Hello everyone,
Welcome to my blog. I suppose any of you who run across this will be wondering where the name comes from. After witnessing subsequent posts I make on science, a subject which I absolutely adore and dedicate my life to, you may imagine I stole the title from Steven Hawking's brilliant book entitled, "On the Shoulders of Giants." You would, in fact, be wrong. But it was a nice guess, I'll give you that.
In fact, I started this blog at the closing of my latest little adventure, a brief trip through central California. While some of you may already know the giants I speak of, others will be conjuring their own imaginary giants from their own lifelong association with the word, and will see skyscrapers or famous actresses, giants of the silverscreen. No, those are nothing near as fantastic as the giants of my world. I speak of real, living, breathing, speaking giants. Giants made of wood.
In California there exist two species of tree which stand, head and shoulders, above the rest. The coastal redwoods are notable as the tallest trees in the world; the tallest measuring in at over 380 feet high. 380 feet is taller than a football field is long. If you are an average man, 380 feet is roughly 63 times your own height. Something 63 times smaller than you would be only an inch high, something like a mouse or a banana slug. To put it in clearer terms, that's freaking huge!
The second species of tree, the one of which I speak and the one to whom the title of this blog belongs, is the great sequioa. Sequioa, while slightly shorter than redwoods, are fatter and so are the "biggest" trees in terms of actual volume of wood. The tallest sequioas is around 300 feet tall, only 1/6 shorter than the tallest redwood, and is nearly 130 feet around the base.
You see, over the fourth of July weekend I decided, instead of blowing up a small portion of my country (which I did intend to do, but couldn't reasonably pull off in a national park), to visit a large portion of it. So I drove. And drove. And drove. Did anyone here tell you how huge this country is? I drove from San Diego to Monterey; it took from 2 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. I passed thousands of houses, hundreds of small businesses, miles and miles and miles of beautiful coastline. On my way up I spied an algae-harvesting ship floating off Morro Bay pulling the upper canopy of the kelp into its massive maw. I saw a group of plump elephant seals hawwing at each other while rubbing off last season's fur. I saw Soda Lake and the San Andreas Fault Zone rise around me in all directions, reminding me how puny the forces which puttered me along truly are.
From Monterey, after a hurried interlude at the (absolutely fabulous) aquarium, I made my way to Yosemite. By then I'd been driving 16 hours over 2 days, and I was smoked. But, dammit, I roughed it out and by day 3 I was heading past Fresno and into Sequioa National Park. It was a hot day and the fires were raging so badly up north that the valley had filled with haze, a ghostly reminder of the largess of our individual actions.
It was around 5:00 when I pulled into the park. 5:30 by the time I spotted my first sequioa. When I say big, you don't really get the picture. We're used to big, but not this big. And I mean big in every sense of the word. Big in size, massive in breadth, brimming to the top with history. These trees bare the scars of two thousand years of life on their mundane patch of land. Draw a circle around your couch and imagine not leaving it since the time Rome was last sacked. Yeah, that's a long freakin' time. And that entire time these trees have stretched forth their branches, swayed in the wind, shivered in the cold, breathed in the air, and lived.
And so I dedicate this site to them because I can see no more fitting a way to unite my love for science, reason, thought, and trepidation, than with the patience of giants. Time will ebb and flow, and my opinions today will be my follies of youth tomorrow. Here I advocate a calm, a somber, and a meaningful discussion of the important things that make life worth living. It will be a tale of my life, but told to the beat of new discovery. In among the pages of scientific writing and journalistic critique I hope to provide a picture of my personality, while defining my own voice.
So, lofty goals for a blog, especially since I have yet to establish a single routine to my life. I get the notion that this will evolve into a storehouse for my thoughts rather than something of public import. That said, welcome to the forest of giants. Please feel free to stroll among the trees, and don't worry about the fruit, after all, a little knowledge never hurt anybody.
