Live Oaks 145 
A brook from the cafion flows sinuously 
through this grove, bordered with alders, 
which in California are large trees, and with 
sycamores everywhere bending gracefully 
over the water, their trunks a mottled grey 
and white and their branches as tortuous and 
as drooping as those of the live oak itself. 
Ascending one of these sycamores, an army of 
red ants crosses the stream by interlacing 
twigs and descends a tree on the opposite 
bank. All through the winter I find them 
using this natural bridge. The oaks, unlike 
the sycamores, avoid the water’s edge. Scat- 
tered beneath them are boulders, large and 
small and of all conceivable shapes, which 
have seen many oaks—many groves—come 
and go; veritable antiques, mottled with 
lichens, and slowly sinking beneath the surface 
of the soil. Time and the elements have per- 
forated the boulders and hollowed grotesque 
miniature caverns within their rotund and 
massive bodies, revealing their yellow hearts. 
When it rains, and there are protracted 
rains and many cloudy days, the oaks droop 
nearer and nearer the earth and the groves 
become cavernous as grottoes of the sea, 
Birds hide and the army of ants no longer 
crosses to and fro upon the slender bridge. 
10 
