The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “We can’t risk it right now. Moss-Eater and Graywolf got spooked by the death threats and went home. The entire LDF is stretched thin on the ground. We’re having some internal communication issues. In fact, we’re pretty hosed at the moment. Can you stay up just one more week?”

  “Of course!” Maidenhair says. “We can stay up forever.”

  Forever might be easier, Watchman thinks, if he, too, were hearing from beings of light. Loki shivers in the candlelight. “Man, it’s cold up here. That wet wind goes right through you.”

  Maidenhair says, “We don’t feel it anymore.”

  “Much,” Watchman qualifies.

  Loki harnesses up. “Gotta head down before they trap Sparks and me. Watch out for Climber Cal. Serious. Humboldt has this guy who scoots up trunks bareback, with just his spikes and a big loop of cable. He’s been all kinds of trouble at other tree-sits.”

  “Sounds like a forest legend,” Watchman says.

  “He’s not.”

  “He’s taking people out of trees by force?”

  “There are two of us,” Maidenhair declares. “And we’ve got our balance now.”

  THE LOGGERS STOP COMING. There’s nothing more to argue over. Resupply from LDF ground support dries up, too. “We must still be under siege,” Watchman says. But they can see no blockade down on the surface. Humans might well have vanished from everywhere but the fossil record. High up in the canopy, they see no animals larger than flying squirrels, who nest in the warmth of their bodies at night.

  Neither of them can say how many days pass. Nick marks each morning on a hand-drawn calendar, but by the time he pees and sponges clean and eats breakfast and dreams some more of a collective artwork that could do justice to a forest, he often can’t remember if he has marked off the day already or not.

  “What does it matter?” Maidenhair asks. “The storms are almost over. It’s warming up. The days are getting longer. That’s all the calendar we need.”

  Whole afternoons pass as Watchman sketches. He draws the mosses that sprout up in every crevice. He sketches the usnea and other hanging lichen that turn the tree into a fairy tale. His hand moves and the thought forms: Who needs anything, except food? And those like Mimas who make their own food—freest of all.

  Equipment still whines, down the gaping hillside. A nearby saw, a more distant trunk skidder: the two tree-sitters get good at telling the creatures apart by ear. Some mornings, those sounds are their only way of knowing if the system of free enterprise still barrels toward its God-sized wall.

  “They must be trying to starve us out.” But in that long stretch when provisions don’t get through, they have couscous and imagination.

  “Hold out,” Maidenhair says. “The huckleberries will be fruiting again before we know it.” She nibbles on dried chickpeas like they’re a course in philosophy. “I never knew how to taste things, before.”

  He neither. And he never knew how his body smells, and his fresh shit, turning to compost. And how his thought changes when he stares for hours at the carved light sinking through the branches. And what blood sounds like, pumping in his ears in the hour after the sun sets, and while everything alive holds its breath, waiting to see what happens, once the sky falls.

  Reality tips away from perpendicular in every little breeze. Gusty afternoons are an epic two-person sport. When the wind picks up, there’s nothing, nothing at all but wind. It turns them feral—the tarp flapping like mad and the needles whipping them senseless. When the wind blows, that’s all your brain has—no drawing, no poems, no books, no cause, no calling—just the gales and your crazed ideas that bang around wild, their own careening species tumbling free of the family tree.

  Once the light goes, the two of them have only sound. The candles and kerosene are too precious to spend on the indulgence of reading. They have no idea when their next provisions might make it through the cordon, whether there still is a cordon, still an LDF or any earthly institution that remembers the pair of them, high up in a thousand-year-old tree, in need of supplies.

  She takes his hand in the dark, all the signal he needs. They burrow into one another, as they do every night, against the black. “Where are they?”

  There are only two choices, which they she means. Three if you count the creatures of light. And his answer is the same for all three. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they’ve forgotten about this stand.”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t think they have.”

  The moonlight behind her throws a hood across her features. “They can’t win. They can’t beat nature.”

  “But they can mess things over for an incredibly long time.”

  Yet on such a night as this, as the forest pumps out its million-part symphonies and the fat, blazing moon gets shredded in Mimas’s branches, it’s easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

  “Shh,” she says, although he’s already silent. “What’s that?”

  He knows and he doesn’t. Another experimental incarnation checking in, announcing its whereabouts, testing the blackness, calibrating its place in the enormous hive. Truth is, his eyes are drooping and he can’t quite keep her question from turning into hieroglyphics. With no way to domesticate the dark or turn it to the smallest use, he’s done for. But he’s wakeful enough still to realize: This is the longest stretch of time I’ve ever gone without the black dog coming to bite at my ass.

  They sleep. They don’t strap in anymore. But they still clutch each other hard enough, most nights, that they’d pitch over the side of the platform together, all the same.

  WHEN IT’S LIGHT AGAIN, he makes a meaningless tick mark on his DIY calendar. He washes, evacuates, eats, and crawls into the traditional waking position—head alongside her feet, so they can see each other. It crosses Nick’s mind to wonder how he ever took it in his head to move his life twenty stories into the open air. But how does a person get anywhere? And who could stay on the ground, once he has seen life in the canopy? As the sun skids by in smallest increments across the summer sky, he draws. He begins to see how it might work, how a few black marks on a blank white field might change what’s in the world.

  She sits on the platform edge with the tarp up, looking out across the tumbling forest. Bald patches in the middle distance are coming closer. She listens for her disembodied voices, her constant reassurance. They don’t check in every day. She retrieves her own notebook and scribbles down tiny poems smaller than a redwood seed.

  He watches her take a sponge bath with water that collected in the tarp. “Do your parents know where you are? In case something . . . comes down?”

  She turns, naked and shivering, frowns, like the question is advanced nonlinear dynamics. “I haven’t spoken to my parents since we left Iowa.”

  Clean and clothed again, seven degrees of solar descent later, she adds, “And it won’t.”

  “Won’t what?”

  “Nothing’s coming down. I’ve been assured that this story has a good ending.” She pats Mimas, who has, that very day, eaten four pounds of carbon from the air and added them to its mass, even in late middle age.

  THEY SPEND the endless hours reading in their sleeping bags. They read all the books previous sitters left in the hammock lending library. They read Shakespeare, holding the thick volume across their twinned bellies. They read a play every afternoon, taking all the parts between them. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. King Lear. Macbeth. They read two fabulous novels, one three years old and the other a hundred and twenty-three. She has trouble, as they near the end of the older story, keeping her voice under control.

  “You love these people?” The stories have captivated him. He cares about what happens. But she—she’s broken.

  “Love? Wow. Okay. Maybe. But they’re all imprisoned in a shoe box, and they have no idea. I just want to shake them and yell, Get out of yourselves, damn it! Look around! But they can’t, Nicky. Everything alive is just outside
their field of view.”

  Her face crabs up and her eyes go raw again. Crying for the blindness, even of fictional beings.

  THEY READ The Secret Forest again. It’s like a yew: more revealing on a second look. They read about how a branch knows when to branch. How a root finds water, even water in a sealed pipe. How an oak may have five hundred million root tips that turn away from competition. How crown-shy leaves leave a gap between themselves and their neighbors. How trees see color. They read about the wild stock market trading in handicrafts, aboveground and below. About the complex limited partnerships with other kinds of life. The ingenious designs that loft seeds in the air for hundreds of miles. The tricks of propagation worked upon unsuspecting mobile things tens of millions of years younger than the trees. The bribes for animals who think they’re getting lunch for free.

  They read about myrrh-tree transplanting expeditions depicted in the reliefs at Karnak, three thousand five hundred years ago. They read about trees that migrate. Trees that remember the past and predict the future. Trees that harmonize their fruiting and nutting into sprawling choruses. Trees that bomb the ground so only their own young can grow. Trees that summon air forces of insects to come save them. Trees with hollowed trunks wide enough to hold the population of small hamlets. Leaves with fur on the undersides. Thinned petioles that solve the wind. The rim of life around a pillar of dead history, each new coat as thick as the maker season is generous.

  “CAN YOU FEEL IT?” she asks, under the mayhem in the western sky early one evening, or perhaps the next. With no more explanation, he knows what she means. He can read her mind now, so many hours have they passed together in purposeless contemplation, knee to elbow, elbow to knee.

  Can you feel it lift and disappear? That standing wave of constant static. The distraction so ubiquitous you never even knew you were wrapped in it. Human certainty. The thing that blinds you to what’s right here—gone. He can—can feel it. The tree, like some tremendous signal beacon. The two of them, turning into something powered by the spots of speckled sun that reach them through the dozens of feet of Mimas’s branches still above them.

  “Let’s summit,” she tells him. And before he can object, he’s looking up at a mud-caked gargoyle perched on a lightning-clipped spire, her legs wrapped around a pipe running all the way down to earth and her arms flung up, sieving the sky.

  NICK IS DEEP in a green dream one night when a shudder rips through Mimas and rolls Nick onto the platform’s edge. His arm stabs out and grabs a thin branch. He clings, looking twenty stories downward. Behind him, Olivia screams. He scrambles back to mid-platform as a bigger gust catches the tarp and lifts the whole construction, bucking it. Winds liquefy the air and hail pelts them through the needles. At a tremendous crack, Nick looks up. Thirty feet above his head, a branch thicker than his thigh tears free and crashes down in slow motion, cracking other limbs on its way down.

  Furious winds cross-check Olivia into Mimas’s trunk. She clutches the platform, hysterical. The trunk tips several feet off the vertical, then swings back as far the other way. Nick swings like a sliding weight on the world’s tallest metronome. As sure as he knows anything, he knows he’s going to die. He’s clenched from jaw to toes, clamped to life with all that’s left in his body. He’ll let go, and the ground will solve everything.

  Something screams at him through the hail. Olivia. “Don’t. Fight. Don’t fight!”

  The words slap him, and he can think again. She’s right: clenched, he won’t last another three minutes.

  “Relax. Ride!”

  He sees her eyes, the crazed green celadon. She sways on the wild bends, limber, as if the storm is nothing. In a few beats more, he sees that it is. Nothing to a redwood. Thousands of these storms have blown through this crown, tens of thousands, and all Mimas ever had to do was give.

  He surrenders to the rage as this tree has done, through a millennium of killer storms. As sempervirens has done for a hundred and eighty million years. Yes, a storm topped this tree, centuries ago. Yes, storms will bring down trees this size. But not tonight. Not likely. Tonight, the top of a redwood is as safe a spot in this gale as any. Just bend and ride.

  A howl cuts through the hail-thickened wind. He howls back. Their shrieks turn into asylum laughter. They screech in tandem until all the world’s war cries and wild calls turn into thanksgiving. Long past the hour when his clenched fists would have given out, they whoop descant to the storm.

  LATE THE NEXT MORNING, three loggers appear at the foot of Mimas. “You two all right? A lot of windthrow last night. Big trees down. We were worried about you.”

  INCREDIBLY, the police make the video. A year ago, it would have been the kind of shaky, blurred proof the police destroyed. But the tactics of the lawless are changing. Against them, the police need new experiments. Methods that must be documented, evaluated, and refined.

  The camera pans across the crowd. People spill down the street past the burnished company sign. They surround the headquarters, nestled lodge-like against a rim of spruce and fir. Not even an apprehensive cameraman can make it seem like anything but democracy in America, the right of people peaceably to assemble. The crowd stands well back from the property line, singing their songs and shaking their bedsheet banners: STOP ILLEGAL HARVESTING. NO MORE DEATH ON PUBLIC LANDS. But police wander in and out of the frame. Officers on foot and horseback. Men seated in the back of vehicles that look like armored personnel carriers.

  MIMI SHAKES HER HEAD in wonder. “I didn’t know this town had so many cops.” Douggie limps beside her, bowlegged. “You know we don’t have to do this. At least half a dozen people would be happy to stand in.”

  He spins to face her and almost stumbles. “What are you talking about?” He’s like a golden retriever whacked with the rolled-up newspaper he just so proudly fetched. “Wait.” He touches her shoulder, confused. “Are you scared, Meem? Because you don’t have to do anything you—”

  She can’t bear it, his goodness. “Fine. I’m just saying don’t be a hero this time.”

  “I wasn’t being a hero last time. How could I know they’d melt down the old family jewels?”

  She saw, the day his denim was sheared open to the breeze. The family jewels, flapping in the air, burned with chemicals. He has wanted to show her again, so often, since: the miraculous recovery—almost a resurrection, you might say. She just can’t bring herself. She loves the man, maybe more than she cares for anyone but her sisters and their children. It’s a constant amazement to her that a man so artless has made it to the age of forty. She can’t imagine not watching out for him. But they’re different species. This cause they’ve given themselves to—this defense of the immobile and blameless, the fight for something better than endless suicidal appetite—is all they have in common.

  They head toward the deployment vehicle, where the protest’s new secret weapon, the steel-bar black bears, are being handed out. “Damn straight we’re doing this, woman. What do you think? That wasn’t my first Purple Heart. Or my last. Gonna end up with a whole string of them, just like an earthworm.”

  “Douggie. No more injuries. I can’t take it today.”

  He points his chin toward the line of police, waiting for something to happen. “Take it up with them.” And then, like a creature with no memory except for the sun, “Geez! Look at all these people! Is this a movement or what?”

  THE FIRST CRIME—crossing the line onto corporate property—happens off-camera. But the lens soon finds the action. The automatic focus slurs and locks in as a few peaceful assemblers cross the parkway onto the manicured lawn. There, they stand and shout responses to the calls of the megaphone.

  A people! United! Can never be defeated! A forest! Once blighted! Can never be re-seeded!

  Two officers approach the trespassers and ask them to step back. Their words are muffled on the recording, but polite enough. Soon, though, the clump turns into a rolling bait ball. People challenge and jeer—precisely the standoff the police hope
d to avoid. One white-haired, hunchbacked woman shouts, “We’ll respect their property when they respect ours.”

  The camera swings hard to the left, where a group of nine people dash across the lawn. The first altercation turns out to be a well-executed diversionary tactic to draw police away from the building’s entrance. Each beelining figure carries a shallow, vee-bent steel tube three feet long, thick enough to insert an arm.

  Then a cut. The scene shifts indoors. The activists have chained themselves into a ring around a pillar in the foyer. Curious employees pour out of the hallways. Police come from behind the cameraman, trying to manage the disintegrating situation.

  THE PROTESTERS have drilled for how to deploy as fast as possible. But in the real lobby, with milling employees and pursuing police, deployment isn’t pretty. The scuffle splits Mimi and Douglas. They end up across from each other in the ring. They have three seconds to lock down. Douglas sticks his left arm in the black bear and attaches the carabiner on his wrist cable to the steel post welded into the center of the tube. His companions do the same. Seconds later, the whole nine-node ring solidifies into something impervious to anything short of a diamond saw.

  They sit cross-legged in a circle on the floor around a fat pillar. Douglas tilts to one side, and still can’t see her. He shouts “Meem,” and that round brown face he has come to associate with all the world’s goodness peeks around and grins. He shoots her a thumbs-up, before remembering his thumb is inside a steel cylinder.

  ONE LONG TRACKING SHOT records each close-up. A tall, gawky man with a gap between his front teeth and long bushy hair pulled back in a ponytail starts to sing. We shall overcome. We shall overcome. There are snickers, at first. But by measure three the rest of the group is singing along. Five policemen tug at the demonstrators, but easy disentanglement is not an option. A uniformed man says, as if reading from a prompter: “My name is Sheriff Sanders. Your presence here is in violation of the penal code, section numbers . . .” Shouts from the ring drown him out. He stops, closes his eyes, and starts again. “This is private property. I order you on behalf of the state of Oregon to disperse. If you do not withdraw peacefully, you will be held for unlawful assembly as well as trespass with criminal intent. Any attempt to resist arrest will be considered in violation of the penal code sections—”