Old Red Cedar

Western red cedar, over 1000 years old, you grew for 200 years and towered over others, silently observing sights in the forest that are no more, your secrets buried within your spirit. The bark covering your tree trunk, said to be about 23 feet around, was hollow when men discovered you. Inside the hollow trunk, a fire somehow began; you cannot tell us when, how, or why, and there is no record of it. The fire caused your death. Slowly, you died, from the inside out. Such a sad loss for an old soul of the forest, with centuries of knowledge in its cells. Houses, watercraft, shingles, bowls, bows and arrows, and paper that men used to write what they knew of your history could have been made from your body, branches, and bark. Truly, fire was a better death for you than a logger’s saw.

If only you could have created a history, oral or written, of what you knew.

Men found a huge knot-hole below your large fork, which formed 4 enormous branches that jutted out from the fork. For years, people had heard stories of an enormous tree with a 99-foot circumference. In 1891, 5 men searched and finally found you. They determined that the 99-foot circumference might be accurate only when measured at ground level and included your knots and roots; they measured 68 feet around the trunk. They scaled about 25 feet up to that knothole and went inside you.

Climbing down a distance of approximately 45 feet inside your trunk, they reported that there was enough standing room for at least 40 men. They also noted a peculiarity: the tree had bark on the inside, exactly like its outside. Is that usual, or an anomaly? Are the insides of trees like their outside bark? Logged trees show us that it isn't so.

In 1916, men cut off your top and dragged your stump about 150 yards north of where you had lived, and set it in concrete. When your stump cracked, men put it back together and reconfigured you, to the amazement of humans. Looking in awe at your dead stump, people could imagine your living nobility and immense size, while they drove a car through your remains.

Did you have brothers and sisters as tall, or taller? Perhaps you were the matriarch of the forest, the firstborn, the oldest, the one with the largest waist, the tallest. Maybe your father stood a mile away, your roots connected underground, and you waved at each other in the wind. Squirrels and birds carried messages between you and your forest relatives. You protected, sheltered, and fed wildlife while seeding the forest. Your root system broadcast the death, and I think your fellow trees sagged a bit then. Your relatives flinched when they saw the men drag your remains away.

You stand as a monument to the logged-off forests of old-giant trees that once covered the land. Now you rest beside a major highway at a rest stop, with a sign detailing the written history of your life. Birds still nest in your stump, and you'd be happy to know tens of thousands (probably more) photos of you exist, with people appearing the size of ants compared to you. You give home to insects, shade and shelter to birds, and jaw-dropping amazement to children and parents.

You may have been born of fire, for fire cultivates and opens seeds to sprout. You died of fire, a slow cremation, and then transformed into your death marker. A marker that reveals nature's eminence, prominence, birth, and death. Your transformation sparked human curiosity, and their ingenuity gave you another life after you had been giving gifts to the forest for over 1000 years.

Copyright © 1/20/2026 by Andrea O. Corwin

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