A drive along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway in the Redwood National & State Parks is nice: Sunlight and morning mist filter through some of the biggest trees in the system. But if you want to get up close and intimate with the trees – so close, in fact, that you fear for your bumper – take the Howland Hill Road in the northernmost section of the park.

This is the Jedediah Smith State Park (Redwood shares responsibilities between state and federal units) near Crescent City, California. The road rises quickly from the coast and doesn’t narrow so much as the trees seem to crowd it, emphasizing that you are in their territory now, and you are the stranger.

Like many strangers, I look for a welcome, but the trees are not anything if not aloof. Aloof, and aloft – their 300-foot crowns lost above. My world is at their feet, amidst trunks as wide as my car, surrounded by wet wooden walls strung with running colors – black and green and yellow and, of course, red.

My traveling partner and I get out at the Stout Grove, a short circle trail that allows us to foot it over mushy red fibers on the forest path, which is edged with brilliant green sorrel. We can touch the trunks here, lean back and look for those elusive treetops. I feel small – and yet not insignificant.

It’s a contradiction I don’t understand until I brush up against a redwood branch and feel its surprisingly short, soft needles. As massive as the trees are, they depend on these little green units to manufacture food. The needles are no bigger that a grain of rice, which provides me about as good a metaphor as I can come up with to explain my sense of place in this world of the immense: I too am a small but not unuseful part of the whole.

On the following day and farther down the coast, I hike alone along the Lost Man Creek trail, not feeling particularly lost myself, but strangely muted. The woods are muted as well, and I realize that unlike most forests I have been in, this is an almost exclusively visual experience. There is almost no sound, not even dripping from the saturated branches, and there is no astringent pine scent rising high in the nostrils: The smell here is a low, fungal dampness, all forest floor and fog, which still drifts through the trees.

Near the trailhead I had passed a sign commemorating the day in the 1980s when Redwoods had been declared a World Heritage Site. The sign reminded me of when I was a kid in the 1960s and the debate had raged over creating the Redwood National Park to begin with. I remember the cries about property rights, logging losses, economic impacts – blah, blah, blah.

Now I pause on the trail and hear, finally, the wash of Lost Man Creek itself – undisturbed, undisturbing. Peaceful and in place.