I remember roaming the back country of the Santa Lucias and the Sierra de Salinas throughout my childhood into my adult years. I remember that there was charcoal everywhere. Today there is charcoal everywhere.
Fire scars. An interesting term. Sounds like a wound. What if the wound is a blessing? What if it is the opposite of what you think? Turns out it is.
Fire rages, fire ravages, fire destroys.
Depends where you are standing. Depends how you look at it. When you look at it, it starts changing and shifting right in front of you.
Up behind the old ranch on Fort Ord is a wonderful pasture of wild oats and wildflowers, mostly lupines and California poppies, peppered with twisted oak trees.
At the base of the oak trees the trunk is open on many of them and you can see the char inside the hollow part. Many of the trees have branches that are contorted, some of them with the daily afternoon breeze that comes off of Monterey Bay, but once you polish the lens of your glasses, you start to see something else.
A fire would come through here every few years when we were growing up, the grass would burn off, the dead branches and leaves turned to ash, everything would grow greener next spring, wildflowers abounded, the trees remained healthy and happy. The fire didn’t kill the trees, the singed and browned leaves came back nicely as healthy green new growth.
Dad took us camping to Pfeiffer State Park in Big Sur every year. On the way in to the campgrounds, just past the lodge are some particularly large redwood trees that have a tall charcoal fire scar in the center, hollowed out quite a bit at the base, going up 15 or 20 feet. We always thought that that was from some fire that came through and burned them that way. They told us that dead branches would pile up on the uphill side of a tree and when the fire comes would create a fire scar, and in some cases burn out a hollow in the tree.
Fact is, these redwood trees are on flat ground. Not only that, when you polish your lens and look closely, you see that some of them form a circle. We were told that the circle is formed when a huge large tree dies and sprouts come out at the perimeter of the base making new trees. Except these circles of trees are larger than that. And the hollow burned parts are all facing toward the center of the circle.
It would be years before visiting another location in Big Sur that I would see other large circles of redwood trees on flat ground that had large hollow charred spaces at the base.
Wait a minute. What’s going on here?
It was when I was in Mendocino County that some native Pomo Indians were demonstrating how they purposefully lit fires at the base of the large redwoods and oaks and sometimes sycamores to form enough space for them to store acorns.
When you stand in the shade of the redwoods or giant oaks or sycamores, and let it all sink in, something that can only be described as sacred comes through. Might be nothing more than some good juju gravity. Might be the thousands of years that somebody gathered here around the fire.
Redwoods have a thick bark that allows them to survive repeated fires. Over time low intensity fires burn out the dead heartwood of the tree, leaving a hollow cavern inside while the outer layers remain alive.
In the Sierra Nevada, burned-out sequoias lose their crowns and are hollowed out to the top, creating a straight view up to the sky. Tribes use these natural observation chambers for spiritual introspection and stargazing, viewing upward, a direct conduit to the spirits and creators.
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