You've Been Lied To

You’ve been lied to.

Nature is neither evil nor good.  Indifferent, the rationalists tell us.  Uninterested in the affairs of men.

They’ve never spent a night beneath the titans of the rugged Redwood Coast.

There’s nothing rational about Humboldt County.  More people per capita go missing than almost any other county in the country.  900 souls, each year, every year.

And by the way, 60% are children.

It’s the isolation, they say.  Drives families to drink, to the pot fields, to the gun cabinet.  Chaos up and down the 101.

Maybe.

Deep cuts start small.  Ask the Wiyot, Yurak and Hupa.  Add the Sequoia sempervirens to the indigenous genocide list.  Like the buffalo, the old growth redwoods found themselves corralled into tiny corridors, a living dinosaur for the tourists.

I know, I know, innocent till proven guilty.  Correlation doesn’t prove causation.  Forests aren’t sentient. They don’t get angry.  They’re incapable of revenge.

You sure about that?

Spend the night up here yourself.  Not within sound of the freeway.  Instead, venture deep, where the mountains are numbered, not named.  Where only cloud pierces the ancient canopies.  Where you’re just a beetle, scavenging with the other insects among the tangled understory. 

If you make it back, there’s only one reason why.

She let you.