T A B L E_T A L K Why does the rest of the world love to hate American tourists? Discuss the "Ugly American" phenomenon in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y England's decadent delights By Douglas Cruickshank Staying at a country castle (07/29/98) Lions and tigers are PC, oh my! By Sally Eckhoff Disney goes PC at its new theme park (07/28/98) Sex, drugs and Armenian vodka By Drew Fellman What goes on behind closed doors in Iran (07/27/98) Mondo Weirdo No place like Oz In Japan, a bar with no alcohol or music, only coffee (07/24/98) Mondo Weirdo Nude beaches of the week Favorite places to bare all (07/24/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		TALLEST TREE EPIPHANY | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - As we got farther north the clouds moved lower. In Arcata we wandered in light rain through the central plaza and ate fabulous vegan food. But my mother was underwhelmed. She exhausted the city's shopping delights in half an hour and was alarmed at the considerable presence in town of people the locals have come to call "drainbows," the itinerant army of scruffily dressed young people who, now that the Grateful Dead are no more, look even more depressed and lost (and to my mother's eyes, dangerous) than usual. She wasn't too hot on the idea of spending the next day -- Dad's and my Tallest Tree day -- there, or in the local sauna. It looked like we'd be taking her with us. On Tallest Tree morning it was pouring with rain, and Sam Pennisi, our host at the Lady Anne B'n'B and a former mayor, had lit a fire. Sitting eating our huge breakfast, it was hard to leave. I was anxious, though. The Redwood Information Center, some 20 miles north and where you purchase your precious, limited-issue permit to drive up to the Tall Trees Grove, would open at 9. So I hustled my parents, who were happily chatting about the weather with our host, and we set off, looking vainly for breaks in the leaden sky. When we arrived at the Information Center, it was deserted. The bored-looking rangers were only too happy for company and to dispense advice. And their advice essentially amounted to this: Don't go see the tree. Oh. Really? The drive, they reminded us, was two hours each way in good weather and on dirt roads. Today there'd be rivers of mud. There was every chance the 800-foot descent had become a waterfall. I was still game, and my mum said it was up to Dad. So he decided. We wouldn't go. He swore he was happy to do this. He rationalized: He'd seen a lot of trees by now, including the second tallest tree, so he was fine. After all, he said, one redwood tends to look much like another after a while. Was I really hearing this right? This was the Champion Tree. He could measure it with his string. Or if he had no string we could measure with our arms outstretched, working around it in turn, in our own British family tree-hugging measurement ritual. We'd come a long way. He was the modern Green Man. He had to want to see it. And he's retired. This might be his only chance to get up here. He'd come to California again but there were so many other things to see. All of a sudden, in the Information Center, surrounded by leafy dioramas populated by stuffed chickerees and deer and owls, I was having filial intimations of paternal mortality. But no, we wouldn't go. To console ourselves, we drove the short distance to see the trees at nearby Lady Bird Johnson Grove. I'd been there before and remembered it as a short, easy trail through magnificent trees with a fabulous view of the ocean. When we got there -- the only occupants of a car park I'd remembered as a madhouse -- the rain had eased off to a steady drizzle. We set off, trudging through what had become a series of small lakes, my mother getting so wet her feet ended up the color of her shoes, the view reduced to 100 yards of trees and then a wall of clouds. But despite the weather, both parents seemed happy and appreciative. My dad kept saying that this was the way to see what was, after all, a temperate rain forest. We were experiencing the conditions (i.e. walking inside a rain cloud) that had allowed these trees to grow to their magnificent heights in the first place. I pushed him, but no, he said, he was happy enough with this. He didn't need to see a Champion Tree. As much as you can ever tell with any Englishman, I think he was saying what he felt. And I realized, as I led him and my mom around in a large and very muddy circle, that I'd rather romanticized his tree worship. I should have guessed when, as we first drove up into what the locals call the Redwood Empire, he expressed more interest than disdain at all the sawmills we were passing. When I'd first discovered this area, on my honeymoon with my native Californian wife, we were all but weeping at the sight of every clear-cut. I'd wanted to protect my father from the sight of a single stump, imagining the pain it would cause his tree-loving soul, but in fact he turned out to be fascinated by the milling history of the area. Now that he has retired, I realized, now that he's come to know the countryside in weekly walks and tree-finding trips, my father has become much more a man of the land than myself and my very urbane wife. And as a result, I think, he has a more measured idea of how humans and nature can interact -- of how they can be linked and still both survive. As someone who hikes regularly in woods that have been managed by man for over 1,000 years, he has perspective with which, in coming to California, I'd lost touch. To him a second growth redwood forest isn't so much a scar upon the Earth's soul as just the beginning of a centuries-long partnership between man and tree -- one that's made "old-growth" an almost meaningless term in England but that has kept its forests alive for millennia. My father, the Green Man, is also the rational, measuring man. As we headed back south he read aloud to us in the car, as he loves to, how the Tallest Tree in the World was only discovered in 1963. Apparently, though, it hasn't been measured since. Who's to know, he asked, if the tree we failed to see really is the tallest still? It wasn't the achievement I had planned, but both my parents were happy with their rain-forest experience. We still got to see some damn big trees. We did get properly awed. It was still a long trip -- still a kind of pilgrimage. And, since no one else seemed foolhardy enough to want to trudge around the big trees in the rain, we got to see them alone; father, son and mother sharing nature's own majestic vaulted cathedrals; three Brits doing what they do best: not quite getting where they intended but enjoying it and doing it in the rain. SALON | July 30, 1998 Simon Firth is a writer who lives in the San Francisco area.