canopy to the desperately empty fingers of its exposed roots—and said, “I think we should do something about this tree.” 

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​On the morning of the removal, I was awakened by the men shouting to one another over the whine of chainsaws. Their voices sounded excited and tense, boastful and scared. One of the men swung like a monkey in the canopy, tethered to ropes wrapped around neighboring redwoods—the only things strong enough to save him from a fall should the tree he was dismantling collapse. He started at the top and worked his way down, limb by limb. Each branch hit the ground with the sound of a sizeable tree falling over. Dust rose from the street. I began to feel like I was watching an execution.

“It’s not like it should have been here in the first place,” reasoned Del, who had lived on our street longer than anyone else. “Redwoods are not native to this part of the mountain.”

She’s right. Our neighborhood in the unincorporated part of Mill Valley, just ten miles north of San Francisco, occupies a mix of steep canyons and grassy, rolling hills approximately 1,100 feet above sea level. Two miles west is the Muir Woods National Monument, a stand of ancient coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), some approaching 400 feet in height and 30 feet in width. The rings in the trunks of fallen trees here show more than 2,000 years of life.

Only five percent of the redwoods that once existed on Earth still stand, and they exist only from the Oregon border to California’s Central Coast. Many of the buildings that flew up after gold was discovered in Northern California were built with redwood. After the 1906 earthquake, even more were sacrificed to rebuild San Francisco.

Shortly after the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, a Hearst newspaper, the San Francisco Call, gave away small parcels of Mr. Hearst’s largess on Mt. Tamalpais to anyone who subscribed to his paper. Development and subdivision quickly ensued. Redwood vacation cabins on tiny, pie-shaped lots sprang up. Owners planted a few redwoods for shade and protection from northwest winds which can reach 90 to 100 miles an hour at the mountain’s East Peak.

But redwoods seem to propagate incessantly, and the trees grew in number faster than the houses beneath them. By the time our house was built in 1965, the redwoods ruled.

Jimmied into the hillside, most of our redwood house and surrounding decking hangs over a steep slope, supported by 25 foot, four by four stilts anchored in cement. Several redwoods of significant size already occupied the property when construction began and rather than cutting these trees down, builders installed the decking and roofing around the trees.
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Three redwoods continue to grow up through holes in our deck, which we have had to widen to allow for the expanding girth of their trunks. Like humans, redwoods achieve their permanent height within the early decades of life, then continue to grow and fill out in width. Every five or so years, we have had to carve out a little more room for the trees, leaving less deck for our patio chairs and barbeque. The widest redwood on our property grows up through a three-by-three-foot hole in the carport deck and roof. There is evidence that a previous owner removed another large redwood that stood too close to one end of the house. The roof ends there not in a square, but in a crescent shape no doubt to accommodate the tree. 

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“Most agents wouldn’t even show a place like this,” our adventurous real estate representative, Leslie, said. She was gripping the wheel of her Mercedes in a January downpour as we slipped and slid down the steep hill that is our road.

Broken branches were hanging off the roof of our house to be. The gutters were bent from such falls and completely rusted out in parts. Other rotted detritus formed an ominous, seedy pool at the front door as Leslie struggled with a rusted lock and swollen wooden door.

“We’ll take it,” we said. The idea of living in a tiny house among giants was beyond our wildest dreams. Of the 1.5 million acres of redwood habitat that remain on Earth, we could own a small sliver.

Granted, living in a redwood forest is not for everyone. Every weekend, Jack must sweep redwood droppings from the roof and dig even more out from between the slats in the deck. The weight of the bark, branches and dust sloughed off with winter rain has ruined several lengths of brand-new gutter over the years. And the winter revels of our giant neighbors—the thumping and screeching of soaking wet tree bark bumping and rubbing against the sides of our house or decking—are enough to scare the pants off Wes Craven.

We also must maintain our own street, which has often meant collecting contributions from all homeowners for street patching and doing the work ourselves. Some neighbors refused to contribute and opted out of pavement in front of their homes, preferring the curb appeal of “Dirt Road Chic,” the title of a New York Times article about similar neighborhoods in upstate New York.

My suburban New York mother never understood anyone’s preference for “living in the sticks.” On her first and only visit to our new place, I could hear her on the phone with my father. “You should see this place! No sidewalks. And you can’t walk anywhere.”  She had no interest in the miles of hiking trails that started within feet of our house. Mom’s focus was on beaches, which she found “too cold, too rocky,” San Francisco cable cars, “too slow,” and Dungeness crab, which of course, was “nothing compared to Maryland crabs” from Chesapeake Bay. Nonetheless, every evening during her visit, my husband would return from work and ask: “Did you take your mother to Muir Woods?”

I didn’t have to ask to know that Mom would not enjoy a visit to the famous forest that attracts millions of people from all over the world. Still, my husband persisted and on the last evening of Mom’s visit he asked the same dammed question.

Mom was out on the deck with a glass of Sonoma Chardonnay. She only seemed to be focused on the forest canopy.

“What’s Muir Woods?” she asked.

“Mom, you wouldn’t . . . like it,” I blurted. “I mean, I didn’t think you’d like it there.”

My normally pleasant husband admonished me with a nasty look. “It’s only ten minutes away,” he snarled. “In visitation, it’s second only to Disneyland!”

The kind of silence that you can only get in a redwood forest on a balmy October evening followed. Shafts of setting sunlight mixed with the dust in the dry air to give a sepia tone to our surroundings. Dried up fingers of redwood needles floated to the ground with a whisper. Despite it being “Fire Season,” after a routine six months with no rain, this was my favorite time of year.

Mom broke the silence and finally answered my husband’s question.

“These are the ugliest God-damned trees I have ever seen in my whole life,” she said. “I bet if you cut them all down you could see the Bay.”

I squeezed my husband’s hand. I was about to gloat but decided not to say anything. A shaft of sunlight calmed my neck. I took a very deep breath of the sweet scent of drying redwood sap.

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Once the tree men packed up their gear, all that was left of the threatening brute was a stump big enough for a throne. Were it not for us living below it in our houses strung together by electrical, phone and cable lines, this tree would have been allowed to take its place among the heaviest living things on Earth. Were we not here, it would have gone on—as most redwoods do—to live a life of hundreds to thousands of years that no disease, no fungus, not even a fire could end very easily.

But, in just four hours’ time it fell: A heavy, fragrant Christ.

Twenty-five years have passed since the leaning redwood was taken. Tomas’ once young sons have graduated college and started careers and households of their own. Three years ago, Del passed away in her bed on a rainy March night, the redwoods over her house tapping her roof with the raindrops they couldn’t absorb.

My husband and I have retired. We will soon give up the ghost trying to maintain the street that is now mostly mud with an uneven crust of whatever is left of past paving. A lot of neighbors have left the mountain once they reached a certain age. But we haven’t. Not yet.

The step of hillside where the dangerous tree once hung over our house continues to erode with heavy winter rain, which occurs less and less because of severe drought. Even the summer fog, absorbed through a redwood’s needles during dry times, has severely retreated with climate change. But the roots, the empty fingers with nothing to grasp, remain determined to stay. To haunt. In fact, they’ve conspired with the earth and ivy to form a dome that hangs over the street. I watched a coyote shelter under it during the only heavy rain last winter. It looked like he was waiting for a bus. Soon you could fit a Barcalounger under it.
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We can no longer clearly see the redwood’s stump. A “fairy ring” of six-foot-tall seedlings and a thick blanket of ivy shield it from any more insults. I know it wasn’t supposed to grow here. Neither was I.

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​​Denize Springer's nonfiction and fiction have appeared in various publications and literary journals including The New York Times, Marin Independent Journal, East Bay Express, Pearl, Estero, Vistas & Byways, Please See Me and Ocean Realm. Her plays and adaptations have been presented in distinguished New York and San Francisco venues including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Her short story, “The Way We Say Goodbye,” was named one of 15 semi-finalists in the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU and has taught courses in scene writing, genre and story structure at OLLI at SF State.

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