The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “Jesus H! This’ll scare the shit out of them.”

  Moses shakes his head at the new guy’s handiwork. “It’s good. We want them to think we’re dangerous.”

  Olivia comes up behind Nick in pride. She curls her hands beneath his upper arm. She has no clue what that does to him, after days together on the cross-country car ride, nights side by side in thick sleeping bags. Or maybe she knows, and doesn’t care. “Nice work,” she whispers.

  He shrugs. “Not especially useful.”

  “Urgent. I have it on good authority.”

  They christen themselves with forest names that night, in the soft drizzle of the redwoods, on a blanket of needles. The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear. Why shouldn’t they take new names for this new work? Trees go by a dozen different labels. There’s Texas and Spanish and false buckeye and Monillo, all for the same plant. Trees with names as profligate as maple seeds. There’s buttonwood, aka plane tree, aka sycamore: like a man with a drawer full of fake passports. In one place there’s lime, in another linden, Tilia at large, but basswood when turned into lumber or honey. Twenty-eight names for longleaf pine alone.

  Olivia appraises Nick in the darkness, far from the fire. She squints for evidence of what to call him. Pushes his hair back behind his ear, tilts his chin in her cool hands. “Watchman. Does that sound right? You’re my Watchman.”

  Observer, bystander. Would-be protector. He grins, discovered.

  “Name me now!”

  He reaches out and takes a fingerful of that wheaty stuff that soon will never be lighter than mud. It fans out under his fingers. “Maidenhair.”

  “That’s a real thing?”

  It is, he tells her, another name for a living fossil, earlier than flowering trees, early as the earliest conifers, a native for a while, in these headwaters, then disappeared for millions of years before returning in cultivation. A tree from back at the beginning of trees.

  . . .

  SHE CURLS against him in the pup tent as they fall asleep, made safe from anything more intimate than warmth by the proximity of so many other volunteers. He lies gazing at her back, the slight rise and fall of her rib cage. The T-shirt she uses for pajamas slips off her shoulder, revealing a tattoo across her scapula, in florid script: A change is gonna come.

  He lies as still as he can, a tumescent monk. He counts the poundings of his heart high up in his ears until the surf weakens into sleep. As he drifts off, a spidery thought spins through him. People from another planet will wonder what’s wrong with earthly names, that it takes so many different ones to tag a thing. But here he lies, alongside this friend he has known only weeks, joined again after so many lifetimes. Nick and Olivia, Watchman and Maidenhair—the complete quartet of them—open to the January night, under topless columns of coastal redwood, the ever-living Sempervirens.

  PATRICIA WESTERFORD sits on her ladder-backed chair at the pine farmhouse table, pen in the air, taking dictation from the insects. Eleven o’clock nears and she has nothing—not one sentence she hasn’t revised to death. The wind wafts through the window, smelling of compost and cedar. The scent triggers an old, deep longing that seems to have no purpose. The woods are calling, and she must go.

  All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice. She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold. How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root. How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving. How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen. How indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How willows clean soils of dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals.

  She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make.

  Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . .

  There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. . . .

  In the great forests of the East, oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baffle the animals that feed on them. Word goes out, and the trees of a given species—whether they stand in sun or shade, wet or dry—bear heavily or not at all, together, as a community. . . .

  Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

  She tells how an elm helped start the American Revolution. How a huge five-hundred-year-old mesquite grows in the middle of one of the planet’s most arid deserts. How the glimpse of a horse chestnut through a window gave Anne Frank hope, even in hopeless hiding. How seeds brought to the moon and back sprouted all over the Earth. How the world is inhabited by magnificent creatures no one knows. How it may take centuries to learn as much about trees as people once knew.

  Her husband lives fourteen miles away in town. They see each other once a day, for lunches that Dennis makes from whatever is in season. All day and all night long, her only people are the trees, and her only means of speaking for them are words, those organs of saprophytic latecomers that live off the energy green things make.

  Journal articles have always been hard enough. Her years as an outcast come back to her each time she writes one, even when she’s only one of a dozen coauthors. She feels even more anxiety when others are on board. She’d sooner retire again than inflict on these beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public. Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone. But this millstone book: She’s sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press. And she’ll never earn out what her publisher has already paid.

  All winter long she has struggled with how to tell a stranger everything she knows. The months have been hell, but paradise, too. Soon enough, the hellish paradise will end. In August she’ll close her field lab, pack up the gear, and remove all her meticulous samples to the coast and that university where she’ll—unthinkable—begin to teach again.

  The words refuse to come, tonight. She should simply sleep, and see what her dreams might say. Instead, she cranes to glimpse the kitchen clock above the antique, slope-shouldered refrigerator. Still time for a midnight wander down to the pond.

  The spruces near the cabin wave spooky prophecies under the near-full moon. There’s a straight line of them, the memory of a vanished fence where red crossbills once liked to sit and shit out seeds. The trees are busy tonight, fixing carbon in their dark phase. All will be in flower before long: huckleberry and currant, showy milkweed, tall Oregon grape, yarrow and checkermallow. She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.

  Tonight the stands are as drizzled and murky as her wo
rd-filled mind. She finds the trail and ducks beneath her beloved Pseudotsuga. A path cuts under the spires lit by late winter’s moon, a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural. The many uncataloged volatile compounds breathed out by needles at night slow her heart rate, soften her breathing, and, if she’s right, even alter her mood and thoughts. So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees—jasmonate—supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I’m in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees. All the forests of the world, even the quaintly named set-aside lands. More trouble than she has the heart to tell readers of her little book. Trouble, like the atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict or control.

  She pops out into the pond’s clearing. The starry sky erupts above her, all the explanation a person needs for why humans have waged war on forests forever. Dennis has told her what the loggers say: Let’s go let a little light into that swamp. Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky.

  Her seat is vacant and waiting—that moss-blanketed nurse log by the water’s edge. The moment she looks out over the water, her head clears and she finds the passage she’s after. She has searched for a name for the great ancient trunks of the uncut forest, the ones who keep the market in carbons and metabolites going. Now she has one:

  Fungi mine stone to supply their trees with minerals. They hunt springtails, which they feed to their hosts. Trees, for their part, store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded. A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

  Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.

  The reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love. And with those two words, Patricia Westerford seals her own fate and changes the future. Even the future of trees.

  IN THE MORNING, she splashes cold water on her face, makes a flax-berry slurry, drinks it while reading yesterday’s pages, then sits at the pine table, vowing not to stand up until she has a paragraph worthy of showing Dennis at lunch. The smell of her red cedar pencil elates her. The slow push of graphite across paper reminds her of the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons of water up hundreds of feet into a giant Douglas-fir trunk every day. The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

  The final chapter eludes her. She needs some impossible trifecta: hopeful, useful, and true. She could use Old Tjikko, that Norway spruce who lives about midway up the length of Sweden. Above the ground, the tree is only a few hundred years old. But below, in the microbe-riddled soil, he reaches back nine thousand years or more—thousands of years older than this trick of writing she uses to try to capture it.

  All morning long, she works to squeeze the nine-thousand-year saga into ten sentences: a procession of trunks falling and springing back up from the same root. There’s the hopeful she’s after. The truth is somewhat more brutal. By late morning, she catches up to the present, when, for the first time, the new man-made atmosphere coaxes the latest of Old Tjikko’s usually snow-stunted krummholz trunks to shoot up into a full-sized tree.

  But hope and truth do nothing for humans, without use. In the clumpy, clumsy finger-paint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we, to trees? She remembers the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book’s end.

  DENNIS SHOWS AT NOON, reliable as rain, bearing broccoli-almond lasagna, his latest midday masterpiece. She thinks, as she does several times a week, how lucky she has been, to spend these few blessed years married to the one man on Earth who’d let her spend most of her life alone. Game, patient, good-natured Dennis. He protects her work and needs so little. In his handyman’s heart, he already knows how few things man is really the measure of. And he’s as generous and eager as weeds.

  As they eat Dennis’s feast, she reads him today’s installment on Old Tjikko. He listens, astonished, like a happy child might listen to Greek myths. She finishes. He claps. “Oh, babe. It’s just fine.” Something deep in her callow green soul likes being the world’s oldest babe. “I hate to tell you this, but I think you’re done.”

  It’s terrifying, but he’s right. She sighs and stares out the kitchen window, where three crows hatch their elaborate plans for breaking into her compost bin. “So what do I do now?”

  His laugh is as hearty as if she said something funny. “You type it up and we mail it to your publishers. Four months late.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Everything’s wrong. Starting with the title.”

  “What’s wrong with How Trees Will Save the World? Trees won’t save the world?”

  “I’m sure they will. After the world shrugs us off.”

  He chuckles and packs up the dirty dishes. He’ll take them home, where there are deep sinks, strainers, and hot water. He looks across the kitchen at her. “Call it Forest Salvation. Then you don’t have to commit to who’s saving what.”

  “I do love you.”

  “Did someone say you didn’t? Look. Babe. This should be pure pleasure. Talking to people about your life’s great joy.”

  “You know, Den. The last time I was in the public eye, it didn’t go so well.”

  He swipes at the air. “That was another lifetime.”

  “Wolfpack. They didn’t want to disprove me. They wanted blood!”

  “But you’ve been exonerated. Over and over.”

  She wants to tell him what she has never mentioned: how the trauma of those days was so great that she cooked herself a fatal woodlands feast. But she can’t. She’s too ashamed of that long-dead girl. Part of her no longer entirely believes that she could ever have considered such a course. Deniable theater. A game. So she conceals the only thing she has ever kept from him—how she had the poison mushrooms all but in her mouth.

  “Babe. You’re practically a prophetess, these days.”

  “I also spent a lot of years as a pariah. Prophetess is much more fun.”

  She helps him out to the car with the dirty dishes. “Love you, Den.”

  “Please stop saying that. You’re spooking me.”

  SHE TYPES UP THE DRAFT. She prunes a few words and pollards a few phrases. There’s now a chapter called “The Giving Trees,” about her beloved Doug-firs and their underground welfare state. She ranges around the country’s forests, from cottonwoods that top a hundred feet in a decade to bristlecone pines that die slowly for five thousand years. Then the post office, where all her anxiety drains out of her the minute she pays the postage and sends the manuscript off to the other coast.

  SIX WEEKS LATER, her office phone rings. She hates the phone. Handheld schizophrenia. Unseen voices whispering to you from a distance. Nobody calls her except with unpleasant business. It’s her editor, whom she has never met, from New York, a city she has never seen. “Patricia? Your book. I just finished it!”

  Patricia winces, waiting for the ax.

  “Unbelievable. Who knew that trees got up to all those things?”
r />   “Well. A few hundred million years of evolution gives you a repertoire.”

  “You make them come alive.”

  “Actually, they were alive already.” But she’s thinking of the book her father gave her when she was fourteen. She realizes she must dedicate this book to her father. And to her husband. And all the people who will, in time, turn into other things.

  “Patty, you wouldn’t believe what you have me seeing, between the subway stop and my office. That part about the giving trees? Mind-blowing. We didn’t pay you enough for this.”

  “You paid me more than I’ve made in the last five years.”

  “You’ll earn out in two months.”

  What Patricia Westerford would like to earn back is her solitude, her anonymity, which she begins to sense—the way trees can sense an invasion still far away—will never be hers again.

  MASTERY ARRIVES, and there’s no turning back. Two months after the game’s North American release, the president, CEO, and majority stockholder of Sempervirens fires up a copy on his workhorse machine, in his apartment on the floor above the company’s shiny new headquarters in the foothills up Page Mill Road. It’s all redwood and glass—a playground of whimsical, meditative spaces. Odd angles surround open-air atriums planted with giant Italian stone pines. Working at your carrel feels like camping out in a national park.

  Neelay’s refuge is tucked away on high, above the hive. The only way to reach it is by private elevator, hidden behind a fire stairwell. At the center of the concealed den sits a complex hospital bed. Neelay almost never uses it anymore. Forty minutes to get in and out of; it feels like death, these days, even to lie down. There’s no time. He sleeps in his chair, rarely more than forty minutes at a shot. Ideas torture him like the Furies. Plans and breakthroughs for his world in progress chase him around the galaxy without mercy.