The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  At the height of the rise is a little clearing, slashed down with a chain saw. Someone has been out improving things. She produces her loupe from her key chain and applies it to one stump to estimate the number of rings. The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.

  That’s why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres. The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around. But then, as Dr. Westerford knows, the world’s outlands are everywhere, and trees like to toy with human thought like boys toy with beetles.

  Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson.

  Two thousand miles to the east, a student sculptor born into an Iowa farming family, on a pilgrimage to the Met, walks past the single quaking aspen in all of Central Park and doesn’t notice it. He’ll live to walk past the tree again, thirty years later, but only because of swearing to the Puccini heroine that no matter how bad things get, he won’t kill himself.

  To the north, up the curving spine of the Rockies, on a farm near Idaho Falls, a veteran airman, that very afternoon, builds horse stalls for a friend from his old squadron. It’s a pity hire, one that comes with room and board, and the vet plans to leave the gig as soon as he can. But for today, he makes the corral siding out of aspen. As poor as the wood is for lumber, it won’t shatter when a horse kicks it.

  In a St. Paul suburb not far from Lake Elmo, two aspens grow near the south wall of an intellectual property lawyer’s house. He’s only dimly aware of them, and when his free-spirit girlfriend asks, he tells her they’re birches. In time, two great strokes will lay the lawyer low, reducing all aspens, birches, beeches, pines, oaks, and maples to a single word that will take him half a minute to pronounce.

  On the West Coast, in the emerging Silicon Valley, a Gujarati-American boy and his father build primitive aspens out of chunky, black-and-white pixels. They’re writing a game that feels to the boy like walking through the forest primeval.

  These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.

  Years from now, she’ll write a book of her own, The Secret Forest. Its opening page will read:

  You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .

  She stands in the clearing at the top of the rise, looking out over a shallow gully. Aspens everywhere, and it boggles her mind that not one of them has grown from seed. All through this part of the West, few aspens have done so in ten thousand years. Long ago, the climate changed, and an aspen’s seeds can no longer thrive here. But they propagate by root; they spread. There are aspen colonies up north where the ice sheets were, older than the sheets themselves. The motionless trees are migrating—immortal stands of aspen retreating before the latest two-mile-thick glaciers, then following them back north again. Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. All the drama of the world is gathering underground—massed symphonic choruses that Patricia means to hear before she dies.

  She looks out over the draw to guess which way her male, this giant aspen clone, might be headed. He has been roving around the hills and gullies in a ten-millennium search for a female quaking giant to fertilize. Something on the next rise punches her in the chest. Carved out from the heart of the spreading clone, a housing development sits among a ribbon of new roads. Condos, a few days old, cut through several acres of the root system of one of the earth’s most lavish things. Dr. Westerford closes her eyes. She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

  IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES, Patricia heads northwest. Giants still grow in the Lower 48, pockets of old growth scattered from Northern California on up to Washington. She means to see what uncut forest looks like, while there is any left to see. The western Cascades in a damp September: nothing in her experience prepares her. From mid-distance, with no clue for scale, the trees seem no larger than the biggest sycamores and tulip poplars out East. But up close the illusion disappears, and she’s lost in reason’s opposite. All she can do is look and laugh and look some more.

  Hemlock, grand fir, yellow cedar, Douglas-fir: buttressed monster conifers disappear in the mist above her. Sitka spruces bulge out in burls as big as minivans—pound for pound, a wood stronger than steel. A single trunk could fill a large logging truck. Even runts here are big enough to dominate an eastern forest, and each acre holds at least five times as much wood. Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood. A knothole in one of these columns of solidified air could be her home.

  Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she’s underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her. She walks in silence, crunching ten thousand invertebrates with every step, watching for tracks in a place where at least one of the native languages uses the same word for footprint and understanding. The earth gives beneath her like a shot mattress.

  An exposed ridge takes her down into a basin. She swings her singing stick before her, and the temperature plummets as she passes through a thermal curtain. The canopy is a colander stippling the beetle-swarmed surfaces with specks of sun. For every large trunk, a few hundred seedlings huddle in the litter. Sword fern, liverworts, lichen, and leaves as small as sand grains stain every inch of the dank, downed logs. The mosses are themselves as dense as thumbnail forests.

  She presses on fissures of bark and her fingers sink in knuckle-deep. A bit of bushwhacking reveals the extent of the prodigious rot. Crumbling, creature-riddled boles, decaying for centuries. Snags gothic and twisted, silvery as inverted icicles. She has never inhaled such fecund putrefaction. The sheer mass of ever-dying life packed into each single cubic foot, woven together with fungal filaments and dew-betrayed spiderweb leaves her woozy. Mushrooms ladder up the sides of trunks in terraced ledges. Dead salmon feed the trees. Soaked by fog all winter long, spongy green stuff she can’t name covers every wooden pillar in thick baize reaching higher than her head.

  Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful. She sees the source of that forestry doctrine she so resisted in school. Looking at all this glorious decay, a person might be forgiven for thinking that old meant decadent, that such thick mats of decomposition were cellulose cemeteries in need of the rejuvenating ax. She sees why her kind will always dread these close, choked thickets, where the beauty of solo trees gives way to something massed, scary, and crazed. When the fable t
urns dark, when the slasher film builds to primal horror, this is where the doomed children and wayward adolescents must wander. There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.

  The prodigious forest pulls her along, past the trunk of an immense western red cedar. Her hand strokes the fibrous strips that peel from a fluted trunk whose girth rivals the height of an eastern dogwood. It reeks of incense. The top has sheared off, replaced by a candelabra of boughs promoted to stand-in trunks. A grotto opens at ground level in the rotted heartwood. Whole families of mammals could live inside it. But the branches, a thousand years on, drooping with scaly sprays a dozen stories above her, are still crammed full of cones.

  She addresses the cedar, using words of the forest’s first humans. “Long Life Maker. I’m here. Down here.” She feels foolish, at first. But each word is a little easier than the next.

  “Thank you for the baskets and the boxes. Thank you for the capes and hats and skirts. Thank you for the cradles. The beds. The diapers. Canoes. Paddles, harpoons, and nets. Poles, logs, posts. The rot-proof shakes and shingles. The kindling that will always light.”

  Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. “Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling. I forget. . . . Thank you,” she says, following the ancient formula. “For all these gifts that you have given.” And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back.”

  SHE FINDS WORK with the Bureau of Land Management. Wilderness ranger. The job description seems as miraculous as the outsized trees: Help preserve and protect for present and future generations places where man is a visitor who does not remain. The wild woman must don a uniform. But they pay her to be by herself, carry the welcome weight of a pack, read a topographic map, dig a water bar, look for smoke and fire, teach folks to leave no trace, follow the rhythms of the land, and live wholly within the arc of the year. To clean up after humankind, yes. To gather the endless twisties, baggies, six-pack rings, foil, cans, and bottle caps strewn through meadows of wildflower, on remote scenic outlooks, skewered in the boughs of noble firs, under cold running streams, behind waterfalls. She would gladly pay the government, to do that much.

  Her supervisor apologizes for the state of the cabin they give her, on the edge of an ancient cedar grove. There’s no running water, and the varmints outweigh the new biped in biomass, many times over. She can only laugh. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. It’s the Alhambra.”

  TOMORROW SHE’LL HIKE twenty-five miles, loosening the bolts on the signs attached to trailside trees, so their cambium can keep growing. There’s a spot on the other side of the ridge where the bark of a big spruce has swallowed an old Forest Service plaque from the forties that now says only BEWARE OF.

  The nightly rain starts. She goes out to the clearing and sits in the downpour, dressed only in a loose cotton shirt, listening to the wood put forth fresh cells. She comes back inside. In the kitchen, she lights the kerosene lamp with chunky strike-anywhere matches and takes the flame into the bedroom. The thump of a bushy-tailed wood rat telegraphs another raid on her worthless belongings. Last week it was a pair of barrettes. Too dark to search for the latest missing loot tonight. She sponges off over the cold-water zinc basin in the corner and gets in bed. No sooner does her ear listen in to the musty pillow than she’s transported to the ancestral vacation home, where the future still radiates endless forms most beautiful.

  . . .

  SHE WORKS for eleven blissful months. The wildlife never once threatens her, and deranged campers do so only twice. In the constant rain, everything grows mold. Monster trees suck up the downpour and respire it back into the air as steam. Spores spread across every damp surface. Both her legs sport athlete’s foot up to the knees. Sometimes, when she lies down and closes her eyes, she feels that moss will cover her lids by the time she opens them again. She labors for days to make a storage pad, hacking back the brush from a few square feet. By year’s end, the little nick in the undergrowth is covered again in shrub and saplings. She loves feeling that every headway man tries to make into the relentless green blitz will be crushed.

  UNKNOWN TO HER, while she rehabs backcountry fire rings and cleans up illegal campsites fouled with beer cans and toilet paper, an article appears. It’s published in a reputable journal, one of the best that humankind has managed. Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines. Their fragrances alert and awaken their neighbors. They can sense an attacking species and summon an air force to come to their aid. The authors cite her earlier, much-mocked article. They reproduce her findings and extend them into surprising places. Words of hers that she has all but forgotten have gone on drifting out on the open air, lighting up others, like a waft of pheromones.

  PATRICIA IS OUT ONE DAY in an unfamiliar drainage, sawing windthrow from a remote trail. She sees a motion in the undergrowth—the most dangerous game. Drawing nearer, she spies two researchers, a couple of vagabond scientists from that loose confederation who gather every summer in the flimsy trailers full of lab gear in a clearing a handful of miles from her own cabin. She dreads these run-ins with her old tribe. She always says as little as possible. Today, she holds back and watches. Through the woods, at this distance, the two men look like upright, blundering circus bears in lumberjack costumes.

  The pair bushwhack a little, closing in on a spot that interests them. One of the men hoots softly, a perfect, purring impersonation. She has heard the call at night, although she has never seen the caller. This imitation would fool her. The man calls again. Incredibly, something answers. A duet ensues: the bright, pert, human come-on, followed by the logy but obliging bird, hidden in the trees. A streak in the air, and the owl appears. Bird of wisdom and sorcerers. It’s the first Strix occidentalis Patricia has ever seen. Spotted owl: the endangered species that scientists propose to save by locking up billions of dollars of old growth, the only place it can live. It settles down, mythic, on a branch three yards from its seducers. Bird and men regard each other. One species takes pictures. The other just spins its head and blinks its enormous eyes. Then the owl is gone, followed, after further note-taking, by the humans, leaving Patricia Westerford wondering if she wakes or sleeps.

  Three weeks later, she’s near the same spot, pulling invasive plants. The thick, furry twigs of ailanthus suckers leave her fingers stinking of coffee and peanut butter. She climbs a switchback at a good clip and runs into the two researchers again. They’re several yards up the slope, kneeling by a downed log. Before she can flee, they see her and wave. Caught, she waves back and hikes up to them. The older man is on the ground, on his side, popping tiny creatures into specimen bottles.

  “Ambrosia beetles?” The two heads turn toward her, startled. Dead logs: the topic was her passion once, and she forgets herself. “When I was a student, my teacher told us that fallen trunks were nothing but obstacles and fire hazards.”

  The man on the ground looks up at her. “Mine said the same thing.”

  “ ‘Clear them off to improve forest health.’ ”

  “ ‘Burn them out for safety and cleanliness. Above all, keep them out of streams.’ ”

  “ ‘Lay down the law and get the stagnant place producing again!’ ”

  All three of them chuckle. But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound. Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

  “Well,” the man on the ground says, “I’m sticking it to the old bastard now!”

  Patricia smiles, hope pushing through the ache like a breeze through rai
n. “What are you studying?”

  “Fungi, arthropods, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, frass, webs, denning, soil. . . . Everything we can catch a dead log doing.”

  “How long have you been at it?”

  The two men trade looks. The younger man hands down another sample bottle. “We’re six years in.”

  Six years, in a field where most studies last a few months. “Where on earth did you find funding for that long?”

  “We’re planning to study this particular log until it’s gone.”

  She laughs again, a little wilder. A cedar trunk on the wet forest floor: their grad students’ great-great-great-grandchildren will have to finish the project. Science, in her absence, has gone as crazy as she always thought it should be. “You’ll disappear long before it does.”

  The man on the ground sits up. “Best thing about studying the forest. You’re dead by the time the future can blame you for missing the obvious!” He looks at her as if she, too, is worth researching. “Dr. Westerford?”

  She blinks, as baffled as any owl. Then she remembers her uniform badge, on her chest for anybody to read. But that Doctor. He could only have gotten that from her buried past. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t remember ever meeting you.”

  “You haven’t! I heard you talk, years ago. Forest studies conference, in Columbus. Airborne signaling. I was so impressed, I ordered offprints of your article.”

  That wasn’t me, she wants to say. That was somebody else. Someone lying dead and rotting somewhere.