The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  He’s still there, marking the stumps, when Mimi comes out for lunch. Anger is her new lunchtime card game, played solitaire while eating her egg and hot pepper sandwiches on a bench in the newly minimized Zen garden. Since the night raid, she has made scores of phone calls, attended an impotent public meeting, and talked to two lawyers, both of whom advised her that justice was a fantasy. Outdoor lunch is her only recourse, staring at the raw stumps and chewing her rage. She sees the man on his hands and knees annotating the damage and explodes. “What are you doing now?”

  Douggie looks up at a woman the image of a Patpong B-girl named Lalida he once loved more than breathing. A woman worth punching any number of potholes to get next to. She advances, threatening him with a sandwich lance.

  “It’s not enough to murder them? You have to deface them, too?”

  He bares his palms, then points at the hieroglyphics on a cut stump. She stops and sees—the labeled rings running backward to the circle’s center. The year her father blew his brains all over the backyard. The year she graduated and got this godforsaken job. The year the whole Ma family scattered from the bear. The year her father showed her the scroll. The year of her birth. The year her father came to study at the great Carnegie Institute of Technology. And in the outermost ring, the caption: CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.

  She glances back down at the man on his knees. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I thought you were . . . I almost kicked you in the face.”

  “Guys who did this beat you to it.”

  “Wait. You were there?” Her eyebrows draw together as she does the yield-stress calculation. “If I’d been there, I’d have hurt someone.”

  “Big trees are coming down all over.”

  “Yeah. But this was my park. My daily bread.”

  “You know, you look at those mountains, and you think: Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever. Only, civilization is snorting like a steer on growth hormones, and those mountains are going down.”

  “I talked to two lawyers. No laws were broken.”

  “’Course not. The wrong people have all the rights.”

  “What can you do?”

  The crazy man’s eyes dance. He looks like the twelfth arhat, amused by the folly of all human aspiration. He wavers. “Can I trust you? I mean, you’re not here to steal one of my kidneys or anything?”

  She laughs, and that’s all he needs to believe.

  “Then listen. You wouldn’t happen to have three hundred bucks anywhere? Or maybe a car that works?”

  THE BRINKMANS TAKE TO READING, when they’re alone together. And, together, they’re alone most of the time. Community theater is over; they haven’t acted in a play since the one about the nonexistent baby. They’ve never said out loud to each other that their acting days are over. No dialogue required.

  In place of children, then, books. In their reading tastes, each of them stays true to the dreams of youth. Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race. Dorothy needs wilder reclamations, stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

  Ray’s shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy’s, alphabetical by author. He prefers state-of-the-art books with fresh copyrights. She needs to communicate with the distant dead, alien souls as different from her as possible. Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

  Life in their forties. Once any given volume enters the house, it can never leave. For Ray, the goal is readiness: a book for every unforeseeable need. Dorothy strives to keep local independent booksellers afloat and save neglected gems from the cutout bin. Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

  The conversion of their house into a library happens too slowly to see. The books that won’t fit she lays on their sides, on top of the existing rows. This warps the covers and makes him crazy. For a while they solve the problem with more furniture. A pair of cherry cases to set between the windows in his downstairs office. A large walnut unit in the front room, in the space traditionally reserved for the television altar. Maple in the guest room. He says, “That should hold us for a while.” She laughs, knowing, from every novel she has ever read, how brief a while a while can be.

  Dorothy’s mother dies. They can’t bear to part with a single volume of the dead woman’s titles. So they add them to a collection that would have been the envy of kings. Dorothy finds an incredible deal on Walter Scott’s Complete Waverly Novels in a downtown antiquarian bookstore. “Eighteen eighty-two! And look at these beautiful endpapers. Marble waterfall.”

  “You know what we could do?” Ray tosses off the idea on the way to the cashier. Next to the Scott, he slips in a copy of The Age of Intelligent Machines. “That funky wall in the small bedroom upstairs. We could have a carpenter design some built-ins.”

  The plans they once had for that room now seem older than anything on their shelves. She nods and tries to smile, reaching down inside herself for a word. She doesn’t know the word. She doesn’t even know that that’s what she’s doing. Nevertheless. The word is nevertheless.

  THEY HAVE A STANDING JOKE, at Christmas, a joke always ready not to be one, on a moment’s notice. One gift they give each other must be the annual attempted conversion. This year, he gives her Fifty Ideas That Changed the World.

  “Honey! How thoughtful!”

  “Sure changed me.”

  He will never change, she thinks, and kisses him near the lips. Then she comes through with her part of the ritual: a new annotated edition of Four Great Novels by Jane Austen.

  “Dorothy, darling. You read my mind!”

  “You know, you could try her, one of these years.”

  He tried her, years ago, and almost choked to death from claustrophobia.

  They spend the holidays in their robes, each reading the gift they bought the other. On New Year’s, they struggle to make it to midnight. They lie in bed, side by side, leg to leg, but with hands firmly on the pages in front of them. Falling asleep, he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

  “Happy New Year,” he says, when the ball drops at last. “Survived another one, huh?”

  They pour the bubbles that have been waiting by the bedside on ice. She clinks, drinks, and says, “We should have an adventure this year.”

  The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.

  “Something life-threatening,” she adds.

  “I was just thinking that.”

  “Maybe we should run a marathon.”

  “I . . . could be your trainer. Or whatever.”

  “Something we could do together. Pilot’s license?”

  “Maybe,” he says, comatose with fatigue. “Welp.” He sets the glass down and slaps his thighs.

  “Yep. One more page before lights-out?”

  SHE DESCENDS into the real anguish of imagina
ry beings. She lies still, trying not to wake him with her sobs. What is this, grabbing at my heart, like it means something? What gives this pretend place so much power over me? Just this: the glimpse of someone seeing something she shouldn’t be able to see. Someone who doesn’t even know she’s been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.

  FOR SOME REASON, when their anniversary comes, the Brinkmans again forget to plant anything.

  THE REDWOODS knock all words out of them. Nick drives in silence. Even the young trunks are like angels. And when, after a few miles, they pass a monster, sprouting a first upward-swooping branch forty feet in the air, as thick as most eastern trees, he knows: the word tree must grow up, get real. It’s not the size that throws him, or not just the size. It’s the grooved, Doric perfection of the red-brown columns, shooting upward from the shoulder-high ferns and moss-swarmed floor—straight up, with no taper, like a russet, leathery apotheosis. And when the columns do start to crown, it happens so high, so removed from the pillars’ base, that it might as well be a second world up there, up nearer eternity.

  All the agitation of the journey ebbs from Olivia. It’s like she knows the place, although she has never been west of Six Flags Over Mid-America. Along a narrow road through the coastal forest she calls out, “Stop the car.”

  He pulls over onto a shoulder soft with needles a few feet deep. The car door opens and the air tastes sweet and savory. She wanders out from the passenger side into a grove of giants. When he joins her, her face is streaked and her eyes hot and liquid with joy. She shakes her head, incredulous. “This is it. This is them. We’re here.”

  . . .

  THE DEFENDERS of the forest aren’t hard to find. Different groups are organizing throughout the Lost Coast. There’s a report of some action almost every day in the local papers. Nick and Olivia live rough, car-camping for a few days, feeling out who’s who in a ragtag cast that is makeshift and an organization that is improvised, to say the least.

  They learn about a volunteer encampment in the muddy fields of a sympathetic retired fisherman, not far from Solace. The bivouac swarms with more activity than coherence. Quick young people, loud in their devotion, call across the tent-dotted meadow. Their noses, ears, and eyebrows flash with hardware. Dreadlocks tangle in the fibers of their multicolored garb. They stink of soil, sweat, idealism, patchouli oil, and the sweet sinsemilla grown all through these woods. Some stay for two days. Some, judging from their microflora, have been in this base camp for more than a few seasons.

  The camp is one of many nerve centers for a chaotic movement without leaders that mostly goes under the name of Life Defense Force. Nick and Olivia scout the fields, talking to everyone. They share a dinner of eggs and beans with an older man named Moses. He, for his part, questions and vets them, too, assuring himself that they aren’t spies for Weyerhaeuser or Boise Cascade or the more proximal force in these parts, Humboldt Timber.

  “How do we get . . . assignments?” Nick asks.

  The word makes Moses laugh out loud. “No assignments here. But no end of work.”

  They cook for dozens and help clean up afterward. There’s a march the next day. Nick letters posters while Olivia joins the sing-along. A flame-haired, plaid-clad, hawk-silhouetted woman passes through camp wrapped in a woven shawl. Olivia grabs Nick. “It’s her. The one from the television clip back in Indiana.” The one the beings of light wanted her to find.

  Moses nods. “That’s Mother N. She can turn a megaphone into a Strad.”

  As the light falls, Mother N holds an orientation talk in a clearing next to Moses’s tent. She scans the rings of seated bodies, acknowledging veterans and welcoming newcomers. “It’s good to see so many of you still here this late in the season. In the past, a lot of you have headed home for the winter, when the rains shut down the logging shows until spring. But Humboldt Timber has started working year-round.”

  Boos ripple through the crowd.

  “They’re trying to get the cut out before the law catches up with them. But they haven’t counted on all of you!”

  A cheer breaks like a whitecap over Nicholas. He turns to Olivia and takes her hand. She squeezes back, as if this isn’t the first time he has touched her in gladness. She beams, and Nick marvels again at her certainty. She has gotten them this far navigating by feel—Warmer, this way, warmer—whispered instructions from presences only she can hear. And here they are, like they knew where they were going all along.

  “A lot of you have been out here for a while,” Mother N continues. “So much useful work! Picketing. Guerrilla theater. Peaceful demonstrations.”

  Moses rubs his shaved head and shouts, “Now we put the fear of God in them!”

  The cheer redoubles. Even Mother N smiles. “Well, maybe! But the LDF takes nonviolence seriously. For those of you who just arrived, we want you to take passive resistance training and pledge the nonviolence code before joining any direct action. We do not condone outright property destruction. . . .”

  Moses shouts, “But you’d be surprised at what a little quick-drying cement around a wheelbase can do.”

  The edges of Mother N’s lips twist. “We’re part of a very long, very broad process, all over the world. If those beautiful Chipko women in India can let themselves get threatened and beaten, if Brazilian Kayapo Indians can put their lives on the line, so can we.”

  It’s drizzling. Nick and Olivia hardly notice.

  “Most of you already know all about Humboldt Timber. For those who don’t, they were a family business for almost a century. They ran the last progressive company town in the state and paid incredible benefits. Their pension system was overfunded. They took care of their own and rarely hired gypos. Best of all, they cut selectively, for a yield they might have sustained forever.

  “Because they cut the old stuff slowly, they still had several billion board feet of the best softwood on the planet, long after their competitors all along the coast shot their bolts. Two hundred thousand acres—forty percent of the area’s remaining old growth. But HT’s stock price lagged compared to those companies out there maximizing profits. Which, by the rules of capitalism, meant somebody had to come in and show the old-timers how to run a business. You remember Henry Hanson, the Junk Bond King? The guy who went to jail last year for racketeering? He set up the deal. A raider buddy of his pulled off the steal, all the way from Wall Street. Ingenious, really: you pour junk-raised cash into a hostile takeover and sell the debt to your savings and loan, which the public ultimately must bail out. Then you mortgage the company to the hilt to pay off the funny money, loot the pension fund, run through the reserves, sell off everything of value, and dispose of the remaining bankrupt husk for whatever you can get. Magic! Loot that pays you extra to plunder it.

  “Right now they’re in that second-to-the-last stage: cashing out every salable scrap of timber in the inventory. Which in this case means lots of seven- and eight-hundred-year-old trees. Trees wider than your dreams are going into Mill B and coming out as planks. Humboldt is cutting at four times the industry rate. And they’re speeding up, before legislation can catch up with them.”

  Nick turns to Olivia. The girl is years younger than he is, but he has begun to look to her for explanations. Her face stiffens and her eyes close in pain. Tears roll down her cheekbones.

  “Obviously, we can’t wait for legislation. The new, efficient Humboldt Timber will have killed all the giants by the time the law catches up with them. So this is the question I ask each of you. What can you bring to the effort? We’ll take anything you can give. Time. Effort. Cash. Cash is surprisingly helpful!”

  Applause and cheers ring out after her talk, and people retreat to a meal of lentil soup made over several campfires. Olivia helps cook, she who used to steal her housemates’ food from the fridge rather than boil a little water for ramen. Nick senses these forest men, some who haven’t bathed in weeks, striving for blasé as she serves them, as if a dryad hasn’t just dropped down into this mea
dow next to them.

  A band under the supervision of a man named Blackbeard returns from a raid gumming up a parked Caterpillar D8 engine with corn syrup. They glow with accomplishment in the campfire’s flicker. They mean to go out again, after dark, to test the company’s vigil on larger gear farther up the hillside.

  “I don’t like property crimes,” Mother N says. “I really don’t.”

  Moses laughs her off. “No valuable property has been destroyed except these forests. We’re in a war of attrition. We tie the lumber crews up for a few hours, then they repair the machines. But in the meantime, they lose time and dollars.”

  Blackbeard glowers at the flames. “Humboldt is nothing but property crimes. And we’re supposed to make nice?”

  Two dozen volunteers start talking over one other. After years in rural Iowa, Nick’s like a kid raised on a tinny radio hearing his first live symphony. He has landed in a druid tree cult like the ones he read about on winter nights in the Hoel family encyclopedia. Oak veneration at the oracle at Dodona, the druids’ groves in Britain and Gaul, Shinto sakaki worship, India’s bejeweled wishing trees, Mayan kapoks, Egyptian sycamores, the Chinese sacred ginkgo—all the branches of the world’s first religion. His decade of obsessive sketching has been practice for whatever art this sect requires of him.

  Olivia leans in. “Are you okay?” His reply sticks in his wide, coprophagic grin.

  The raid party readies to head out again. Blackbeard, Needles, Moss-Eater, and the Revelator: warriors competing for the palm, the laurel, the olive.

  “Hang on,” Nick tells them. “Let’s try something.” He sits them on a camping stool in the shadows of the fire, while he paints their faces. He dips a brush into a can of green latex that a woman named Tinkerbell uses to letter banners. He follows the contours of their skulls, the curves of their foreheads and the mounds of cheekbone, finding his way forward into whorls and spirals, surreal freehand memories of Maori ta- moko tattoos. Tie-dyed tees and paisley faces: the effect is devastating. The night’s commandos stand back and admire each other. Something enters them; they become other beings, inscribed and altered, filled with power by ancient signs.