When I was 10, I discovered in my grandmother’s boxes in the attic (repository of endless treasure), a slick, old B&W postcard of the “Drive-Thru Tree,” nestled deep within the 40-mile Avenue of the Giants, near Redwood National Park in far-northern CA. For a kid who’d never been west of Pennsylvania, this set up all kinds of mental images: a vast and limitless West full of gargantuan possibilities, jumbo natural wonders, and trees so tall they gave NYC skyscrapers a run for their money. I had of course heard Woody Guthrie’s folk tune about the ribbon of highway leading to such marvels, and I knew I wanted a piece of it. The idea of a West so fabulous that one could drive through a tree trunk introduced a whole new sense of scale. In trees—and everything else. This summer, on my way north from San Luis Obispo back to Oregon, I finally realized my dream of wandering through the Land o’ the Giants. Better yet, I spent more than an hour photographing THE Drive-Thru Tree (actually, there are 3 in this area), in Myers Flat. And though many of my photos are speckled with raindrops, I must say the attraction did not disappoint. While a lighting nightmare for my camera, laying down inside the base of a tree is a wonderful feeling. Less so when cars are driving through. And because this tree has been hollowed like a pumpkin, it offers both containment and perspective.
During my visit, I wandered over to the Shrine Drive-Thru Tree Gift Shop, a bleak, fluorescently lighted, harvest-gold-carpeted room selling various shellacked wooden tchochkes and a few postcards, including a couple of the Step-Thru Stump, which I also documented with my Mavica. In the end, I settled for the postcard that came free with admission, handed to me by a 60ish lady with a strong accent. We spoke for a few moments, and I asked her if she were from Italy. She told me that her roots were in Spain, via a small country called El Salvador, and asked me if I had heard of it. I was loathe to explain to her that, during the Reagan era, some of us American do-gooders fervently desired to visit her country and neighboring Nicaragua and support, even "liberate," their war-ravaged people. I decided against explaining to her that I had once romanticized Central America as a place where great poets and artists dwelled in beautiful, lush, natural environments (at least until Somoza got there). We spent a few minutes talking about her journey northward, and how she had married her North American husband, the proprietor of the Drive-Thru Tree and Ancillary Stumps and Wooded Attractions. Sounding terribly depressed, she mostly stared away from me or looked at the floor as we spoke. After several decades in the US, her English was still quite broken.I thought to myself, what odd karma to have been born in wartime El Salvador and end up selling trinkets at the gift shop of the Drive-Thru Tree, in a remote town in the midst of a megaforest, in a place that rains constantly and where there’s very little to do or see other than gi-normous conifers and people peering up at them and exclaiming, “Oh, wow.” I wondered how she’d even begun to explain the concept of “roadside attraction” to her relatives back in Central America.
“Johnny struck it big in Vegas last weekend, so now we’re gonna move to Avenue of the Giants and buy the Drive-Thru Tree!”To her relatives, this might seem the height of bourgeois luxury, the very essence of having attained LARGE-scale success in Estados Unidos. Clearly she had penetrated the A List, the B List--and even the Tree List! Partying with Jackie and Ari Onassis on the "Christina O" every week. Or maybe they just give her a hard time for not being privileged enough to own the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree, Dyerville’s World’s Biggest Tree, or the crème de la creme, the Immortal Tree (complete with Burl ‘n’ Drift Novelty Gifts).
