visiting, including my favorite, Giant Tree, as well as the Flatiron Tree, and the Albino Redwood—a tree not many people knew how to find, but I did.
I suggested we leave early so we had the whole day to explore. I also wanted to make sure October was coming down off her trip before we drove home.
As we were making our plans, October pulled out her phone and said, “Before I get too excited, let me text Rae to see if she can spend the night with Diego.”
She began typing, and I let her words sink in.
“Wha . . . huh?” I stuttered, my brow furrowing against my will. “You want to spend the night there? Together?”
She paused, biting at her thumbnail while she pondered my question, as if the trouble with the idea had only just occurred to her. “Well, I thought . . . I mean . . . We certainly can’t drive home on drugs, right?”
“I’m not planning on doing the drugs. I’m planning on supervising.”
“Joe, no. You can’t let me do them alone.”
My stomach felt like it had been tossed off the top of a tall building.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s a long way to go for just a few hours. If we find somewhere to crash for the night, we can spend a lot more time with the trees.”
I didn’t want to be responsible for making a decision like this. On the one hand it seemed like a horrible idea for us to go away together overnight; on the other hand there was nothing I wanted more than to spend the night in the middle of an ancient redwood forest with her.
She touched my arm and said, “It’ll be fine. We’re friends, remember? Friends do this kind of stuff. Don’t worry.”
I wasn’t worried. I was terrified. And weak.
“We can get separate rooms if that makes you feel better. However, if I’m still tripping when I go to sleep, I’m going to need you to sit by my bed and make sure I don’t die.”
I laughed. “You’re not going to die.”
She laughed too. But then she got serious. “Really though, if you don’t feel comfortable with this, I understand. I can ask Rae to go with me.”
I scoffed. “You cannot do mushrooms with Rae.”
Her megawatt smile returned. “OK. What I’m hearing you say is that it’s cool and you’ll take me?” She raised her phone. “Blink once for no and twice for text Rae about the dog.”
My conscience wrestled with all the other parts of me and lost, because as much as I believed no was the correct answer, I blinked twice, and the words that came out of my mouth were “It’s cool. Text away.”
“Thank you! I promise it will be fun!”
Fun was not what concerned me.
She pushed “Send,” and we waited for a response. Less than two minutes later, Rae wrote back and told October she would be at Casa Diez by seven.
The next morning I walked down to Equator before Rae got to the house—I didn’t want her to see me leave with October.
October picked me up at the cafe a little after seven, asked if I minded driving, and then climbed over the middle console to the passenger’s side of the car.
As we headed north on US 101, she propped her feet up on the dashboard and reclined her seat as if she were relaxing on a beach lounger. She had my redwoods book in her lap and was reading facts aloud—facts I already knew—but I let her go on because her reverence for the trees made me feel closer to her.
“Redwoods have been around for 240 million years!” she gasped. “That’s before humans.”
“Yup. Before birds and spiders, even.”
“They can live to be two thousand years old? Jesus. It doesn’t seem fair that a tree gets to live for centuries and all we get is a handful of measly decades.”
“You’d really want to live for a thousand years?”
“You wouldn’t?”
“I’ve barely made it this far.” It was warm in the car, and I asked October to hold the wheel while I took off my fleece jacket. “Anyway, trees are so much smarter, stronger, and more reliable than humans. If we could actually live that long, imagine how much more fucked up the Earth would be.” I tossed my jacket into the back seat. “Who am I kidding? We would have destroyed the Earth by now. We’d be long gone.”
“That’s very pessimistic, Joey.” A minute later she said, “Wait. The coast redwood is actually a