Grandmother
An Essay by Heather Durham
I don’t remember the first time I met Western redcedar. It must have been sometime around the turn of the millennium when I first moved west to Oregon. Fresh from graduate school in environmental biology, I was awed and inspired by Pacific Northwest forests and the colossal conifers in particular for their stark contrast with the more humble, diminutive leafy green trees of my northeastern upbringing. Whether I first distinguished redcedar in a field guide or in the naturalist training program I joined to help me get my bearings (and ideally, a job), I would have first learned the facts.
That the correct common name is in fact redcedar, not red cedar, because Thuja plicata and its American cousins are not true cedars like the long-needled cedars of the old world, but instead confusingly named members of the cypress family of scaly-needled conifers.
I would have learned that the range of the western redcedar spans what I would later come to think of as my own ecological niche—low to middle elevation west side (wet side) forests of the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia to northern California. If left undisturbed in their cool, shaded river valleys and creekside groves, they can grow to eight feet in diameter and two hundred feet high.
In the year 2000, I would have learned that western redcedars can live upwards of 2000 years, a fact that’s easy to toss around until you really think about it, think about everything these ancient trees might have witnessed, what this landscape might have looked like and who might have known them as saplings. Certainly not any of my ancestors, off among the oaks on the British Isles.
As long as my species has been in this region, early indigenous or recent colonizer, we have been in relationship with western redcedar.
Not just in the way of most large trees—wood for tools, shelter, or fuel, though redcedar’s rot-resistant, insect-repelling, clean-burning wood is excellent in that regard. Canoes, canoe paddles, totem poles, spear poles, arrow shafts, furniture, boxes, dishes, spoons, longhouse planks, little hermit cabin planks, firewood, and friction fire boards. But also? Strips of fibrous bark or rootlets woven into baskets, nets, ropes, clothing, or shredded and worked into bedding, blankets, even diapers. Also? Resonant foliage steeped into teas or tinctures as antifungal, antibacterial, infection-fighting immune-stimulating medicine. And? Aromatic incense that energetically and literally (scientifically!) cleanses and purifies the air.
Western redcedar is this region’s Giving Tree, the local Tree of Life. The uses, the facts abound. But sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I first began the process of sinking in to this region of rivers, ravens, and rain, redcedars were there with me, and I started to get to know them personally, intimately, viscerally.
In my forays outside of Portland I enjoyed hiking volcanic peaks and delighted in the rugged Pacific coast, but the forested rivers and creeks in between began to tug at me less from a yearning for adventure and more from a sense of homecoming. I explored many a trail along the Clackamas and Sandy Rivers, and along those trails would seek out just the right place to sit a while, maybe eat lunch, maybe scribble in my journal, bask in the sun with toes in the cool water or hunker down out of the cold rain depending on the season, and also, always, take some time to just sit, and breathe, and listen, and sink in to the forest, let the forest sink in to me. At my back, silent observer and solid support, was western redcedar.
Warm cinnamon-brown bark rose in vertical ridges, smooth and sturdy against my spine. A buttressed base with polished crimson roots spreading just above ground inevitably created nooks and hollows that fit a human body like a throne with armrests. Above, sprays of layered green scales fanned out in arcing waves, collecting raindrops or sashaying in the riverine wind.
Rivers are old, but on a human scale, cedars seem almost as old. And if rivers drew cedars, it seems, cedars drew the rest of us. Sword fern, wild ginger, bleeding heart. Salmonberry, huckleberry, elderberry. Pacific wren, Swainson’s thrush, Townsend’s warbler. Pine marten, flying squirrel, coyote. We all came for these places redcedar created, the space they hold.
I sit with redcedar to find quiet. I sit there to find stillness. I sit there to shed the static electricity of the insular human world and remember my place in the wild one. Cedar at my back – solid and steady, sweet-smelling and earth-bound. Sitting there I start to get it. Sitting there I start to feel it, feel ego and self fade a little, allowing outside to seep inside. My breath a tree’s exhalations. My exhalations a tree’s breath.
I moved on to other rivers, other Cascadian rainforest watersheds. Snoqualmie, Skykomish, Skagit. There, I always found redcedar. Starting over with new jobs and new residences in new communities these friendly familiars helped orient and ground me. Coming home at the end of an overwhelming, frazzling day among my own baffling species I would seek out that one particular redcedar I’d chosen, or, perhaps, who’d chosen me, and get my bearings in the more-than-human world.
Redcedar’s gifts spanned beyond those riverside groves. Like many of those rooted in Pacific Northwest soil I lived in many a cedar plank home and warmed myself by clean-burning sweet-smoking redcedar fires. And, as a student of natural and cultural history, of deep nature connection that seeks direct experience beyond the facts, I dug in further. Tried my hand at friction fire, the “bowdrill” method that spun redcedar spindle into redcedar fireboard to create black dust and then a glowing coal that when added to shredded redcedar bark could be blown into flame. I wove bark strips into a traditional redcedar basket. I carved and sanded a redcedar branch into a spoon. I steeped redcedar needles into soothing tea for a chest cold. Tinctured needles in alcohol to make an immune-supporting, anxiety-calming, rash-dispelling medicine for my fiery disposition.
I don’t remember when it happened, but Thuja plicata would no longer be just a tree with certain characteristics and uses. Redcedar refers to living, breathing, unique beings I’ve known, who’ve supported and sustained me and who’ve become an essential element of Home.
When I found my little cabin on the creek, my sanctuary, my little hermit hideaway, I wasn’t surprised, then, to find an ancient Western redcedar standing at the center of the property, next to the front steps. Of course there was. Maybe that specific tree wasn’t an essential item in what I was looking for in a home – I would later discover several others from sapling to elder scattered around the property and into the forest. But this one, likely hundreds to over a thousand years old, this redcedar by the front steps told me, of course, YES, this was the place for me.
Her branches reach over my roof and roots weave under my floor, holding my fifty-four-year-old house and forty-nine-year-old me in a loose embrace. Whenever I return home she is there to greet me, her perfume washing over me as soon as I step out of my car, my hand brushing her weathered skin in greeting as I walk up the steps. When I am frazzled or upset, happy or calm, angry or confused, I can sit with her and feel content to be whomever I happen to be.
Others, too, are drawn to her. Red-breasted sapsucker tap-tap-taps dotted lines of sap wells along her trunk so that her bark appears as an ancient hieroglyphic text. Douglas squirrel strips paper-thin bark from her outer branches to line a winter nest. Barred owl perches hidden in her foliage to stalk a deer mouse blundering into the open. Wild strawberries crowd around her base, the only place I’ve found them on the property. These are just a few of those I’ve observed so far, though I know countless other lives have lived in, among, around, above and below my redcedar. I look forward to witnessing more of them, to understanding her multitudes better in the time we have together.
I know. It’s just a tree, right? What kind of loony tree-hugger nonsense is this, right? Go out and find some real friends, right? Or maybe, at least, get some cats already? I know. I hear you. And yet…
I made a new tincture last spring, snipping green tips of redcedar foliage into alcohol and infusing it for six weeks. The resulting liquid is a green-amber concoction that unlike many medicinal tinctures, retains the strong cedar smell and taste. I siphoned it into dropper bottles, labelled them, then squirreled my medicine away in the cupboard for when I might need it.
Just two months later, I needed it.
I’d been standing on a rickety ladder left with the house, more comfortable than I should have been, more careless than I should have been. Painting, touching up some of the worn and stained redcedar house planks using a free gallon of paint also left with the house. As I reached up, leaned a little to the side, the old ladder shifted, twisted out from under me, and I fell. And unlike the typical ladder-fall injuries involving bumps and bruises on the lucky end and head injuries or worse at the unlucky end, my fall and resulting injury took a unique turn. Falling, I reached an arm under me to break my fall and caught it in a thin electrical cord pulled taut between the house and a metal grounding rod. The rest of my body’s bumps and bruises were minimal. My arm, sliced open like a block of cheddar on a cheese cutter.
An ER visit, tetanus shot, morphine shot, several shots of Novocain, twenty-seven stitches and an antiseptic bandage later, I’d thought the worst was over. Soon afterwards, though, I developed a severe skin allergy to the chemical bandage, leaving my stitched-up arm looking even more like a bad makeup job from a slasher movie— technicolor bruised, scarlet blistered, swollen and spurting various fluids at any moment.
I am intensely grateful for medical doctors and nurses, pharmaceutical pills and ointments, and health insurance. I am thankful for my neighbor who drove me to the ER, and coworkers who picked up my slack at work. Returning home to an empty house, however, drugged out and still feeling the most uncomfortable mashup of pain and intense itching I’ve ever experienced can make a loner hermit reevaluate her situation, ask all the what-ifs and consider worst case scenarios, even if she isn’t normally the type to do that when it comes to her own health and safety.
Did I yearn for someone to hold and comfort me, to cook and clean for me in my convalescence? To open jars and cans and all the other mundane tasks I never realized can be near impossible with only one working arm? To help me shower, clean and rebandage my tattered arm to save me from my awkward shoddy attempts? Or at the very least, at the beginning, to come running when I fell, pick me up off the ground, bring rags to apply pressure and dial the phone so I didn’t have to manage that myself, adrenalated and bloody?
I probably should have. Might have, once upon a time in my younger days. But I didn’t. The thing about loner hermits is, you get used to picking yourself up off the ground and doing what needs to be done. Maybe you don’t remember any other way.
But, also, I didn’t feel alone. Not the way I used to in my insular, human-focused youth. That redcedar tree keeping watch over me, my house, and this land, she did comfort me. Not in the way of my own species but in her own ways. Drug-addled and broken, I sat with her, and she held me, that ancient grandmother, familiar and friendly, sweet, solid, and strong at my back. Her weathered skin against my bandaged arm, her medicine in my steaming tea. Yes, she’s just a tree. And I’m just a human, a relative newcomer to this landscape and this earth, a mere sapling rooting in her shade. We two living, breathing beings are in relationship now. And if that makes me a loony tree-hugger, so be it.
Heather Durham is a bird-watching, tree-sitting, journal-scribbling hermit with an MS in environmental biology and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of Wolf Tree: An Ecopsychological Memoir in Essays from Homebound Publications (2022), and Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust from Wandering Aengus Press (2019). Born and raised in New England, Heather currently lives, writes, and plays on the traditional lands of the Snohomish and Snoqualmie tribes, in the Cascades foothills of the Pacific Northwest.