The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “They hit you pretty hard.”

  She shrugs. The younger scientist looks on like a kid on a visit to the Smithsonian.

  “I knew you’d be vindicated.” Her bafflement is enough to tell him everything. Why she’s in the uniform of a wilderness ranger. “Patricia. I’m Henry. This is Jason. Come visit the station.” His voice is soft but urgent, like there’s something at stake. “You’ll want to see what our group is doing. You’ll want to learn what your work’s been up to, while you were gone.”

  BY DECADE’S END, Dr. Westerford makes her most surprising discovery of all: she may just love her fellow men. Not all of them, but robustly and with enduring green gratitude, at least those three dozen regulars who take her in and make a home for her in the Dreier Research Station, Franklin Experimental Forest, the Cascades, where she spends several dozen months in a row that are happier and more productive than she imagined possible. Henry Fallows, the group’s senior scientist, puts her on a grant. Two other research teams from Corvallis add her to their payrolls. Money is tight, but they give her a mildewed trailer in the Ghetto in the Meadow and access to the mobile lab—all the reagents and pipettes she needs. The latrines and the community showers are sinful indulgences, compared to her BLM cabin, with its frigid sponge baths on the porch at night. Then there’s cooked food, in the shared mess hall, although some days she’s so immersed in work that someone must come remind her that it’s time to eat again.

  Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld. A scattering of scientific papers vindicates her original work in airborne semaphores. Young researchers find supporting evidence, in species after species. Acacias alert other acacias to prowling giraffes. Willows, poplars, alders: all are caught warning each other of insect invasion across the open air. It makes no difference, her rehabilitation. She doesn’t much care what happens, outside this forest. All the world she needs is here, under this canopy—the densest biomass anywhere on Earth. Steep, steely streams scour through rickles of rock where salmon spawn—water cold enough to kill all pain. Falls flash over ridges turned jade by moss and tumbled with shed branches. In the scattered openings, shot here and there through the understory, sit secret congregations of salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, snowberry, devil’s club, ocean spray, and kinnikinnick. Great straight conifer monoliths fifteen stories high and a car-length thick hold a roof above all. The air around her resounds with the noise of life getting on with it. Cheebee of invisible winter wrens. Industrial pock from jackhammering woodpeckers. Warbler buzz. Thrush flutter. The scatterings of beeping grouse across the forest floor. At night, the cool hoot of owls chills her blood. And, always, the tree frogs’ song of eternity.

  Through this Eden, her colleagues’ astonishing discoveries confirm her suspicions. Slow, long observation makes a laughingstock of what people think about trees. In a nutshell: the rich brown batter of soil—itself mostly unknown microbes and invertebrates, perhaps a million species—channels decay and builds on death in ways she only now begins to suss out. It thrills her to sit at meals and be part of the laughter and shared data, the dizzy network trading in discoveries. The whole group of them, looking. Birders, geologists, microbiologists, ecologists, evolutionary zoologists, soil experts, high priests of water. Each of them knows innumerable minute, local truths. Some work on projects designed to run for two hundred years or more. Some are straight out of Ovid, humans on their way to turning into greener things. Together, they form one great symbiotic association, like the ones they study.

  Turns out that the temperate jungle’s million invisible tangled loops need every kind of death-brokering intermediary to keep the circuits coursing. Clean up such a system, and the countless self-replenishing wells run dry. This gospel of new forestry is confirmed by the most wonderful findings: beards of lichen high in the air, that grow only on the oldest trees and inject essential nitrogen back into the living system. Subterranean voles that feed on truffles and spread the spores of angel fungi across the forest floor. Fungi that infuse into the roots of trees in partnerships so tight it’s hard to say where one organism leaves off and the other begins. Hulking conifers that sprout adventitious roots high in the canopy that dip back down to feed on the mats of soil accumulating in the vees of their own branches.

  Patricia gives herself to Douglas-firs. Arrow-straight, untapering, soaring up a hundred feet before the first branch. They’re an ecosystem unto themselves, hosting more than a thousand species of invertebrates. Framer of cities, king of industrial trees, that tree without which America would have been a very different proposition. Her favorite individuals stand scattered near the station. She can find them by headlamp. The largest of them must be six centuries old. He’s so tall, so near the upper limits imposed by gravity, that it takes a day and a half for him to lift water from his roots to the highest of his sixty-five million needles. And every branch smells of deliverance.

  The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. . . . It will take years for the picture to emerge. There will be findings, unbelievable truths confirmed by a spreading worldwide web of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia, all happily swapping data through faster and better channels. Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.

  THE MEN want her to come back to Corvallis and teach.

  “I’m not good enough. I don’t really know anything yet.”

  “That doesn’t stop us!”

  But Henry Fallows tells her to think about it. “Let’s talk when you’re

  ready.”

  . . .

  THE RESEARCH STATION MANAGER, Dennis Ward, drops by with little gifts, when he’s on site. Wasps’ nests. Insect galls. Pretty stones polished by the creeks. Their standing arrangement reminds Patricia of the one she had with the pack rat she shared her BLM cabin with. Regular visits, lightning and shy, trading in worthless trinkets. Then days of hiding. And just as Patricia once warmed to her resident pack rat, so she grows fond of this gentle, slow-moving man.

  Dennis brings her dinner one night. It’s an act of pure foraging. Mushroom-hazel casserole, with bread he has baked in a cloche laid in a brush burn. Tonight’s conversation is not inspired. It rarely is, and she’s grateful enough for that. “How’re the trees?” he asks, as he always does. She tells him what she can, minus the biochemistry.

  “Walk?” he asks, when they finish rinsing the dishes into a graywater catch. A favorite question, to which she always answers, “Walk!”

  He must be ten years older. She knows nothing about him and doesn’t ask. They talk only of work—her slow research into the roots of Douglas-firs, his impossible job of corralling scientists and getting them to abide by the minimal rules. She herself is well into autumn. Forty-six—older than her father was, when he died. All her flowers have long since faded. But here’s the bee.

  They don’t go far; they can’t. The clearing is small, and the trails are too dark to navigate. But they don’t need to go far to be in the thick of all she loves. Out into the rot, the decay, the snags, the luxuriant, prolific dying all around them, where a terrible green rises, riding forth in all directions with its converting coils.

  �
�You’re a happy woman,” Dennis says, somewhere in that great basin between question and claim.

  “I am now.”

  “You like everyone who works here. That’s remarkable.”

  “It’s easy to like people who take plants seriously.”

  But she likes Dennis, too. In his spare motions and abundant silence, he blurs the line between those nearly identical molecules, chlorophyll and hemoglobin.

  “You’re self-reliant. Like your trees.”

  “But that’s just it, Dennis. They aren’t self-reliant. Everything out here is cutting deals with everything else.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  She laughs at the purity of his hunch.

  “But you have your routines. You have your work. It keeps you going, full time.”

  She says nothing, spooked now. On the threshold of a contented middle age, this ambush.

  He feels her clench; for the length of several owl calls, he adds no syllable. Then: “Here’s the thing. It’s nice to cook for you.”

  She sighs long and slides down into the way things need to be. “It’s good to be cooked for.”

  But everything is so much less spooky than she could have supposed. So much lighter. He says, “What if we kept our separate places? And just . . . came to each other from time to time?”

  “That . . . could happen.”

  “Did our work. Saw each other for dinner. Like now!” He sounds surprised to make the connection between his wild proposal and what the present already holds.

  “Yes.” She can’t yet believe that luck might extend so far.

  “But I’d want to sign the papers.” He peers out into an opening in the western firs, where the sun has undeniably started to set. “Because then, when I die, you could get the pension.”

  She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

  OLIVIA VANDERGRIFF

  SNOW IS THIGH-HIGH and the going slow. She plunges through drifts like a pack animal, Olivia Vandergriff, back to the boardinghouse on the edge of campus. Her last session ever of Linear Regression and Time Series Models has finally ended. The carillon on the quad peals five, but this close to the solstice, blackness closes around Olivia like midnight. Breath crusts her upper lip. She sucks it back in, and ice crystals coat her pharynx. The cold drives a metal filament up her nose. She could die out here, for real, five blocks from home. The novelty thrills her.

  December of senior year. The semester so close to over. She might stumble now, fall face-first, and still roll across the finish line. What’s left? A short-answer exam on survival analysis. Final paper in Intermediate Macroeconomics. Hundred and ten slide IDs in Masterpieces of World Art, her blow-off elective. Ten more days plus one more semester and she’s done forever.

  Three years ago, she thought actuarial science was the same as accounting. When the counselor told her it dealt in the price and probability of uncertain events, the rigor combined with ghoulishness made her declare, Yes, please. If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death. Being one of three females in the program also gave her a little frisson. A kick, to defy the odds.

  But the kick has long since gone limp. She’s taken the national Society of Actuaries preliminary exam three times and failed all three. Part of the problem is aptitude. Part is the sex, drugs, and all-night parties. She’ll get the degree; she can still manage that. If not, she’ll sample whatever opportunities disaster resents. Disaster is, as actuarial science proves and Olivia reassures her overly concerned friends, just another number.

  She turns the corner onto Cedar in the half dark. Other students, stumbling under the weight of their own backpacks, have beaten trails through the snow, clumping around the first walker’s mostly terrible guesses. Beneath the fresh drifts, cracked sidewalks ride up over bulging tree roots in the world’s slowest seismic waves. She looks up. Although she’ll miss precious little when she leaves this shit-kicking backwater, she does love the streetlamps. Their Gilded Age cream-colored globes look like stilled candles. They light a soft path through the student rentals all the way to her own rambling American Gothic, once some surgeon’s mansion, now chopped up into private cubbies with five separate fire escapes and eight mailboxes.

  Lit by the streetlamp in front of her house is a singular tree that once covered the earth—a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood. A tree with sperm that must swim through droplets to fertilize the ovule. Its leaves vary as much as human faces. Its limbs, in the streetlight, have that extraordinary profile, lined with bizarre short side-spurs that make the tree unmistakable, even in winter. She has lived under the tree for a whole semester and doesn’t know it’s there. She passes it again tonight without seeing.

  She stumbles up the snowy steps into a dark hall full of bicycles. She shuts the front door behind her, but frigid air keeps pouring through around the seams. The light switch teases her from across the foyer. Six steps into the black gauntlet, Olivia slits her ankle on a derailleur. Her curses echo up the stairs. She has raged against the bikes at house meetings all semester long. But here the bikes are, despite all the house votes, her frozen ankle gouged and smeared with bike grease, and her enraged sense of justice shouting, “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Nothing matters. Five little months, and life will begin. Even if she’s still living in rented squalor in a cold-water apartment over a breakfast dive where she waitresses, all the forthcoming crimes and misdemeanors will be gloriously hers alone.

  Someone snickers at the top of the stairs. “Everything all right?” Suppressed giggles seep down from the kitchen. Her housemates, entertained by her routine rage.

  “Just fine,” she chirps. Home. December 12, 1989. The Berlin Wall, coming down. From the Baltic to the Balkans, millions of oppressed people take to the winter streets. Her scraped-open ankle spills blood through the foyer. So what? She bends to press a dry Kleenex to her wound, stanching the flow. It stings like mad.

  HUGS AWAIT HER ABOVE: two routine, one mocking, one cold, and one filled with half a year of hangdog longing. She hates her housemates’ endless cheap hugging, but she hugs them back in kind. The group converged the previous spring in an orgy of mutual enthusiasm. By the end of September, the communal lovefest spun out into daily recrimination. Whose hairs are these in my razor? Somebody stole the thimble of hash I left in the freezer. Who the hell stuffed that leftover turkey log down the disposal? But a girl can do anything, with the finish line in sight.

  The kitchen smells like heaven, though no one invites her to share the meal. She checks the refrigerator. The prospects are abysmal. She hasn’t eaten for ten hours, but she decides to hold out a little longer. If she can wait to eat until after her private party, eating will be like dancing with demigods.

  “Got divorced today,” she announces.

  Scattered cheers and clapping. “Took you long enough,” says the least favorite of her former soul mates.

  “True. Been getting divorced for longer than I was married.”

  “Don’t change your name back. This one’s much better.”

  “What were you thinking anyway, getting married?”

  “That ankle looks bad. You should at least clean off the grease.” Another round of stifled giggles.

  “Love you guys, too.” Olivia steals a bottle of somebody’s nut-brown ale—the only thing in the refrigerator not rancid—and squirrels it away into her rehabbed attic room. There, in bed, she knocks back the contents of the bottle without lifting her head. Acquired talent. Grease and blood from her ankle smear the bedspread.

  SHE AND DAVY met in court one last time, that afternoon, between her Econ and Linear Analysis. Now they’re done, and the final de
cree has no power to sadden her further. She does have her regrets. Tying her life to another’s—a whim of sophomore spring—felt so all-in, so sweeping and innocent. For two years, their parents raged at the idiocy. Their friends never understood. But she and Davy were determined to prove everyone wrong.

  They did love each other, in their way, even if their way consisted mostly of getting high, reading Rumi out loud, then screwing each other senseless. But marriage turned them both abusive. After the third time through the fun-house werewolf act, which ended up with her fracturing her fifth metacarpal, somebody had to sober up and pull the plug. They had no property to speak of, and no kids except the two of them. The divorce should have taken a day and a half. That it took more than ten months was mostly a function of nostalgic lust on the part of both litigants.

  Olivia sets the empty beer on the radiator with the other dead recruits and fishes in the nest of crap by her bed until she finds her disc player. Divorce requires a memorial service. Marriage was her adventure, and she needs to commemorate. Davy kept the Rumi, but she still has scads of their favorite trance music and dope enough to turn the regrets into laughs sufficient for today. There’s her Linear Analysis final to worry about, of course. But that’s still three days off, and she always studies better when a little loose.

  It should have occurred to her two years ago, even in the initial thrill, that any relationship where she lied three times in the first two hours might not be a great long-term bet. They walked under the cherry blossoms in the campus arboretum. She professed a deep love for all flowering things, which was a flavor of true, at least right then. She told him that her father was a human rights lawyer, again not entirely false, and that her mother was a writer, which was pretty much bullshit, though based on a fact-like scenario. She isn’t ashamed of her parents. In fact, she once got suspended from grade school for punching a chick who called her father “flaccid.” But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been. So she spruced them up a tad, for the man she’d already decided she would spend the rest of her life with.