The park encompasses more than 150 square miles of old-growth coastal redwoods, about half those left on the planet. A century and a half ago, there were eight thousand square miles of old-growth redwood forest in California alone, which means 99.5 per cent of the original dawn forest has been cut. Redwoods, also known as sequoias, grow to fantastic sizes and live for millennia. The largest tree in the world, the General Sherman in Sequoia National Park, is a redwood; its base is 102.5 feet in circumference, and it is thought to be 2,700 years old. The trees here in Redwood National Park are slightly smaller and younger, probably no more than 1,500 years old, mere saplings when Clovis drove the Visigoths out of France.
I gently close the car door and the Steller’s jay flies to a nearby shrub and scolds me. There’s a path and we follow it, eventually coming to the first big tree. It’s fifty feet around if it’s an inch, and so heavy it appears to be sinking around its own root ball, the way an obese man’s ankles sink around his shoe tops. There isn’t much we can do with it except stare, so we stare at it, then turn and follow the path deeper into the woods. This is a mistake, as there are paths bifurcating off the main path and we stumble along them, staring mostly up at the trees, until quite soon we are no longer certain how to get back to the car. Well, Merilyn is certain, but I insist on a different path and she follows under protest until neither of us knows where we are.
Merilyn has an apple and a packet of trail mix in her shoulder bag, and there is a path of sorts to follow. Walking through a forest, even on a path, is infinitely better than driving through it, especially if part of the purpose of the experience is to get lost. You can get lost faster, and stay lost longer. By the time we have meandered on intersecting paths for half an hour, I am hopelessly turned around, though I don’t admit it, especially when the path takes us to the road.
“The car park is to the left,” I say confidently.
“Then we should go right, right?” Merilyn says.
“Left,” I say firmly.
“Let’s just go right until we round that curve,” Merilyn says. “If there’s no car park, we’ll turn around and come back.”
Of course, the car park is around the curve. There is the traitorous Echo, waiting where it shouldn’t be. I check the plates before inserting the key, but it’s our car, all right. Merilyn somewhat pointedly asks me if I would like to drive.
Sticking to the coastline, we pass more big trees, a lot of seaside villages, brightly painted clapboard houses huddled against the rugged coastline. We encounter more cold, light drizzle, and a seaward wind that makes the fishing boats tethered in the harbours strain and rear against their hawsers like startled stallions. The water looks cold and thick. On the radio, we listen to a weather report that warns of snow squalls higher up in the mountains, with accumulations of two to three feet. Merilyn and I congratulate ourselves on having stayed by the water instead of cutting inland at Eugene, though at some point, we realize, we are going to have to turn east.
We pass a sign: Eureka 10 miles.
“I have a cousin in Eureka!” Merilyn announces excitedly, the way one might say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I won the Nobel Prize last night!”
“His name is Russell Thompson. He moved down to Los Angeles after the war and got into the movies, and now he’s retired to Eureka!” I gather it’s hard to pronounce Eureka without following it with an exclamation mark.
“Great!” I say. “Let’s drop in to say hello!”
MY American cousin is really my second or third cousin, I can never figure out which. He and my father shared a set of grandparents. We’re not close, but we’re blood.
My father, like many men, didn’t seem to care much for the family he came from. They lived in Toronto, about an hour and a half away. We’d visit his mother and his brother, who lived in the apartment next to hers, almost every week. The air in the car was always brittle as we drove into the city and still edgy as we came out. Family put my father in a foul mood.
The only relatives he talked about with pleasure were Russell and Russell’s sister, Dorothy, cousins he spent weekends with as a boy. Russell’s birthday was in the same month as Dad’s, and every March, the phone would ring long-distance. “It’s Russell!” my mother would call out, breathless—“From California!”—and my father would rush to the phone as if he expected to win around-the-world cruise.
Dorothy’s birthday is the same day as mine, so I call her every September. She is full of stories: about another cousin who played piano in a sheet-music store and took off for San Francisco to play professionally; about the time Russell drove back to Ontario from California in a Cadillac convertible, top down all the way.
My American Cousin, the movie, opens with the cousin barrelling up to the family homestead in a flashy red convertible. His name is Butch and he is darkly sexy and safely rebellious in that James Dean kind of way. He’s come to spend the summer in Canada, a place where NOTHING EVER HAPPENS, as the young female protagonist writes in bold across her diary. I felt the same way: real life happened somewhere else, somewhere like California.
Russell was lean and handsome, a lion tamer. In the eight-by-ten glossy in my parents’ album, he wears skin-tight trousers, knee-high boots, and a white cutaway, and he is flourishing a top hat. I think he might be carrying a whip. When my parents talked about him, the conversation always started, “Russell, he’s in the movies in California . . .”
What could be more glamorous than that? I met Russell only once, the summer I was thirteen. He drove up to Canada, and we visited him at Dorothy’s house in the woods. The day was hot and clear, the water as blue as the ocean. We water-skied, my first time, and somehow the feeling of standing on the water, zipping across the waves, is what comes to me even now when I hear the word “California.”
Since my father died, Russell has been sending me photographs, of himself and my father when they were kids, and later as soldiers, fighting for different countries. After the war, Russell hosted a Saturday-morning radio show on the Armed Forces Radio Service,
Let’s Pretend with Uncle Russ. He sends glossies of himself leaning into a microphone with some famous actress or crooner glancing over at him with wry affection. From radio, he moved to television: he was a pirate on The Shirley Temple Show, a dead man on Gunsmoke. But it was on Ozzie and Harriet that he found his home. After the summer we met, he sent me an autographed picture of Ricky Nelson, signed “To Merilyn with love.”
I haven’t told Russell I would be travelling down this coast. I wasn’t sure I wanted the old man he’d surely become to replace the golden Russell of my California dreams. But once I’d made the phone call, heard his voice, so rich and deep, that hint of a laugh waiting to split open wide, I couldn’t wait.
“Eureka’s not far,” I say to Wayne. “Russell says we’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
WHY do I find the name Eureka so familiar? Yes, it’s what Archimedes is supposed to have shouted when he discovered the trick of measuring the volume of an irregularly shaped object: “Eureka!” he exclaimed, jumping out of the bath: “I’ve got it!” But I don’t think that’s what’s stuck in my mind.
Eureka (without the exclamation mark) is a small city on Humboldt Bay, in the heart of California’s big-tree country; it got its name when gold was discovered by some classically trained forty-niner in nearby Trinity River during the California bonanza. The 1849 gold rush defined this part of California, draining so many people from southern regions that in one year the population of Los Angeles dropped from 6,000 to 1,600 and the population of San Francisco jumped from 800 to 35,000.
Mining and logging soon destroyed the forests around Eureka and the rivers that drained into Humboldt Bay. When