The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  She glances his way, confused. He shakes his head and can’t help smirking. He leans in to whisper, and she reciprocates. Maybe the chance hasn’t vanished. “Kitty Genovese. The bystander effect. Darley and Latané, 1968.”

  “But is he okay?” Her breath is like cinnamon.

  “Remember how we had to answer whether we’d help someone who . . . ?”

  A woman shouts from below for someone to call an ambulance. But by the time the paramedics get their ambulance onto the quad, Professor Rabinowski is dead of a myocardial infarction.

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the premed beauty says, in their booth at Bucky’s. “If you thought he was demonstrating the bystander effect, why did you keep sitting there?”

  She’s on her third iced coffee, and it bothers Adam. “That’s not the point. The question is why fifty-three other people, including you, who thought he was having a heart attack, didn’t do anything. I thought he was jerking us around to make a point.”

  “Then you should have been on your feet and calling his bluff!”

  “I didn’t want to spoil the show.”

  “You should have been up in five seconds.”

  He slams the booth table. “It wouldn’t have made any damn difference!”

  She flinches into the booth, like he meant to hit her. He puts up his palms, leans toward her to apologize, and she flinches again. He freezes, hands in the air, seeing what the cowering woman sees.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right.” Professor Rabinowski’s last lesson. Learning psychology is, indeed, pretty much useless. He pays for the drinks and leaves. He never sees her again, except for the following week, from four seats away, for two hours, at the proctored final exam.

  . . .

  HE’S ADMITTED to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountainside overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and lying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad clouds of stars. After two years, the other grads take to calling him Bias Boy. In any discussion of the psychology of social formations, Adam Appich, master of science, is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

  HE CONSULTS with his advisor. Professor Mieke Van Dijk, she of the sublime Dutch bob, clipped consonants, and soft-core softened vowels. In fact, she makes him confer with her every two weeks, in her office up in College Ten, hoping the enforced check-in will jump-start his research.

  “You are dragging your feet over nothing.”

  In fact, he has his feet up, reclining on her Victorian daybed across the office from her desk, as if she’s psychoanalyzing him. It amuses them both.

  “Dragging . . . ? Not at all. I am utterly paralyzed.”

  “But why? You make too big a deal about this. Think of a thesis . . .”—she can’t pronounce the th—“as a long seminar project. You don’t have to save the world.”

  “I don’t? Can I at least save a nation-state or two?”

  She laughs; her wide overbite quickens his pulse. “Listen, Adam. Pretend this has nothing to do with your career. Nothing to do with any professional approval. What do you, personally, want to discover? What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple of years?”

  He watches the words spill from that pretty mouth, free from the social-scientific jargon that she tends to drop into in seminars. “This enjoyment you speak about . . .”

  “Tsh. You want to know something.”

  He wants to know whether she has ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say robust. He feels a weird need to tell her how he got here, in her office, looking for a thesis topic. Wants to draw his entire intellectual history in a straight line—from daubing nail polish on the abdomens of ants to watching his beloved undergraduate mentor die—then ask her where the line leads next.

  “I’m interested in . . . unblinding.” He steals a look at her. If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

  She purses her lips. She must know how good that looks on her. “Unblinding? I’m sure that must mean something.”

  “Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs?”

  “You want to study transformative potential as a function of strong normative in-group favoritism.”

  He’d nod, but the jargon bugs the crap out of him. “It’s like this. I think of myself as a good man. A good citizen. But say I’m a good citizen of early Rome, when a father had the power, and sometimes the duty, to put his child to death.”

  “I see. And you, a good citizen, are motivated to preserve positive distinctiveness. . . .”

  “We’re trapped. By social identity. Even when there are big, huge truths staring us in . . .” He hears his peers jeering, Bias Boy.

  “Well, no. Clearly not, or in-group realignment would never happen. Transformation of social identity.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course! Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  Professor Van Dijk laughs. Her fine high cheekbones pink out; he’s sure of it. Tough to hide, with that complexion. “Topic, please.”

  “I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . .”

  “. . . while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties. Now we get somewhere. This could be a topic. With much more narrowing and definition. You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness. Study those people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.”

  “For instance?”

  “We’re living at a time when claims are being made for a moral authority that lies beyond the human.”

  One smooth tensing of his abdominal muscles, and he sits up. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve seen the news. People up and down this coast are risking their lives for plants. I read a story last week—a man who had his legs sheared off by a machine he tried to chain himself to.”

  Adam has seen the stories, but he ignored them. Now he can’t see why. “Plant rights? Plant personhood.” A boy he knew once jumped into a hole and risked live burial to protect his unborn brother’s sapling from harm. That boy is dead. “I hate activists.”

  “So? Why?”

  “Orthodoxy and sloganeering. Boring. I hate it when those Greenpeace guys shake me down on the street. Anyone who gets righteous . . . doesn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “How hopelessly fragile and wrong we all are. About everything.”

  Professor Van Dijk frowns. “I see. Good thing we aren’t doing a psychological study of you.”

  “Are these people really appealing to a new, nonhuman moral order? Or are they just being sentimental about pretty green things?”

  “That’s where controlled psychological measurements come in.”

  He smirks a little, himself. But something large wells up in him, and he can’t even shift his weight or it will disappear. A way forward. “I
dentity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists.”

  “Or: Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?”

  THE SUN SHINES on the western Cascades as Mimi and Douglas pull onto the car-packed Forest Service road. Bodies mill about the small clearing. This isn’t a protest march. It’s a carnival. The ceramic mold manager asks the wounded vet, “Who are all these people?”

  Douggie steps from the car with that stupid, air-eating, sun-eating grin Mimi has come to enjoy, the way you might enjoy the yips of a dog you’ve rescued from the pound. He waves his work-gnarled hand across the crowd in goofy cowboy joy. “Homo sapiens, man. Always up to something!”

  Mimi trots to catch up with him. The turnout dizzies her. “What they do?”

  Douglas leans his good ear toward her. “How’s that?” The crowd is loud in the circus of their cause, and he’s lost a lot of hearing from his days in transport planes.

  It still surprises her. A man who bothers to listen. “My father used to say that. What they do?”

  “What they do?”

  “Yeah. Meaning, What the hell do those people hope to accomplish?”

  “Was he strange?”

  “Chinese. He believed English should be more efficient than it is.”

  Douglas smacks his forehead. “You’re Chinese.”

  “Half Chinese. What did you think?”

  “I don’t know. Something swarthier.”

  The real question, Mimi knows, is What she do? She’s amazed he managed to get her up here for this protest. Her only previous political action was a grade school vendetta against Chairman Mao. Her grudge is with the city, its scheming nighttime raid against her pines. As for these trees, so far out of town: She’s an engineer, for crying out loud. These trees are calling out to be used.

  But a pair of lectures and a visit to an organizational meeting accompanied by this clumsy innocent have broken her heart. These mountains, these forest cascades—now that she has seen them, they’re hers. So here she is, at a public demonstration that would have made her emigrant father come pluck her home in fear of deportation, torture, or worse. “Look at everyone!”

  It’s grannies with guitars and toddlers with space-age water pistols. College students out to prove themselves worthy of one another. Preppers pushing baby carriages like all-terrain Hobbit Humvees. Grade school kids carrying earnest placards: RESPECT YOUR ELDERS. WE NEED OUR LUNGS. A rainbow alliance of assorted footwear makes its way up the trunk to the haul road—loafers and cross-trainers, backward sloping sandals, cracked-toe Chuck Taylors, and, yes, logger caulks. The clothes are still more varied: button-down oxfords and pre-stressed jeans, tie-dye and flannel, hickory shirts, even a U.S. Air Force flight jacket like the one Douggie pawned for a few bucks fifteen years ago. Clown suits, swimsuits, jumpsuits—every kind of suit except three-piecers.

  Much of the crowd has been bused to the site by four wildly different environmental outfits that tend to go to war with one another when there’s no closer target. A group of backpackers took two days making their way overland to join this spectacle, all trying to bail out the ocean of capitalism with an acorn cap. A handful of locals show up to watch. Out this far, most of the people in a hundred-mile radius exist by grace of timber. They have their hand-lettered signs as well. LOGGERS: THE REAL ENDANGERED SPECIES. EARTH FIRST! WE’LL LOG THE OTHER PLANETS LATER.

  Two men sporting beards down to their sternums hover around the periphery pointing shoulder-mount video cameras. A gray-haired woman in Danskins, felt fedora, and sleeveless vest tapes interviews with anyone who’ll talk. Deeper into the trees, a man and woman with megaphones shape the crowd’s mood. “People! You’re amazing. What a turnout. Thank you all! Ready for a walk in the woods?”

  A cheer erupts, and the parade lurches down a gravel path toward the fresh skid road. Douglas falls into step, Mimi alongside. They weave into the colorful crowd waving rainbow banners and shouting outrageous epithets. In the festive atmosphere, under so blue a sky, walking arm in arm with strangers up the slight grade, Mimi sees. For her entire life, unwittingly, she has complied with her parents’ first shared principle: Make no noise in this world. She, Carmen, Amelia—all three Ma girls. Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter.

  They walk shoulder to shoulder across the skid road, ten abreast, more rows deep than she can count. They sing tunes that Mimi last sang in summer camp in Northern Illinois, songs of jingly childhood. “This Land Is Your Land.” “If I Had a Hammer.” Douggie smiles and hums along in a toneless bass. Between songs, a cheerleader with a megaphone, walking sideways near the front of the pack, stirs up some call-and-response. Clear-cuts cost too much! Save our last stands!

  Righteousness makes Mimi nuts. She has always been allergic to people with conviction. But more than she hates conviction, she hates sneaky power. She has learned things about this mountainside that sicken her. A wealthy logging outfit, backed by a pro-industry Forest Circus, is exploiting the power vacuum prior to a big court decision by rushing through an illegal grab of mixed conifers that have been growing for centuries before the idea of ownership came to these parts. She’s ready to try anything to slow the theft down. Even righteousness.

  They hike through dense spruce for the length of three choruses. Trunks slice the sunlight into shards. Godfingers, she and her sisters used to call those slanted beams. Trees she can’t name shoot up all around, wrapped in vines, or tumbling to the ground like barricades—so much life in so many flavors she wants to strip down and scamper. The understory is shot through with saplings she could encircle with her fist, broomsticks that may have bidden their time for a hundred years. But the canopy is carried by trunks that several arm-linked protesters still could not hug.

  Vistas open up through the green crenellations. Mimi tugs Doug’s sleeve and points. To the northeast, down ravines and up slopes too steep to walk, a pincushion of health rolls over the hills. Fog wraps the tops of the firs the way it did on the day the first European ships sniffed out harbors on this coast. But through another gap to the south, lunar devastation runs up the mountainside—slash doused with diesel and burnt until even the fungus is dead, then drowned with herbicide so nothing will grow again but this company’s monocrop row plantations in a short cycle that, she has learned, will last only a few more rounds, at most, before the soil is dead. From on high, it feels as if even the trees spreading across these slopes are at war. Patches of lush green march against patches of muddy vomit, all the way to the horizon. And the people assembled here: ignorant armies going up against each other as they have forever, for reasons hidden from even the most vehement. When will it be enough? Now, if you can believe this chanting, laughing crowd on its way to convince the road crew at the end of these wheel ruts. Now: the second-best of times.

  The road narrows and the emerald forest thickens. Monster trunks dwarf and disorient Mimi. Moss grows up and over everything in thick blankets. Even the ferns reach to her breasts. The man beside her knows the names of trees, but Mimi is too proud to ask for IDs. Despite a decade of living in this state, despite repeated attempts to master the field guides and dichotomous keys, she can’t tell a limber from a sugar pine, let alone a Port Orford from an incense cedar. Silver, white, red, and grand firs are all a frilly blur. And the swarming understory—impossible. Salal, somehow, she knows. Oxalis and trillium. But the rest is a tossed salad of inscrutable foliage, creeping up to trailside, ready to grab her ankles.

  Douglas points off to the left of the road. “Look!” In the middle of the blue-green confusion, seven stout trees grow in a line as straight as Euclid’s daydreams.

  “How the hell? Did someone . . . ?”

  He laughs and pats her shoulder. The touch feels good. “Think back. Think way back.”

  She does, and sees nothing. Douglas milks the suspense a litt
le longer.

  “Few hundred years ago, right around the time the Pilgrims were thinking, What the fuck, huh? Let’s go for it, some big monster fell. Log rot’s a perfect seedbed. Bunch of seedlings used it as a furrow, like God sowed them in with a hoe!”

  Something glints in front of her, revealed by the dappled light, the way dew betrays a spiderweb. Tight nets of tens of thousands of species knit together in weaves too fine for any person to trace. Who knows what medicines might be hidden here? The next aspirin, the next quinine; the next Taxol. Reason enough that this last little stand should stay intact a little longer.

  “Something, isn’t it?”

  “Is, Doogles.”

  This man tried to save her pines. Put his body between the saws and the trees. She wouldn’t be out here, even in this endangered paradise, without him. But for her money, he’s more than a little wacked. His rangy gameness for anything scares her. The twinkle he fixes on the forest ahead has that look of the not entirely housebroken. His head swivels, marveling at the crowd, happy as a puppy to be let back in the house.

  “Hear that?” Douglas asks.

  But she has heard it all morning. In another quarter mile, the dull whine sharpens. Down the road, through the brambles, mustard and orange machines claw the earth—graders and scrapers, pushing this road into new territory.

  “Aw, jeez, Mimi. Look what they’re doing to this beautiful place. What they do?”

  The protesters reach a gate of welded metal bars across the road. The advance guard stops at the obstacle, and the banners pool around them. The megaphone woman says, “We’re about to cross over into the cut. This will be an encroachment of the timber plan we’re contesting. Those of you who are unwilling to be arrested, remain here. Your presence and voices are still important. The press is taking notice of your feelings!”

  Applause, like the flutter of grouse.

  “Those willing to head on, thank you. We’ll cross now. Stay orderly. Stay calm. Do not allow yourself to be provoked. This is a peaceful confrontation.”