The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  Bill Westerford takes Patricia with him when he visits southwestern Ohio farms on his tours as an ag extension agent. She rides copilot in the beaten-up Packard with the pine side paneling. The war is over, the world is on the mend, the country is drunk on science, key to better living, and Bill Westerford takes his daughter out to see the world.

  Patty’s mother objects to the trips. The girl should be in school. But her father’s soft authority prevails. “She won’t learn more anywhere than she will with me.”

  Mile after plowed mile, they hold their roving tutorial. He faces her so she can read his moving lips. She laughs at his stories —thick, slow booms—and stabs enthusiastic answers to each of his questions. Which is more numerous: the stars in the Milky Way or the chloroplasts on a single leaf of corn? Which trees flower before they leaf, and which flower after? Why are the leaves at the top of trees often smaller than those at the bottom? If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?

  She loves the answer to that last one: Four feet. Still four feet. Always four feet, however high the beech tree grows. She’ll love that answer still, half a century later.

  In this way, acorn animism turns bit by bit into its offspring, botany. She becomes her father’s star and only pupil for the simple reason that she alone, of all the family, sees what he knows: plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people. He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise. People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

  “It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.”

  He teaches her to tell a shellbark from a shagbark hickory. No one else at her school can even tell a hickory from a hop hornbeam. The fact strikes her as bizarre. “Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?”

  “Plant-blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain’t it, kiddo?”

  Her father has a little trouble with Homo sapiens himself. He’s caught between fine folks whose family farms are failing to subdue the Earth and companies that want to sell them the arsenal to bring about total dominion. When the frustrations of the day grow too much for him, he sighs and says, for Patty’s impaired ears alone, “Ah, buy me a hillside that slopes away from town.”

  They drive through a land once covered in dark beech forest. “Best tree you could ever want to see.” Strong and wide but full of grace, flaring out nobly at the base, into its own plinth. Generous with nuts that feed all comers. Its smooth, white-gray trunk more like stone than wood. The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter—marcescent, he tells her—shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods. Elegant with sturdy boughs so much like human arms, lifting upward at the tips like hands proffering. Hazy and pale in spring, but in autumn its flat, wide sprays bathe the air in gold.

  “What happened to them?” The girl’s words thicken when sadness weighs them down.

  “We did.” She thinks she hears her father sigh, though he never takes his eyes off the road. “The beech told the farmer where to plow. Limestone underneath, covered in the best, darkest loam a field could want.”

  They drive from farm to farm, between last year’s blights and next year’s vanishing topsoil. He shows her extraordinary things: the spreading cambium of a sycamore that swallowed up the crossbar of an old Schwinn someone left leaning against it decades ago. Two elms that draped their arms around each other and became one tree.

  “We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

  Her father is her water, air, earth, and sun. He teaches her how to see a tree, the living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man has yet figured out. He drives them to a copse of spared hardwoods in the bottoms of a slow stream. “Here! Look at this. Look at this!” A patch of narrow stalks, each with big, drooping leaves. A sheepdog of trees. He makes her sniff the giant spoonlike foliage, crushed. It smells acrid, like blacktop. He picks up a thick yellow pickle from the ground and holds it to her. She has rarely seen him so excited. He takes his army knife and cuts the fruit in half, exposing the buttery pulp and shiny black seeds. The flesh makes her want to scream with pleasure. But her mouth is full of butterscotch pudding.

  “Pawpaw! The only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics. Biggest, best, weirdest, wildest native fruit this continent ever made. Growing native, right here in Ohio. And nobody knows!”

  They know. The girl and her father. She’ll never tell anyone the location of this patch. It will be theirs alone, fall after prairie-banana fall.

  Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

  He finds her out in the backyard making birds from the twinned wings of maple samaras. An odd look comes over his face. He holds up one of the seeds and points it toward the giant that shed it. “Have you noticed how it releases more seeds in updrafts than when the wind is blowing downward? Why is that?”

  These questions are her favorite thing in the world. She thinks. “Travels farther?”

  He puts his finger to his nose. “Bingo!” He looks at the tree and frowns, working through old puzzlements all over again. “Where do you think all the wood comes from, to get from this little thing to that?”

  Wild guess. “The dirt?”

  “How could we find out?”

  They design the experiment together. They put two hundred pounds of soil in a wooden tub by the south face of the barn. Then they extract a three-angled beechnut from its cupule, weigh it, and push it into the loam.

  “If you see a trunk carved full of letters, it’s a beech. People can’t help writing all over that smooth gray surface. God love ’em. They want to watch their lettered hearts growing bigger, year after year. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!”

  He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters. Patty pictures their tiny seed growing up to be covered with words. But where will the mass of such a massive book come from?

  “We’ll keep the tub moist and free of weeds for the next six years. When you turn sweet sixteen, we’ll weigh the tree and the soil again.”

  She hears him, and understands. This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

  IN TIME, she gets almost as good as her father at telling what’s wilting or gnawing on a farmer’s crops. He stops quizzing her and starts consulting, not in front of the farmers, of course, but later, back in the car, when they have the luxury of thinking through the infestations as a team.

  On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. It’s inscribed: For my dear daughter, who knows how big and wide the family tree really is. Patricia opens the book to the first sentence and reads:

  Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

  At those words, she’s back where acorns are a step away from faces and pine cones compose the bodies of angels. She reads the book. The stories are odd and fluid, as old as humankind. They’re somehow familiar, as if she were born knowing them. The fables seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things s
omehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away. By now Patricia’s body is well along its own tortured metamorphosis into something she in no way wants. The new flare to her chest and hips, the start of a patch between her legs turns her, too, halfway into a more ancient beast.

  She loves best the stories where people change into trees. Daphne, transformed into a bay laurel just before Apollo can catch and harm her. The women killers of Orpheus, held fast by the earth, watching their toes turn into roots and their legs into woody trunks. She reads of the boy Cyparissus, whom Apollo converts into a cypress so that he might grieve forever for his slain pet deer. The girl turns beet-, cherry-, apple-red at the story of Myrrha, changed into a myrtle after creeping into her father’s bed. And she cries at that steadfast couple, Baucis and Philemon, spending the centuries together as oak and linden, their reward for taking in strangers who turned out to be gods.

  Her fifteenth autumn comes. The days shorten. Night falls early, signaling the trees to drop their sugar-making project, shed all vulnerable parts, and harden up. Sap falls. Cells become permeable. Water flows out of the trunks and concentrates into anti-freeze. The dormant life just below the bark is lined with water so pure that nothing is left to help it crystallize.

  Her father explains how the trick is done. “Think about it! They’ve figured out how to live trapped in place, with no other protection, whipped by winds at thirty below zero.”

  Later that winter, Bill Westerford is coming home from a field trip after sundown when the Packard hits a patch of black ice. He’s thrown from the car as it flips off the road into a ditch. His body flies for twenty-five feet before crashing into a row of Osage orange that farmers planted for a hedge a century and a half earlier.

  At the funeral, Patty reads from Ovid. The promotion of Baucis and Philemon to trees. Her brothers think she has lost her mind with grief.

  She won’t let her mother throw anything out. She keeps his walking stick and porkpie hat in a kind of shrine. She preserves his precious library—Aldo Leopold, John Muir, his botany texts, the Ag Extension pamphlets he helped to write. She finds his copy of adult Ovid, marked all over, as people mark beeches. The underscores start, triple, on the very first line: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

  HIGH SCHOOL tries to kill her. Viola in the orchestra, the maple howling with old hillside memories, under her chin. Photography and volleyball. She has two almost-friends who understand the reality of animals, at least, if not quite plants. She shuns all jewelry, dresses in flannel and denim, carries a Swiss Army knife, and wears her long hair wrapped around her skull in braids.

  A stepfather arrives, one who’s smart enough not to try to reform her. There’s a trauma involving a quiet boy who dreams for two years of taking her to the senior prom, a boy whose dream must die from a white-oak stake through the heart.

  In the summer of her eighteenth year, preparing to head to Eastern Kentucky to study botany, she remembers the beech growing in its tub of soil, out by the barn. Shame rushes through her: How could she have forgotten the experiment? She has missed her promise to her father by two years. Skipped sweet sixteen altogether.

  She spends an entire July afternoon freeing the tree from the soil and crumbling every thimble of dirt from its roots. Then she weighs both the plant and the earth it fed on. The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air. Her father knew this. Now she does, too.

  She replants their experiment in a spot behind the house where she and her father liked to sit on summer nights and listen to what other people called silence. She remembers what he told her about the species. People, God love ’em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

  Before she goes away to school, she puts the tiniest notch in the smooth gray booklike bark of the trunk with her army knife, four feet above the ground.

  EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY turns her into someone else. Patricia blooms like something southern-facing. The air of the sixties crackles as she crosses campus, a change in the weather, the smell of days lengthening, the scent of possibility breaking the cast of outdated thought, a clear wind rolling down from the hills.

  Her dorm room overflows with potted plants. She’s not the only one on her floor to fit a botanical garden between the student desk and bunk bed. But her plants are the only ones with strips of data taped to their terra-cotta pots. Where her friends grow baby’s breath and blue-eyed violets, she grows tickseed and partridge pea and other experiments. And yet, she also cares for a bonsai juniper that looks to be a thousand years old, a spiky haiku of a creature with no scientific purpose whatsoever.

  The girls from upstairs come down some nights to check on her. They’ve made her into a pet project. Let’s get Plant-Patty drunk. Let’s fix Plant-Patty up with that beatnik econ guy. They mock her studiousness and laugh at her calling. They force her to listen to Elvis. They slip her into sleeveless sheaths and pile up her hair in a bouffant. They call her the Queen of Chlorophyll. She’s not of the herd. She doesn’t always hear them well, and when she does, their words don’t always make sense. And yet her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.

  Sophomore year, Patty gets a job in the campus greenhouses—two hours stolen every morning before classes. Genetics, plant physiology, and organic chemistry take her through evening. She studies every night at her carrel until the library closes. Then she reads for pleasure until she falls asleep. She does try the books her friends are reading: Siddhartha, Naked Lunch, On the Road. But nothing else moves her more than Peattie’s Natural Histories, books from her father’s shelves. Now they’re her endless refreshment. Their phrases branch and turn to catch the sun:

  Thrones have crumbled and new empires arisen; great ideas have been born and great pictures painted, and the world revolutionized by science and invention; and still no man can say how many centuries this Oak will endure or what nations and creeds it may outlive. . . .

  Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .

  And of her father’s beloved tree:

  Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground . . .

  She never exactly becomes a swan. Yet the senior who emerges out of freshman ugly ducklinghood knows what she loves and how she intends to spend her life, and that’s a novelty among the youth of any year. Those she doesn’t scare away come sniff her out, this keen, homely, forthright girl who has escaped the stoop of constant social compliance. To her astonishment, she even has suitors. Something about her perks boys up. Not her looks, of course, but an ever-so-slightly head-turning quality to her walk that they can’t quite place. Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

  When boys come calling, she makes them take her for a picnic lunch in Richmond Cemetery—serving the needs of dead people since 1848. Sometimes they flee, and that’s that. If they stick around and mention the trees, she’ll see them again. Desire, she scribbles into her field notebooks, turns out to be infinitely varied, the sweetest of evolution’s tricks. And in the pollen storms of spring, even she turns out to be a more than adequate flower.

  One boy sticks around, month after month. Andy, the English major. He plays in the orchestra with her and loves Hart Crane and O’Neill and Moby-Dick, although he can’t say why. He can get birds to land on his shoulder. He’s waiting for something to come and redeem his aimless life. One night, over cribbage, he says he thinks it might be her. She takes him by the hand and leads him to her narrow bed. Clumsy and green, they peel back the shields of clothing.
Ten minutes later, she’s turned into a tree just a little too late to be spared.

  REAL LIFE STARTS in graduate school. There are mornings in West Lafayette when Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school. She feels unworthy. Purdue pays her to take classes that she has craved for years. She gets food and lodging for teaching undergraduate botany, something she’d gladly pay to do. And her research demands long days in the Indiana woods. It’s an animist’s heaven.

  But by her second year, the catch becomes clear. In a seminar on forest management, the professor declares that snags and windthrow should be cleaned up from the forest floor and pulped, to improve forest health. That doesn’t seem right. A healthy forest must need dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds turn them to use, and small mammals, and more forms of insects lodge and dine on them than science has ever counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data. All she has is the intuition of a girl who grew up playing in the forest litter.

  Soon, she sees. Something is wrong with the entire field, not just at Purdue, but nationwide. The men in charge of American forestry dream of turning out straight clean uniform grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment and economic maturity. She’s sure these men who run the field will have to fall, next year or the year after. And up from the downed trunks of their beliefs will spring rich new undergrowth. That’s where she’ll thrive.

  She preaches this covert revolution to her undergrads. “You’ll look back in twenty years, amazed at what every smart person in forestry took to be self-evident truth. It’s the refrain of all good science: ‘How could we not have seen?’ ”

  She works well with her fellow grads. She goes to the barbecues and hootenannies and manages to take part in departmental gossip while remaining her own little sovereign state. One night there’s a dizzy, warm, wild misunderstanding with a woman in plant genetics. Patricia puts the embarrassed fumble away in a drawer of her heart and never takes it out again, even to look at.