The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps.

  “He wants to give rights to everything alive. He claims that paying trees for their creative invention would make the whole world richer. If he’s right, then our entire social system . . . everything I’ve ever worked for . . .”

  But her breathing has changed, and she floats away like a newborn after a day of first discoveries.

  He douses the bedside light and turns away from her. Still, she murmurs in her sleep and grapples to him, clutching his backside for whatever warmth he generates. Her bare arms on him, the woman he fell in love with. The woman he married. Funny, manic, wild, untamable Lady Macbeth. Lover of sprawling novels. Jumper from airplanes. The best amateur actress he has ever known.

  WATCHMAN AND MAIDENHAIR, deep in the redwoods. He lugs a pack of provisions. She holds the camp’s video camera in one hand; with her other, she clutches his arm like a channel swimmer hanging from a dingy. Now and then she grabs his wrist, directing his attention to something colorful or darting just outside their comprehension.

  Last night they slept on the cold ground, open to the air. Seas of mud moated their fern-fringed island. He lay in one pee-stained 1950s sleeping bag and she in another, underneath creatures of mildness, bulk, and repose. “Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.

  She answered no. And he believed her.

  “Sore?”

  “Not really.”

  “Scared?”

  Her eyes said, Why? Her mouth said, “Should we be?”

  “They’re so big. Humboldt Timber employs hundreds of people. Thousands of machines. It’s owned by a multibillion-dollar multinational. All the laws are on their side, backed by the will of the American people. We’re a bunch of unemployed vandals, camping out in the woods.”

  She smiled, as at a little kid who just asked whether the Chinese could reach them through a tunnel in the earth. Her hand snaked out of her bag and into his. “Believe me. I have it on the highest authority. Great things are under way.”

  Her hand stayed between them like a traverse line as she fell asleep.

  THEY FOLLOW A SWITCHBACK down into a distant drainage until the path turns into a rivulet of mud. Two miles in, the trail vanishes and the two of them must bushwhack. Light sifts through the canopy. He watches her cross a carpet of starflower massed with sorrel. Mere months ago, by her own account, she was a nasty, jaded, narcissistic bitch with a substance abuse problem, flunking out of college. Now she’s—what? Something at peace with being human, in league with something very much not.

  The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes. She grabs his shoulder. “Look at that!” Twelve apostle trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nicky once drew with a protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago. Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose. A chemical semaphore passes through Nick’s brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

  Alongside the pebbly creek they come to a downed giant that, even sideways, is taller than Olivia. “We’re here. Just to the right, Mother N said. This way.”

  He sees it first: a grove of trunks six hundred years old, running upward out of sight. The pillars of a russet cathedral nave. Trees older than movable type. But their furrows are spray-painted with white numbers, like someone tattooed a living cow with a butcher diagram showing the various cuts of meat hiding underneath. Orders for a massacre.

  Olivia lifts the Handycam to her face and films. Nick slips off his backpack, floats weightless for a few steps. A rainbow of spray cans comes from his pack. He lays them in a patch of young horsetails: half a dozen colors from across the spectrum. Cherry in one hand, lemon in the other, he wanders toward a marked tree. He studies the white strokes already there. Then he lifts the can and sprays.

  Later, her video will be edited, fitted out with voice-over, and sent to every sympathetic journalist in the Life Defense Force address book. For now, the sound track is the hundred cries of the forest punctuated by awe—How do you do that?—up close to the microphone. Nick returns to his palette on the forest floor and picks two more hues. He paints, then steps back to appraise his handiwork. The species are as wild as any that inhabit a museum’s collection cabinet. He goes on to the next numeral-defaced tree and starts again. Soon enough, the numbers disappear, past recognition, into butterflies.

  He graduates to those trunks marked by a simple blue tick. They’re everywhere, these death sentences made with a simple stroke. Then he proceeds to paint those trees with no markings at all, until it’s impossible to say which trunks have been slated for cutting and which are mere bystanders. The afternoon vanishes; they’ve both been on forest-time too long to count in mere hours anymore. The work is over in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

  Olivia pans the camera around the transformed grove. Where there had been measurements and prospects, a project of hard numbers, there are now only skippers and swallowtails, morphos, hairstreaks, and heaths. It could be a grove of sacred firs in the Mexican mountains, where Tiffany insects stage their many-generation migration. Thus two people, in an afternoon, undo a week’s work of appraisers and surveyors.

  The voice on the unedited video says, “They’ll be back.” He means the numbers men, to mark their culls again in a more foolproof way.

  “But this is beautiful. It’ll cost them.”

  “Maybe. Or the lumber shows will just come in and take everything, like they did at Murrelet Grove.”

  “We have film now.”

  You can hear it in the music of her recorded voice: the belief that affection might solve the problems of freedom yet. Then the film cuts to black. No one sees what happens next between the two humans, there on the forest floor, between the banks of fern and Solomon’s seal. No one, unless you count the countless invisible creatures burrowing beneath the soil, crawling under the bark, crouching in the branches, climbing and leaping and banking through the canopy. Even the giant trees breathe in the few molecules per billion of homecoming dispensed into the air.

  PATRICIA HEARS from a quarter mile away: Dennis’s truck thumping down the gravel washboard road. The sound gladdens her—glad before she knows she’s glad. In its way, the crunch and whir lift her as much as the wheezy cheep of a Townsend’s warbler skirting the edge of a clearing. The truck is its own wildlife rarity, although this creature appears every day, as punctual as the rain.

  She drifts down to the road, feeling how edgy her wait has been, these last twenty minutes. He’ll have lunch, yes, and the mail, her mixed bag of connections with the outside world. New data from the lab in Corvallis. But Dennis: That’s the installment her soul now needs. He steadies her, his listening, and she wonders with delighted horror whether twenty-two hours might be too long to go between sightings. She comes up close to the halted truck and must step back when he opens the cab. His broad arm swings around her waist and he nuzzles her neck.

  “Den. My favorite mammal.”

  “Babe. Wait till you see what we’re having.” He hands her the mail and grabs the cooler. They climb the slope to the cabin, shoulder to shoulder, at peace with each other in silence.

  She sits on the porch at the cable spool table, thumbing through the mail as he unpacks lunch. How can the masterful duplicity—Important information about your insurance. Open at once!—find her even here? She has lived far from commerce for decades, and yet her name is a hot commodity, bought and sold endlessly as she sits in her cabin reading Thoreau. She hopes the buyers aren’t paying much. No: she hopes they’re being extorted.

  Nothing from Corvallis, but there’s a packet from her agent. She sets it down on the wooden slats, next to her plate. It’s still there when Dennis brings out two small, magnificent stuff
ed rainbow trout.

  “Everything okay?”

  She nods and shakes her head all at once.

  “No bad news, is there?”

  “No. I don’t know. I can’t open it.”

  He doles out the fish and picks up the packet. “It’s from Jackie. What’s to be afraid of?”

  She doesn’t know. Lawsuits. Chastisements. Official business. Open at once. He hands her the envelope and flicks the air, nudging her courage.

  “You’re good for me, Dennis.” She slips her finger under the sealed lip and many things spill out. Reviews. Forwarded fan mail. A letter from Jackie with a check paper-clipped to it. She sees the check and yelps. The paper falls to the ground and lands facedown, in the always-damp earth.

  Dennis retrieves the check and wipes it clean. He whistles. “Jeepers!” He looks at her, eyebrows high. “Misplaced a decimal point there, did they?”

  “Two places!”

  He laughs, his shoulders shuddering, like his antique truck trying to turn over after a night below freezing. “She told you the book was doing well.”

  “There’s a mistake. We have to pay it back.”

  “You made a good thing, Patty. People like good things.”

  “It isn’t possible. . . .”

  “Don’t get excited. It’s not that much.”

  But it is. It’s more than she has ever had in any bank, her whole life. “The money’s not mine.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not yours? You worked on that book for seven years!”

  She doesn’t hear him. She’s listening to the wind coming through the alders.

  “You can always give it away. Write a check to American Forests. Or maybe to that chestnut back-cross recovery program. You could invest it in the research team. Come on. Eat your fish now. Took me two hours to catch these guys.”

  AFTER LUNCH, he reads her the reviews. Somehow, in Dennis’s radio baritone, they sound mostly good. Appreciative. People say, I didn’t realize. People say, I’ve started seeing things. Then he reads her the readers’ letters. Some of them just want to thank her. Some of them confuse her with the mother of all trees. Some of them make her feel like Miss Lonelyhearts. I have a big bur oak in our back yard that must be 200 years old. Last spring, one side of it started to sicken. It’s killing me to watch it die in slow motion. What can I do?

  Many mention the giving trees—those ancient Douglas-firs that, with their last act, give all their secondary metabolites back to the community.

  “Hear that, babe? ‘You’ve made me think about life in a different way.’ That might be a compliment.”

  She laughs, but it sounds like a bobcat caught in a snare.

  “Oh. Now, here’s something. A request to go on the most listened-to public radio program in the country. They’re doing a series on the planet’s future, and they need someone to speak for the trees.”

  She hears his words from high up in a Douglas-fir in the middle of a howling storm. Human industry, everywhere. People need things from her. People mistake her for someone else. People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

  MOSES COMES into base camp frazzled. Actions everywhere, and they’ve lost thirteen people to detention and arrest in the last half a week. “We’ve got a legacy tree sit that needs manning. Anyone up for a brief stint up top?”

  Maidenhair’s hand shoots into the air before Watchman even understands the request. Such a look crosses her face: Yes. This. At last.

  “You sure?” Moses asks, as if he hasn’t just fulfilled the voices of light’s predictions. “You’ll be up there for at least a few days.”

  SHE ASSURES NICK while she packs. “If you think you can do more from down here . . . I’ll be fine by myself. They wouldn’t dare hurt me. Think of the press!”

  He won’t be fine, except where she is. It’s that simple, that absurd. He doesn’t tell her. The thing is so screamingly obvious, even in the way he hovers and nods. Of course she knows. She can hear beings that aren’t even here. Of course she can hear his banging thoughts, the blood pounding in his ears, even above the endless rain.

  THEIR PACKS go up and over the gate first. Then they follow—Maidenhair, Watchman, and their guide, Loki, who has run ground support for this tree for weeks. Their feet come back down in Humboldt Timber territory, trespass with criminal intent. The packs are heavy and the path steep. Weeks of steady rain have turned the trail to Turkish coffee. Weeks ago, they wouldn’t have made it to mile three. Even now, five miles in, Watchman sucks air in great gulps. He’s ashamed and falls back on the trail, where she can’t hear him wheeze. The path ascends a sloppy escarpment. The weight of the pack and the foot-sucking muck pull him down until every step is a pole vault. He stops to catch his breath, and the sleety air goes through him. Up ahead, Maidenhair forges on like some mythic beast. Power rises into her feet from the needle-bedded ground. Each mud-coated plunge renews her. She’s dancing.

  Cowardice adds several stones to Nick’s pack. He doesn’t want to get arrested. He’s not crazy about heights. He has only love to drive him up the cliff face. She’s fueled by the need to save everything alive.

  Loki puts out his palm. “See that flashing light? Buzzard and Sparks. They hear us.” He cups his hand to his lips and hoots. The light up in the high forest flashes again, impatient. This, too, makes Loki laugh. “Those bastards can’t wait to get back down to earth. Can you tell?”

  Nick is ready himself, and he hasn’t even left the ground. They slog the last few hundred yards up the rut. A profile emerges out of the thicket, so huge it can’t be right.

  “There it is,” Loki says, pointlessly. “There’s Mimas.”

  Sounds come up and out of Nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, Oh, my hopeless Jesus. He has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. Mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. Here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. The tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. From underneath, it could be Yggdrasil, the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. Twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the Hoel Chestnut. Two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. The whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the Evolutionary Tree of Life—one great idea splintering into whole new family branches, high up in the run of long time.

  Watchman humps up to where Maidenhair stands gazing, wondering if it’s too late to back out. But even in the falling light, her face glows with cause. All the agitation that has been such a part of her since she pulled into his gravel driveway back in Iowa has drained away, replaced by a certainty as pure and painful as that solitary calling owl’s. She spreads her arms against the furrows. She’s like a flea trying to hug its dog. Her face tilts straight up the titanic trunk. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe there’s no other way to protect this thing except with our bodies.”

  Loki says, “If nobody’s losing money or getting hurt, the law doesn’t give a fuck.”

  The base of the tree, between two enormous burls, opens onto a charcoal-lined goose pen large enough to sleep all three of them tonight. Black soot marks run up the trunk, the scars of fires that burned long before there was an America. A tear in the lower crown recalls a lightning strike still fresh enough to ooze. And from high up in the tangled mass, vanishingly far aboveground, come the cheers of two exhausted people out of their element who just want to be dry and warm and safe again tonight, for a few hours.

  Something tumbles down from above. Watchman shouts and pulls Maidenhair aside. The snake flops down to the forest floor. A rope dangles in the air, the width of Watchman’s index finger, in front of a shaft wider than his field of view.

  “What do we do with this? Attach the packs?”

  Loki chuckles. “You climb it.” He produces a harness, loops of knotted rope, and carabiners.
He starts to put the belt of the harness around Watchman’s waist.

  “Hang on. What’s this? Are these staples?”

  “There has been some wear. Don’t worry. The staples and duct tape won’t be bearing your weight.”

  “No, this little shoestring here will be bearing my weight.”

  “It has carried loads a lot heavier than you.”

  Olivia steps between the bickering men and takes the harness. She pulls it around her own waist. Loki clamps her in with carabiners. He cables her to the climbing rope with two sliding Prusik knots, one for her chest and the other for a foot stirrup.

  “See? Your weight pulls these knots tight to the rope, like little fists. But when you release . . .” He slips one of the slack knots up the rope. “Stand up on the stirrup. Push the chest knot as high as you can. Lean back and let it take the weight. Sit back into the harness. Slip the stirrup knot as high as it will go. Then stand up on that. Repeat.”

  Maidenhair laughs. “Like an inchworm?”

  Exactly like. She inches. She stands up. She leans back and sits. She stands and inches again, climbing a ladder of air, hoisting herself in self-raising footholds up off the face of the Earth. Watchman stands underneath as she scoots up, seat of the pants, into the sky. The intimacy—her body writhing above him—makes his soul flush. She’s the squirrel, Ratatoskr, scaling Yggdrasil, carrying messages between hell, heaven, and here.

  “She’s a natural,” Loki says. “She’s flying. She’ll reach the top in twenty minutes.”

  She does, though every muscle in her is shaking by arrival. From above, cheers greet her summit. Down at ground level, jealousy seizes Nick, and when the harness drops again, he springs into it. He gets about a hundred feet into the air before freaking. The rope can’t possibly hold him. It’s twisting and making weird nylon groans. He cranes his neck to see how much farther. Forever. Then he makes the mistake of looking down. Loki twirls in slow circles below. His face points upward like a tiny Pacific starflower about to be crushed underfoot. Watchman’s muscles surrender to panic. He closes his eyes and whispers, “I can’t do this. I’m dead.” He feels the zoom, the endless drop, coursing through his legs. Two small lumps of vomit come up his throat and onto his windbreaker.