T A B L E_T A L K Why does the rest of the world love to hate American tourists? Discuss the "Ugly American" phenomenon in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y England's decadent delights By Douglas Cruickshank Staying at a country castle (07/29/98) Lions and tigers are PC, oh my! By Sally Eckhoff Disney goes PC at its new theme park (07/28/98) Sex, drugs and Armenian vodka By Drew Fellman What goes on behind closed doors in Iran (07/27/98) Mondo Weirdo No place like Oz In Japan, a bar with no alcohol or music, only coffee (07/24/98) Mondo Weirdo Nude beaches of the week Favorite places to bare all (07/24/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		tallest tree epiphany A father and son make a rainy redwood pilgrimage in Northern California. BY SIMON FIRTH | Visit any ancient English church and you're likely to find hidden somewhere within it a stone tomb, vault or gargoyle embossed with a large male head, his hair and beard a mass of branches, leaves spilling from his mouth. He'll be a Green Man -- originally a pagan god co-opted, as were many other local deities, by England's first Christians. For both the pagans and the Christians, the Green Man was a symbol of fertility, of the abundance of the forest, and represented the idea that humanity is inextricably intertwined with nature. My not-quite-so-ancient English father is not what you'd call a religious man -- he prefers to express his faith by being the gardener of, rather than a worshiper within, his local church -- but he does believe what both his pagan and his Christian forebears did: He's come to think of man and nature as inextricably entwined. Indeed, since his retirement from his previous life as an executive with an oil company, I've come to think of him as a sort of living Green Man. It's mainly because he's begun a love affair with trees. In the small southern English market town in which he lives, my Dad is now a local "tree warden" -- a kind of neighborhood tree guardian with quasi-legal power to stop you from harming his leafy friends. And he'll hike all over his local Hampshire countryside to find, photograph and otherwise admire trees. If you're driving or walking with him these days, you must be prepared to make long detours when a nice specimen is spotted. He's taken to carrying string with him to measure for "champions" (the biggest of their species), and if he doesn't have his string, he'll rope you into helping him measure it by arm spans. Given the chance, he'll have an entire walking party wrapping their arms around a trunk he needs to measure. It's tree-hugging the British way -- love expressed through categorization. So last month, when my parents traveled halfway around the world to visit me in Northern California and wanted to know what they should see, I was ready with the answer: We'll go see the big trees. In particular I thought we should go see the Tallest Tree in the World, a coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) that rises 367.8 feet above the banks of a creek deep inside Redwood National Park in California's Humboldt County. It would make a fitting climax, I thought, to a three-night trip up the north coast and back from our base near San Francisco. There'd be shopping in Mendocino, Eureka and Arcata for my mum, and trees, trees and more trees for my dad. Bliss for them both. Part of the appeal of the Tallest Tree was that you can't just drive up to it, get out of your car and walk a few feet to snap a picture before moving on. It's either a day's hike up a log-strewn creek or a four-hour round trip by car. Only 30-some cars a day are given permits to do the drive, and even then, when you get to the trailhead, there's an 800-foot descent before you get to see the tree. You really have to want to see it. Perfect, I thought, for my dad -- a tree pilgrimage. The plan was to spend the night before in Arcata, an ex-logging town that in the last two decades has turned into an eco-radical oasis and the only city in the United States to have a Green Party majority on its city council. We would leave my mother shopping in the book and craft stores or lounging in the local outdoors cafe/sauna, and then Dad and I would set off to see the tree. It would be father and son, bonding over what he loved (trees) and I loved (my newly adopted state of California). So off we went. We warmed up for our pilgrimage with a drive along the Avenue of the Giants. Some 80 miles south of Redwood National Forest, the Avenue of the Giants is a 32-mile road along the South Fork of the Eel River. Actually the old route of U.S. Highway 101 (the new and much straighter freeway runs parallel), this drive winds through whole series of magnificent stands of old growth redwoods. The Avenue is home to some of the hokiest tourist attractions this side of the Rockies (several "drive-thru" trees, the Chimney Tree and Hobbiton USA, the Immortal Tree Burl n' Drift Novelty store), but they barely register among the 51,222 acres of pristine forest. Everything was a lush green. In this wet El Niño year the wildflowers were late, so even though it was the end of May, we caught them at their stunning peak. Everything was still damp, the clouds ominous, but it was wonderfully quiet -- after Memorial Day but before school holidays. We had the forest to ourselves. Because El Niño still wasn't done, the summer footbridges that take visitors across creeks to many of the biggest trees were still not in place. To go see the "Giant Tree" -- the previous Tallest Tree in the World until the new Tallest Tree was discovered farther north, and now the second tallest tree in the world -- my Dad and I had to rough it a little. We got to ford a freezing and fast-flowing stream (quite dangerous!) and return (off the trail a little!) over fallen logs so huge we had to climb 20 feet just to begin our walk across. A good start: father and son ruggedly bonding while mother worried where they were -- and had her own drama when she was assaulted by over-familiar chipmunklike creatures (chickerees, we found out at the Visitors' Center) upset she had the effrontery to sit at a picnic table without a picnic. N E X T+P A G E | Among the "drainbows"