Clear head, steady steps. Moving forward.
We take a second break in the afternoon, and that’s when I start to feel the change in the air. A different scent. Sweet, almost. It’s sharp and fresh, and it’s carried on winds that are picking up.
Lennon looks toward the sky. “See those? Cumulus clouds. They’ll start stacking up to make cloud towers. That’s when the rain’s coming.”
“Uh-oh.”
He checks the GPS on his phone. “We’re almost out of the—ah, crap. Phone died. Let me see yours.”
I dig out my phone, but the battery’s dead too. Crap. I can’t text my mom. Surely she’ll understand and chalk it up to no cell service.
He stares at the black screen for a long moment before handing it back. “Doesn’t matter. I know where we are. We’ll be out of the canyon in a half hour or less. Are you okay to keep walking?”
“If it means not getting wet, then hell yeah. Let’s march.”
We walk briskly for several minutes, but the winds are really whipping through the canyon now. Enough to blow my hair in my face. Lennon keeps looking up. I think it’s getting darker. I’m sort of wishing I had asked him for more information about the storm. This isn’t like me at all, but I’d been concentrating on the knowledge that we needed to get through the canyon without being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I didn’t think about what would happen after. And this storm isn’t going to give us a pass for winning. Like: You guys made it through? Great job! I won’t rain on you.
What do we do when it rains?
“Am I good, or am I freaking fantastic?” he says, several paces ahead of me.
When I catch up to him, cresting a hill, I see what he’s seeing.
A shady forest filled with giant trees.
23
The canyon’s arms open up and deliver us straight into it, the river arrowing down the center.
“Majestic Grove,” Lennon says, stopping to look up at the enormous trunks. “Giant sequoias. World’s largest trees. Many of these beauties are a thousand years old. The redwoods on the coast can get taller, but these here in the Sierras are bigger.”
I’ve seen coastal redwoods around the observatory at home, but I’ve never seen an entire forest of giant trees. Some of them here are as big around as a car and they nearly block out the sky. And the canyon ferns we’ve been walking through have nothing on these. They create a pale green carpet on the forest floor, and their fronds are so large, it’s as if they’re in competition with the sequoias to see who can grow bigger.
“It looks prehistoric,” I murmur.
“Endor Forest scenes with the ewoks in Return of the Jedi were filmed in the Bay Area in a forest like this. So cool, right?”
“It’s stunning,” I say as we enter the ancient forest, craning my neck up at the gargantuan trunks. The ground is spongy, and it smells strange here, like an outdoor library—musty. A good kind of musty. And it’s quiet. Which is odd, because the canyon was filled with the sounds of singing birds and the echo of the river off the rocky canyon walls. The water is still flowing here, but it’s a softer babble, absorbed by the great trees.
I walk up to a sequoia and run my hand over soft, corrugated bark, marveling, and then stretch out my arms and try to hug it. “How many people would it take to reach all the way around?”
“Too many.” Lennon stands near me and stretches his arms around the tree, too. We don’t even make it a quarter of the way around together.
“I love this place,” I say, and mean it.
“It’s my favorite part of the park,” he says, eyes sparkling. “My cathedral.”
I understand why.
He points to our left. “There’s a bigger trail that runs along the northern edge of the sequoias, several miles from here. No one comes down this way. It’s secluded. From man and beast. The trees block out the sunlight, so there’s less food for animals. Fewer insects for birds, so it’s quieter.”
“No mosquitoes.”
“Fewer mosquitoes,” he corrects.
“I’ll take it. Any improvement is a good thing,” I say, looking around. “This is surreal. I wish we could stay here.”
“We can,” he says. “This is where we’re camping.”
“Tonight?”
“Right now. We’re stopping early.”
“Really?”
“Truly. Reason one being that I love it here. I know it might sound weird, because it’s so dark in here, but it’s sort of my happy place. And when I first found it, one of the things I thought was that I wished you could be here to share it with me.”
I look into his face and my heart melts.
“Now you can,” he says, softer.
Thunder booms in the distance.
Lennon points upward. “And that right there is the second reason. That storm is going to be fierce, and we need to find a place to make camp. Let’s get a little farther away from the canyon and find a good spot. Hurry.”
There’s not a trail here, so we have to pick our way around the trees and ferns as we follow the river and make our way deeper into the sequoias. The thunder’s getting louder, which scares me, but every time I find a clear spot big enough to accommodate our tents, Lennon glances up and shakes his head.
“Why?” I finally say in frustration after the third rejection. “It’s close to the river, but not too close. It’s flat, it’s—”
“There,” he says, pointing to another spot. It looks the same as this one, basically. Maybe a little more room. I’m tired of looking, so I follow him and am relieved to stop
