The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  But Olivia is talking, up close into his ear. Nick. You’ve done this already. I’ve seen it for weeks. A hand, she says. A foot. Sit. Slide the knot. Stand. He opens his eyes on the trunk of Mimas, the largest, strongest, widest, oldest, surest, sanest living thing he has ever seen. Keeper of half a million days and nights, and it wants him in its crown.

  Shouts greet him at the top. Those above him fasten him with two clamps into the tree. Olivia scampers about the platforms, connected by rope ladder. Buzzard and Sparks have long since talked her through every clause in the lease. They want only to be down before night traps them. They climb down the rope to Loki, who calls up through the encroaching dark. “Someone will be by with your replacements in a few days. All you need to do until then is stay aloft.”

  THEN NICK IS ALONE with this woman who has commandeered his life. She takes his hand, which still has not unkinked from gripping. “Nick. We’re here. In Mimas.”

  She speaks the creature’s name like it’s an old friend. Like she’s been talking with it for a long time. They sit next to each other in needle-grazed darkness, two hundred feet in the air, on what Buzzard and Sparks called the Grand Ballroom: a seven-by-nine-foot platform made of three doors bolted together. Sliding tarp walls shelter them on three sides.

  “Bigger than my room at college,” Olivia says. “And nicer.”

  Balanced on another branch just beneath, reachable by rope ladder, is a smaller piece of plywood. A rain barrel, collecting jar, and sealable bucket complete the bathroom. Six feet above them on a higher spur, another platform serves as pantry, kitchen, and den. It’s filled with water, food, tarps, and supplies. A hammock stretched between two limbs cradles a substantial lending library, left here by previous sitters. The whole three-level tree house balances on the top of an enormous fork made when the trunk was hit by lightning centuries ago. It sways with every breeze.

  A kerosene lamp illuminates her face. He has never seen her look so confirmed. “Come here.” She takes his wrist and guides it to her. “Here. Closer.” As if farther away were an option. And she takes him like someone who’s sure that life has need of her.

  IN THE NIGHT, something soft and warm grazes his face. It’s her hand, he thinks, or the fall of her hair as she leans over him. Even the slow, seasick barcarole of the sleeping bag bed feels blessed—the cramped quarters of love. A claw cuts into his cheek, and the succubus lets loose with falsetto jibbers. Watchman bolts up, screaming, “Shit!” He pitches toward the platform ledge, but his safety cable catches him. One palm punches through the fantasy of tarp walls. Lives go shrieking off into the branches.

  She’s up in a flash, pinning his arms. “Nick. Stop. Nick! It’s okay.” Danger breaks up into little pieces. In the hail of chatter, he’s slow to hear what she keeps saying. “Flying squirrels. They’ve been playing all over us for ten minutes.”

  “Jesus! Why?”

  She laughs and pets him and pulls him back down horizontal. “You’ll just have to ask them. If they ever come back.”

  She nuzzles him, her belly in the small of his back. Sleep won’t come. There are creatures that live so high up and far away from man that they never learned fear. And thanks to the insanity in his cells, Nick has—this very first night on his very first tree-sit—taught them.

  LIGHT GATHERS in speckled fistfuls on his face. He has slept almost not at all, but rises refreshed in a way normally reserved for the industrious. He rolls onto his side and lifts the tarp. The whole spectrum streams in, from blues to browns, greens to absurd golds. “Look at that!”

  “L’see.” Her voice, sleepy but eager, breathes in his ear. “Oh, goodness.”

  They look together: high-wire surveyors of a newfound land. The view cracks open his chest. Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist—all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with—leave him stupid and speechless. Reiterated trunks grow out of Mimas’s main line, shooting up parallel like the fingers of a Buddha’s upraised hand, recouping the mother tree on smaller scales, repeating the inborn shape again and again, their branches running into each other, too mazy and fused to trace.

  Fog coats the canopy. Through an opening in Mimas’s crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale. It’s morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.

  Watchman sweeps back another wall of tarp along its rope runner and looks up. Dozens more feet of Mimas unfold above—trunks that took over when lightning clipped this one. The top of the tangled system disappears into low cloud. Fungi and lichen everywhere, like splatters of paint from a heavenly can. He and Maidenhair perch, most of the way up the Flatiron Building. He looks down. The floor of the forest is a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns.

  His legs go cold with thoughts of plummeting. He lowers the tarp. She’s staring at him, madness in her hazel eyes that spills out as cackling. “We’re here. We made it. This is where they want us.” She looks like someone summoned to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of life.

  Here and there, solo spires rise above the giants’ chorus. They look like green thunderheads, or rocket plumes. From below, the tallest neighbors read like mid-sized incense cedars. Only now, seventy yards above the ground, can Nicholas gauge the true size of these few old ones, five times larger than the largest whale. Giants march down into the ravine the three of them climbed last night. In the middle distance, the forest broadens into denser, deeper blue. He has read about these trees and their fog. On every side, trees lap at the low, wet sky, the clouds they themselves have helped to seed. Skeins of aerial needles—knobbier and more gnarled, a different thing from the smooth shoots growing at ground level—sip the fogbanks, condensing water vapor and sieving it down the sluices of twigs and branches. Nick glances upstairs into the kitchen, where their own water-catchment system works away, running droplets into a bottle. What struck him as ingenious last night—water for nothing—turns crude compared to the tree’s invention.

  Nicholas watches the drama as if thumbing an infinite flip-book. The land unfolds, ridge beyond ridge. His eyes adjust to the baroque abundance. Forests of five different shades bathe in the mist, each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered. And every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.

  A shift in the warmth next to him reminds Watchman. He’s not the only large vertebrate in this roost.

  “If I don’t quit looking, my bladder’s going to burst.”

  He watches Olivia scramble down the rope ladder to the platform below. He thinks: I really should look away. But he’s living in a tree two hundred feet above the surface of the planet. Flying squirrels have surveilled his face. Fogs from the world’s infancy turn the clock back eons, and he feels himself becoming another species.

  She squats above the wide-mouthed jar and a stream rushes out of her. He has never seen a woman urinate—something a fair number of all the human males who’ve ever lived might have to say on their deathbeds. The ritual concealment suddenly seems like some strange animal behavior that might turn up on a BBC wildlife documentary, like fish that change sex when they need to, or spiders that consume their partners after mating. He hears that revered Received Pronunciation whispering off-camera, When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways.

  She knows he’s watching. He knows she knows. Here, raw, now: the culture suited to this place. When she’s done, she tips the jar over the side of the platform. The wind takes the liquid and disperses it. Twenty feet, and her waste atomizes into the fog. Needles will rework it into something alive again. “My turn,” he says, when she comes back. And then, from above, she watches him crouch into the bag-lined bucket, which wil
l go to Loki for removal and compost when he shows up next.

  They take breakfast alfresco. Their chill fingers feed hazelnuts and dried apricots into mouths that hang open, awed by the view. Sitting still and looking: their new job description. But they’re humans, and soon enough their eyes fill up. She says, “Let’s explore.” The main trails from the Grand Ballroom are laid out with loops and lobster claws, rope ladders, places to hook a carabiner to. She gives him the harness. Then she makes one for herself from three nylon climbing cables. “Barefoot. You’ll stick better.”

  He wobbles out on a waving branch. The wind blows, and Mimas’s entire crown dips and bucks. He’ll die. Plunge twenty stories onto a bed of ferns. But he’s getting used to the idea, and there are worse ways to go.

  They head off in different directions. No point in trying to spot each other. He inches along one barrel-sized limb, cabled in, scooting on his pants seat. The scraped branch smells of lemons. A twig growing out of it holds a shock of cones, each one smaller than a marble. He takes one and taps it on his open palm. Seeds fall out like coarsely ground pepper. One sticks in the crease of his lifeline. From such a speck came a tree that holds him two hundred feet in the air without flexing. This fortress tower that could sleep a village and still have room to let.

  From high above, she calls, “Huckleberries! A whole patch up here.”

  Bugs swarm, iridescent, parti-colored, minuscule horror-film monsters. He works his way to a strange junction, careful never to look down. Two large beams, over the course of centuries, have flowed together like modeling clay. He grapples to the top of the hillock and finds it hollow. Inside is a small lake. Plants grow along a pond flecked with tiny crustaceans. Something moves in the shallows, speckled all over in chestnut, bronze, black, and yellow. Seconds pass before Nick coughs up a name: salamander. How did a damp-seeking creature with inch-long limbs climb two-thirds of the length of a football field, up the side of dry, fibrous bark? Maybe a bird dropped it here, fumbling a meal into the canopy. Unlikely. The chest of the slick creature rises and falls. The only plausible explanation is that his ancestors got on board a thousand years ago and rode the elevator up, for five hundred generations.

  Nick edges himself back the way he came. He’s propped up in the corner of the Grand Ballroom when Maidenhair returns. She’s ditched the safety umbilical. “You’ll never believe what I found. A six-foot hemlock, growing in a mat of soil this deep!”

  “Jesus Christ. Olivia. Were you free-climbing?”

  “Don’t worry. I climbed a lot of trees when I was little.” She kisses him, a quick, preemptive strike. “And, you know. Mimas says he won’t let us fall.”

  HE SKETCHES HER as she copies her morning discoveries into a spiral notebook. The drill of solitude comes so much easier to him than to her. After years of camping in an Iowa farmhouse, a day at the top of this leviathan flagpole is like stepping out. She, though, in her core chemistry, is still a college girl, addicted to a rate of stimulations per second that she hasn’t entirely kicked. The fog burns off. Deep in the expanse of midday, she asks, “What time would you say it is?” Her question is more mystified than agitated. The sun hasn’t passed overhead, and yet the two of them are so much older than they were this time yesterday. He looks up from sketching the local labyrinth of Mimas’s limbs and shakes his head. She giggles. “Okay. What day?”

  Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all. Just crossing the nine-foot platform is a national epic. More time passes. A tenth of an eternity. Two-tenths. When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. “I never knew how strong a drug other people are.”

  “The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused.”

  “How long does it take to . . . detox?”

  He considers. “Nobody’s ever clean.”

  . . .

  HE SKETCHES HER as she makes lunch. As she naps. Coaxing birds or playing with a mouse at two hundred feet. Her struggle to slow down looks to him like the human saga in a nutshell, in a redwood seed. He sketches the ravine full of redwoods, and the scattered giants that tower over their lesser brothers. Then he puts the drawing pad aside, the better to see the changing light.

  “YOU HEAR THEM?” he asks. A distant buzzing, systematic and competent. Saws and engines.

  “Yes. They’re everywhere.” Every falling giant brings the crews closer. Trees ten feet thick and nine hundred years old go down in twenty minutes and are bucked within another hour. When a large one falls, even from a distance, it’s like an artillery shell hitting a cathedral. The ground liquefies. Their platform two hundred feet up in Mimas shivers. The largest trees the world has ever made, saved for this final roundup.

  IN THE HAMMOCK LIBRARY, she finds a book. The Secret Forest. The front cover shows a prehistoric yew, aboveground and below. The back proclaims, The Year’s Surprise Bestseller—Translated into 23 Languages. “Would you like me to read to you a little?”

  She reads like she’s in the front of the assembled class, reciting that long freight train of stanzas from Leaves of Grass that the entire tenth grade was assigned to memorize.

  You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor.

  She stops and looks out the transparent wall of their tree house.

  A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.

  She pauses again, as if to do the math.

  But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

  In this manner, tacking into the breeze of the author’s thought, they make their way through four full pages before the light starts to fail. They eat again by candlelight—instant soup mix floating on two cups of water warmed on the tiny camp stove. By the time they’re done, darkness rules. The loggers’ engines have stopped, replaced by the thousand spectral challenges of night that they cannot decode.

  “We should save the candle,” she says.

  “We should.”

  It’s hours before bedtime. They lie on the long, rocking platform of their pledge, chattering to each other in the dark. Up here, they face no dangers but the oldest one. When the wind blows, it feels like they’re crossing the Pacific on a makeshift raft. When the wind stops, the stillness suspends them between two eternities, entirely in the caress of here and now.

  In the dark, she asks, “What are you thinking?”

  He’s thinking that his life has reached its zenith, this very day. That he has lived to see everything he wants. Lived to see himself happy. “I was thinking it’s going to be cold again tonight. We may need to zip the bags together.”

  “I’m down with that.”

  Every star in the galaxy rolls out above them, through the blue-black needles, in a river of spilled milk. The night sky—the best drug there was, before people came together into something stronger.

  They zip the bags together. “You know,” she says, “if one of us falls, the other is going with.”

  “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  THEY WAKE before it’s fully light, to the sound of engines in the deep beneath them.

  HER CITATION for unlawful assembly costs Mimi three hundred dollars. It’s not a bad deal. She has paid twice as much for a winter coat that gave her half the satisfaction. Word of her arrest gets out at work. But her superiors are engineers. If she can deliver her team’s molding projects on time, the company doesn’t care if she works from a federal prison. When a thousand marchers descend with placards on the Department of Forestry headquarters in Salem demanding reform of the Timber Harvest Plan approval process, Mimi and Douglas join them.

  Early one April Saturday, the pair drive to an action in the Coast Range. Douglas takes a vacation day from the hardware store where he has found work. The morning is beyond beautiful, and as they head south, listening to grunge and the day’s headlines, the sky cools from dusky rose to cerulean. A rucksack in
the back seat contains two pairs of cheap swimming goggles, T-shirts to wrap around their noses and mouths, and modified water bottles. Also, his-and-hers steel double-lock police-grade handcuffs, chains, and a couple of bicycle U-locks. There’s an arms race on. The protesters begin to think they might even be able to outspend the police, who are funded by a public convinced that all taxes are theft, but giving away public timber is not.

  They turn down the spur road to the protest site. Douglas scans the parked vehicles. “No television trucks. Not one.”

  Mimi curses. “Okay, nobody panic. I’m sure the print journalists are here. With photographers.”

  “No TV, might as well never have happened.”

  “It’s early yet. They could still be on their way.”

  A shout rises down the road, the sound of a crowd after a field goal. Through the trees, opposing armies square off in each other’s faces. There’s shouting, a bit of scrum. Then a scuffled tug-o’-war with someone’s jacket. The latecomers trade glances and break into a trot. They reach the face-off in a clearing in the denuded woods. It’s like some Italian circus. A double ring of protesters surrounds a track-mounted Cat C7–powered monster whose crane arches above their heads like a long-necked dinosaur. Fellers and buckers circle the anarchy. A special fury hangs in the air, the product of how far this wooded hillside is from the nearest town.

  Mimi and Doug trot up the incline. At the roar of a chain saw, she tugs his arm. One snarling machine sets off another. Soon a chorus of gas-powered rippers screams through the woods. The loggers swing their machines lazily, laconically. Reapers with scythes.

  Douglas stops. “Are they fucking nuts?”