Standing Proud in a Place of Beauty and Challenge

“They (cypress trees) stand proud in a place of beauty and challenge, like those who call California home."

When we first read this sentence, part of a description of the fabulous Point Lobos Natural State Reserve, in the pages of Via, the magazine of the American Automobile Association, my husband and I laughed.  I thought, “Ha!  This can be my column about California this week, making fun of the Via magazine, a not too difficult task.” 

But I happened to visit Point Lobos this week.  I had with me a friend from the east, so I saw it through her eyes as well, and when I sat down to read the Via description again, the words didn’t seem so silly.  Especially about the cypresses and how they symbolize California. 

Here’s the whole passage:

"Best State Park in California: Point Lobos!

“You could spend a lifetime studying California's natural beauty and human history.  Or you could visit Point Lobos State Reserve.  Just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, this promontory of rocky fingers, hidden coves and coastal woods alongside the powerful Pacific distills the state's essence.....(info on the reserve's trails, flowers, animals, history....)

“The park's soul is its stand of Monterey cypress trees, easily accessed by the one-mile Cypress Grove Trail.  The trees have been torqued into spectral shapes by the wind and salt spray, their roots clinging to rocks. 

“They stand proud in a place of beauty and challenge, like those who call California home."

“Californians stand proud?” my husband asked. “We just live here and do the best we can.”  He is a humble man, and I think "pride" feels too self-centered to him.  Look at me, I'm a wonderful Californian.  I, on the other hand, some years younger than him, while all too aware how pride can be arrogance, also experience pride as affirmation – I’m proud to be…..a Streeter, for example, I’m proud of my family.  (Can’t quite say, I’m proud to be an American, especially these days….)

In fact, both meanings of “pride” describe well our state's character – we are a bit arrogant about how great we are, so far superior to the rest of the country.  But we also practically invented self-affirmation and self-actualization, so we take genuine pride in who we are.  So for good or ill, we do “stand proud.”

And ours is certainly a place of both “beauty and challenge.”  We do brag, both correctly and obnoxiously, about our beautiful weather, ocean, Sierras and beautiful communities like San Francisco and the Napa Valley and Malibu.  And challenges - we've got a few.  Earthquake, fire, drought, climate change.  Income disparity, racial tension, paved paradise. 

But for today, let’s just consider the cypress tree. Is it a good symbol for California, and if so, how?

I was a volunteer docent at Point Lobos for many years and as part of my service there I edited a collection of poems inspired by Point Lobos by many different poets.  Several were about the cypress trees, and my favorite was by Carmel poet Dora Hagemeyer, written in 1940.

Cypress Trees at Point Lobos

Food from the granite
Stone for the hungry root-
Storm for the rugged shoot.

What slow flame
Struggles to triumph here
Year upon difficult year?

What desperate faith
Writhes in these twisted limbs,
Sings in the wordless hymns?

When the rock splits
They wrestle with each other,
Brother contrives with brother

For writhing’s sake.
No peace can smooth or define
A curve, a delicate line.

Summers burn blue –
Yet the torture wrought in the seed
In anguished form is freed

Torture and triumph!
These for whom pain is duty
Stand in their desperate beauty.

Sounds like beauty and challenge to me, the torture wrought in the seed, anguished form, wrestling brothers, desperate faith writhing in twisted limbs.

Or as the Via author wrote, “torqued into spectral shapes.”  Torqued sounds to me like a techy word, something done by a tool, not wind and wave.  I looked it up: 1. Torque is the measure of a force’s tendency to produce torsion or rotation about an axis, equal to the product of the force vector and the radius vector from the axis of rotation to the point of application of the force; the moment of a force.  2. A turning or twisting force.

Was it intentional that the author chose a techy word to describe these 300-year-old trees?  Tech is surely part of the California story also.  But these old yogis of the forest are decidedly un-techy.  That’s part of their beauty.  And challenge. 

Some people comment that cypresses remind them of gnarled trees in Japanese and Chinese prints.  There is a sweet but unlikely legend that the first cypresses were brought to Central California and Point Lobos by the Chinese fisherman who actually did sail here in the 1840’s on their junks, maybe bringing seedlings all the way across the Pacific?  There is a distinctly Asian influence and vibe in California, and we do tend to look west to Asia for values and art and culture as much as we do east, so I like the pseudo Asian feel of the cypresses, themselves looking west.

Perhaps the cypress, with its sturdy strength and resilience symbolizes not so much today’s Anglo Californians, but its immigrants, from the 1600’s to today.  They came and they come not just from the east, but also from the west and south.  Their journeys were and are hard, their lives here a daily struggle for survival.  But they persist, they root, as the cypress are deeply rooted.  Their descendants, more like my husband than me, are sturdy and strong, but more humble than brash.  Yet proud, very proud.

Like the cypress. 

Copyright © 2019 Deborah Streeter