Everyone has good days and bad days, but especially so he Los Angeles Times in recent years, which has been absolutely devastated by cutbacks, subscription falloffs, print declines, and local editions cut. The tale of at times seems endless. Yet good people at the paper have kept on doing good work. It's worth celebrating a good day, and yesterday, Sunday July 28th 2013, the Los Angeles Times had a pretty great journalistic day. I'm going to post links to a couple of examples, beginning with Maria La Ganga's marvelous story about John Muir, and a tree he planted.
MARTINEZ, Calif. — It would be hard to equal John Muir's love for the giant sequoia, a majestic California native that can live 3,000 years and soar 250 feet high.
"The King tree & me have sworn eternal love," he wrote to a friend in the fall of 1870, "sworn it without swearing and Ive taken the sacrament with Douglass Squirrels drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple drips I am writing this woody gospel letter."
A decade or so later, the besotted conservationist returned from a Sierra Nevada jaunt with a seedling wrapped in a damp handkerchief. He planted the slender specimen in a place of honor on his family's fruit ranch.
Today, Muir's homestead 35 miles northeast of San Francisco is a national historic site. And the sequoia, 70 feet tall, is dying of an airborne fungus.
Keith Park loves this particular tree almost as much as Muir loved them all — which is why the young National Park Service horticulturist is trying to keep at least a remnant of the ailing conifer alive by cloning it.
Great to see Muir's "woody gospel" on the front page of the largest paper on the West Coast. Here's Mr. Park, ascending the tree he wants to immortalize.
Thank you, Maria. (By the way, the story is good to the last word.)
Kit Stolz 