There’s a tree that grows along the rain-soaked edge of North America where the mountains tumble into the Pacific and the ocean seems to hang permanently in the air.
Given the right patch of earth and enough time, it becomes immense. Two hundred feet tall. Five, eight, even ten feet across. It can live seven or eight centuries, standing through storms that flatten younger trees and outlasting generations of bears, salmon and people. On the wet coast of Southeast Alaska, its roots disappear beneath moss and fern while its trunk rises through the forest like a column, straight and enormous, its crown lost somewhere overhead.
Farther north, the summers shorten and growth slows. Each year the tree lays down another narrow band of wood beneath its bark, then another, and another. Decades become centuries. The rings crowd together. The wood they produce is pale, straight-grained and astonishingly strong for its weight. Its long fibers …
