What I Did On My Spring Vacation
Grove is in the heart
Hello friends.
Around 700 BC, the Zapotec civilization began to develop in Mexico. By 200 BC, the Romans were dominating the Mediterrannean. Somewhere in that span of time, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, what is now the largest tree in the world sprouted.
Like most other national parks, and a good deal of the continent, the largest tree in the world grows on a site of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Wobonuch/Wobunuch/Woponunch/Wobonoch band of the Western Mono, lived nearest this tree which they called Wah-who-nau, maybe for the cry of the owl that roosted in it. Other peoples in the area were the Yokuts, Tübatulabal, Paiute, and Western Shoshone. There are pictographs at a nearby site called Hospital Rock, and round depressions in a flat granite boulder, made by people gathering for generations to pound acorns into flour. Marie Wilcox was the last living speaker of Wukchumni, and compiled a dictionary of the language before her death in 2021. She appears in the display at Hospital Rock, with a recorded greeting, bidding visitors in her language to enjoy their path and walk in a good way.
The largest tree in the world was briefly known as the Karl Marx Tree. A bunch of socialists moved up to the Sierra Nevadas from San Francisco, claiming land under the Timber Act of 1878, and started Kaweah Colony, a utopian experiment. They kept it up for a few years, building the first road in the area and starting the first newspaper, until the state overturned their claim to the land in the process of establishing Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.
In 1903, Sequoia National Park was administered by the US Military, led by Col. Charles Young, the third Black graduate of West Point. That made him the first African-American superintendent of a national park. His men, dubbed the “buffalo soldiers” by Native Americans during their time out West, built the first usable road into the Giant Forest, allowing many more people to visit the largest tree in the world. They named one of the other giants for Booker T. Washington.
In 1978, a branch broke off the largest tree in the world. The branch was 150 feet long and nearly seven feet thick—big enough, all by itself, that it would’ve been the largest tree east of the Mississippi.
In 2021, the KNP Complex Fire swept through this area, burning tens of thousands of acres. Firefighters, looking like industrious little mice, swathed the trunk of the largest tree in the world with a shiny heat-reflective blanket, so that its 36-foot diameter resembled a large burrito. The effort was adorable, courageous, and pathetically small-scale. We got lucky that time.
In 2025, a new administration began slashing staff and funding for national parks. By April 2026, a family visiting the largest tree in the world encountered hardly any rangers, compared to their Yellowstone trip in August 2024. There was trash everywhere. Visitors were stepping over railings to take photos at the top of slippery waterfalls, lining up their cars in front of No Parking signs on narrow curving roads, marking trees with graffiti, treading off trail and wearing the ground down to the bare roots.
On April 7, 2026, the leader of that same administration, dubbed a “clearly insane” “unhinged” “out of control” “batshit crazy” “genocidal lunatic,” by some of his former supporters, in charge of the largest military in the world, threatened publicly, “a whole civilization will die tonight”. That same empire was sending a capsule to orbit the moon.
Far away from wifi or cell phone signals, a family of four spent 20 minutes standing in a photo line, as if the largest tree in the world were a baseball player or a politician. They nudged each other, and shared a giggle with the hikers behind them, as a group of stylish Italians conducted essentially a full-scale photo shoot, posing like models. The largest tree in the world waited patiently for all comers, shining and ruddy in the full sun.
I don’t know if I can communicate how it feels to me to be in the presence of these trees. I compare it to a full solar eclipse; or visiting places where volcanic heat and steam bubbles out of the earth; or to seeing a blue whale breaching. What it gives me is relief that I don’t need to speculate about a divine presence anymore. I don’t need any faith in things unseen. I have proof of beautiful, vast and unknowable forces, and not just forces, entities. They show another way of being. And if I align myself with that way, I will be straighter and truer. So I am evidently not alone in the universe, and I cannot be lost, if I only look up.
My children are still children, and their great pleasure is in sensory communion. They feel the beauty and the exaltation by inhabiting it. On the Congress Trail we can hide inside the largest trees in the world, hollowed out by fires that swept through years and decades and even centuries ago; these trees can take a lot of fire and keep growing. We can climb in the roots and balance along the trunks on the trees that have fallen, and spread out our picnic on a stump.
We have all gotten really good at this, family vacations spent outdoors. We have special games we’ve made up and running jokes and emergency rations of sour gummy worms. We sit together in the shade and sketch the view. It’s unbelievable to me that I have only three more years of this kind of traveling with my oldest, who tells me “Hiking conversations are the best conversations.”
No one knows how long the largest trees in the world could live. The estimate for the largest tree itself is vast— between 2200 and 2700 years. That’s the time span between Shakespeare and the Internet.
But the giants only grow here, in 75 known groves across a 260-mile stretch, at a particular elevation with a particular temperature range, a particular kind of soil, a particular level of precipitation that exists for now and who knows how much longer.
I’m wondering if they will outlast this empire and this way of living. I wonder if I or my children will live to see that day, and if we will be remembered for the roads we built, for the words we learned and used and remembered, for walking in a good way.
The future isn’t guaranteed. We only have this moment, dappled with sun and shadow. And that is all we ever have.
After the paywall, I’m going to share all the details of my trip that I sent to friends—where we went, where we stayed, what we did, and our magic talking guide.
But first, read more about what Trump is doing, right now, to the national forests:
This coming Sunday, April 19, I’ll be tabling at McGolrick Park in Brooklyn from 10-12 in support of the SUNNY ACT, which allows almost anyone to add solar power to their home or apartment! RSVP here or just walk by!
Then at 1pm I’ll be heading up a really cool event called “Climate Conversations” in Union Square, with a 30 minute discussion about climate emotions. RSVP here, it’s free.
