In 1024, a squirrel with poor judgment flings a seed the size of an oat flake into a bed of warm ash on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada. A thousand and two years later, that seed is nine feet through, leaning eleven degrees west, charred to the ninetieth foot, and thoroughly out of patience.
Thick-Skinned is the memoir of a giant sequoia who has watched the gold rush, the auger crews who killed a tree to prove it existed, the men who skinned another one for a touring exhibit, the century when humans loved these groves so much they stopped letting them burn - and the morning a fire crew arrived at dawn and gave his neighbor a coat.