The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  WHILE THE PRISONERS mimic sleep, Neelay Mehta enjoys the prime hours of creation. From his office bed, he issues a directive to Sempervirens’s elves regarding the nature of Mastery 8:

  What will keep several million players unable to sign off? The place must be fuller and more promising than the lives they return to, offline. . . . Imagine millions of users enriching the world together with their every action. Help them build a culture so beautiful it would break their hearts to lose.

  HALFWAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY, another woman starts a jail term all her own. The flooding in her husband’s brain floods her as well. She calls 911. She rides along in the ambulance through the warm night. At the hospital she signs the informed consent, though she’ll never feel informed again. She goes in to the man after the first operation. What’s left of Ray Brinkman lies slack in the adjustable bed. Half his skull has been removed and his brain has been papered back over by a flap of scalp. Hoses spring from him. His face is frozen in terror.

  No one can tell Dorothy Cazaly Brinkman how long he might be like this. A week. Another half century. Thoughts go through her head those first nights, during her ER vigil. Terrible things. She’ll stay until he’s stabilized. After that, she must save herself.

  Again and again she hears the words she shouted at him, just hours before his brain caved in. It’s over, Ray. It’s over. The two of us are over. You aren’t my responsibility. We don’t belong to each other, and we never did.

  IN JAIL, fitful in his upper bunk, Adam sees great redwoods explode like rockets on their launchpads. His research is intact—all the precious questionnaire data gathered over months—but he is not. He has begun to see certain things about faith and law that hid themselves behind the expanse of common sense. Jail without arraignment helps his eyesight.

  “You see their game,” Watchman tells him. “They don’t want the cost or publicity of putting us on trial. They just use the legal system to hurt us as much as they can.”

  “Isn’t there a law . . . ?”

  “There is. They’re breaking it. They can hold us seventy-two hours without charging. That was yesterday.”

  It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.

  ON HIS FOURTH NIGHT in the cell, Nick dreams about the Hoel family chestnut. He watches it, sped up thirty-two million times, reveal again its invisible plan. He remembers, in his sleep, on the cot’s thin mattress, the way the time-lapse tree waved its swelling arms. The way those arms tested, explored, aligned in the light, writing messages in the air. In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.

  WHILE NICK DREAMS, so does the forest—all nine hundred kinds that humans have identified. Four billion hectares, from boreal to tropic—the Earth’s chief way of being. And as the world forest dreams, people converge in the public woods one state north. Four months earlier, arson blackened ten thousand acres in a place called Deep Creek—one of the year’s many fires of convenience. The burn prompts the Forest Service to salvage-sell the lightly damaged standing timber. The arsonist is never found. No one wants to find him. No one, that is, except for a few hundred of the forest’s owners, who converge on the sold-off groves bearing signs. Mimi holds one reading NOT ONE BLACKENED STICK. Douglas’s reads SAY IT AIN’T SO, SMOKEY.

  ADAM, NICK, AND OLIVIA are held without arraignment two days longer than is legal. They’re threatened with a dozen charges, only to have everything dropped overnight. The men meet Maidenhair at her release. They see her through the chicken-wire window, walking down the women’s wing with a little hobo’s ball of her stuff in her hands. Then she’s on them, embracing. She steps back and narrows her fire-green eyes. “I want to see it.”

  They take Adam’s car, which seems to him now like it belongs to someone else. The loggers are gone; there’s nothing left to cut. They’ve long since headed to fresh groves. The absence is obvious from half a mile away. Where once there was a green weave of textures you could study all day, there’s only blue. The tree that promised her that no one would be harmed is gone.

  Now, Adam thinks. Now she’ll decompensate. Begin to rage.

  At the base, her hand stretches out, touching some final proof, amazed. “Look at that! Even the stump is taller than me.”

  She touches the edge of the wondrous cut and breaks down sobbing. Nick stumbles toward her, but she holds him off. Adam must watch every awful spasm. There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.

  “WHERE WILL YOU GO?” Adam asks, over eggs in a breakfast roadhouse.

  Maidenhair gazes out the plate glass, where California sycamores run along the sidewalk by the curb. Watchman follows her glance. These, too, raking their fingers in the air. Waving and swelling like a gospel choir.

  “We’re heading north,” she answers. “Something’s happening up in Oregon.”

  “Resistance communities,” Watchman says. “All over the place. They can use us up there.”

  Adam nods. Ethnography is over. “Did . . . they tell you this? The . . . your voices?”

  She bursts into a curt, wild laugh. “No. The deputy sheriff loaned me her jogging radio. I think she had a thing for me. You should come with us.”

  “Well. I have this research to finish. My dissertation.”

  “Work on it up there. The place will be filled with the people you want to study.”

  “Idealists,” Watchman says.

  Adam can’t read the man. Somewhere up in the tree or in his narrow cell, he lost the ability to tell sardonic from straight. “I can’t.”

  “Ah. Well. If you can’t, you can’t.” Maybe she’s being sympathetic. Maybe she’s felling him. “We’ll meet you up there. When you come around.”

  ADAM CARRIES the curse back to Santa Cruz. For weeks he works up his data. Almost two hundred people have answered the 240 questions of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. They’ve also completed his custom questionnaire testing for various beliefs, including thoughts on human entitlement to natural resources, the scope of personhood, and plant rights. Digitizing the results is trivial. He runs his data through various analysis packages.

  Professor Van Dijk has a look. “Nice work. Took you a while. Anything exciting happen during the fieldwork?”

  Something has happened to his libido while he was away. Professor Van Dijk is as hot as ever. But she seems to Adam like another species.

  “Does five days in jail count as exciting?”

  She thinks he’s kidding. He lets her think so.

  CERTAIN TENDENCIES of radical environmentalist temperament emerge from the data. Core values, a sense of identity. The scores of only four of the thirty personality factors measured by the NEO inventory turn out to predict, with remarkable accuracy, whether a person will believe: A forest deserves protection regardless of its value to humans. He wants to give himself the exam, but it would say nothing now.

  Back at his apartment after ten hours in the computer lab, Adam turns on the TV. Oil wars and sectarian violence. It’s way too early to think about sleeping, though that’s all he wants to do. He’s still a score of stories up in the air, held aloft by a nonexistent tree, listening to the creak of that high house and the calls of birds he’d like to be able to name. He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

  He heads out to a favorite grad student hang, where he consumes five beers, ninety-six decibels of blast beat, and a hundred minutes of wall-sized sine-wave basketball in the company of twenty instant friends. Ejected again from the cocoon of fun, he regroups in the bar’s parking lot. He’s not so buzzed as to imagine he’s fit to drive, but there’s no other way home.

  Waves of simulated mirth pump out of the building as a parade of muscle cars snarls down Cabrillo. A woman under a streetlight shouts
at no one, “Fuck me for even trying to understand you.” Across the alley, people wait to be admitted into the back entrance of some late-night invitation-only event that Adam, juked by the sight of the mini-throng, suddenly needs to attend. Another human irrationality he knows all about but is too fried to remember by name. He walks half a block, propelled by a tremendous wave that feeds on itself, jetting out refuse behind it: bubbles, genocides, crusades, manias from the pyramids to pet rocks—the desperate delusions of culture from which, for one brief night, high up above the Earth, he once awakened.

  At the corner, he leans on a streetlight. A fact struggles to escape him, one he has felt for a long time but has never been able to formulate. Almost every part of need is created by a reflex, phantasmal, and democratic committee whose job is to turn one season’s necessities into the next’s yard sales. He stumbles on into a park full of people dealing in excitement and night. The air stinks a little of Wet-Naps, weed, and sex. Hunger everywhere, and the only food is salt.

  Something hard hits his head, falls to the ground, and rolls a few feet away. He crouches down in the dark and searches. The culprit lies in the grass, a mysterious, industrial-grade button incised on its flat round face with a perfect X. It seems designed to be opened with a large Phillips-head screwdriver and has the look of steampunk: ingenious, Victorian, finely machined. But it’s made of wood.

  The thing is too weird for words. He studies it for a full minute, learning again how he knows nothing. Nothing outside his own kind. He looks up into the branches of a willowy eucalyptus, from which the mystery fell. The thick bole has started its species’ trademark striptease. Sheaves of brown, thin bark litter the base, leaving behind a trunk so white it’s obscene.

  “What?” he asks the tree. “What? ” The tree feels no need to reply.

  THE SEVEN MILES of Forest Service road are so glorious it scares him. Adam follows the cut, climbing along sentry conifers—spruce to hemlock to Douglas-fir, yew, red cedar, three kinds of true firs, all of which he sees as pine.

  A year-long dissertation completion fellowship—a gift from the gods—and this is how he spends it. His pack weighs down on his hips. Above him in the blue, the sun acts like it’ll never hide again. But the crisp air and early shadows in the switchbacks hint at what’s coming. A few more weeks and his thesis will be done. First this, though: a last bit of holdout research.

  The Northwest has more miles of logging road than public highway. More miles of logging road than streams. The country has enough to circle the Earth a dozen times. The cost of cutting them is tax-deductible, and the branches are growing faster than ever, as if spring has just sprung. This road’s curves at last broaden out, and the settlement appears in front of him. Along the edge of the camp, brightly colored people, mostly young, maybe a hundred of them, take a last stand. Adam draws close; the work grows clearer. Community trench digging. Anarchic assembly of a drawbridge. Palisades and stockades rising from salvage timber. Spanning the moated entrance across the chopped-up road, a banner announces:

  THE FREE BIOREGION OF CASCADIA

  The words sprout stems and tendrils. Birds perch on the letters’ vegetation. Adam recognizes the style and knows the artist. He enters the Lincoln Log fortress through the drawbridge over the trench in progress. Just past the defile, a man in camo and receding-hairline ponytail lies in the middle of the road. His right arm stretches down his side, like a reclining Buddha. His left disappears down a hole into the Earth.

  “Greetings, biped! You here to help or hinder?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Name’s Doug-fir. Just testing out a new lockdown. There’s an oil drum full of concrete six feet down there. If they want me out, they’re going to have to rip my arm off!”

  From a nest at the top of a tripod of lashed logs in the road, a small, dark-haired, ethnically ambiguous woman calls, “Everything okay?”

  “That’s Mulberry. She’s thinks you’re a Freddie.”

  “What’s a Freddie?”

  “Just checking,” Mulberry says.

  “Freddies are the Federales.”

  “I don’t think he’s a Freddie. I’m just . . .”

  “It’s probably the button-down and chinos.”

  Adam looks up at the woman’s tripod nest. She says, “They won’t be able to take equipment down this road without knocking this over and killing me.”

  The man with his arm in the ground clucks. “Freddies won’t do that. They think life is sacred. Human life, anyway. Crown of creation and such. Sentimental. It’s the one chink in their armor.”

  “So if you’re not a Freddie,” Mulberry asks, “who are you?”

  Something comes to Adam that he hasn’t thought about for decades. “I’m Maple.”

  Mulberry smiles a little crooked smile, like she can see into him. “Good. No Maples here yet.”

  Adam looks away, wondering whatever became of that tree. His backyard second self. “Do either of you know a man called Watchman or a woman named Maidenhair?”

  “Shit, yeah,” the man chained to the Earth says.

  The tripod woman grins. “We don’t have leaders here. But we do have those two.”

  HIS OLD FELLOW criminals greet Adam like they knew he was coming. Watchman clasps him by the shoulders. Maidenhair hugs him, long. “It’s good you’re here. We can use you.”

  They’ve changed in some subtle way no personality test could quantify. Grimmer, more resolute. The death of Mimas has compressed them, like shale into slate. Their transformation makes Adam wish that he’d chosen some other topic to research. Resilience, immanence, numen—qualities his discipline is notoriously poor in measuring.

  She grabs his wrist. “We like to have a little ceremony when new people join.”

  Watchman sizes up Adam’s pack. “You are joining us, right?”

  “Ceremony?”

  “Simple. You’ll like it.”

  SHE’S HALF RIGHT; the ceremony is simple. It happens that evening, on a broad meadow behind the wall. The Free Bioregion of Cascadia assembles in parade dress. Scores of people in plaid and grunge. Floral, flowing hippie skirts topped off with fleece vests. Not all the congregation is young. A couple of stout abuelas stand by in sweatpants and cardigans. A former Methodist minister performs the ceremony. He’s in his eighties, with a necklace scar where he lashed himself to a logging truck.

  They start in on the songs. Adam fights down his hatred of virtuous singing. The shaggy nature-souls and their platitudes make him queasy. He feels ashamed, the way he does when remembering childhood. People take turns airing the day’s challenges and suggesting cures. All around him spread the garish colors of ad hoc democracy. Maybe it’s okay. Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything. Who is he to say?

  The erstwhile minister says, “We welcome you, Maple. We hope you’ll stay as long as you’re able. Please, if it’s in your heart to do so, repeat these words after me. ‘From this day forward . . .’ ”

  “ ‘From this day forward . . .’ ” He can’t very well not repeat, with so many people assembled to watch him.

  “ ‘. . . I’ll commit myself to respect and defend . . .’ ”

  “ ‘. . . I’ll commit myself to respect and defend . . .’ ”

  “ ‘. . . the common cause of living things.’ ”

  They aren’t the most destructive words he has ever spoken, or the most pitiful. Something echoes in his head, something he once copied down. A thing is right . . . a thing is right when it tends . . . But he can’t get to it. Cheers break out around his final echo. People set to work making a campfire. The blaze is high, wide, and orange, and the carbonizing wood smells like childhood.

  “You’re a psychologist,” Mimi says to the recruit. “How do we convince people that we’re right?”

  The newest Cascadian takes the bait. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a go
od story.”

  Maidenhair tells that story that the rest of the campfire knows by heart. First she was dead, and there was nothing. Then she came back, and there was everything, with beings of light telling her how the most wondrous products of four billion years of life needed her help.

  An old Klamath guy with long gray hair and glasses like Clark Kent nods. He takes the floor for the benediction. He chants the old chants and teaches everyone a few words of Klamath-Modoc. “Everything happening here was already known. Our people said long ago that this day would come. They told of how the forest was about to die, when humans suddenly remembered the rest of their family.” And for half the night, the characters sit around the blaze, laughing and listening and whispering and baying at the moon up in the spruces’ spires.

  THE NEXT DAY is pure work. Trenches to be widened and deepened, a wall to be secured. Adam swings a hammer for hours. By evening he’s so tired he can’t stand. He shares a cookout with the four friends who strike him as a Jungian archetypal family: Maidenhair, the Mother Priest; Watchman, the Father Protector; Mulberry, the Child Craftsman; and Doug-fir, Child Clown. Maidenhair is the glue, casting spells over everyone in camp. Adam marvels at her bulwark optimism, even after the routs she has suffered. She speaks with the authority of one who has already seen the future, from high above.

  They take him in that night, a square fifth wheel. He’s not sure what his role in this desperation-forged clan is supposed to be. Doug-fir calls him Professor Maple, and that’s who he becomes. That night, he sleeps the deep oblivion of an exhausted volunteer.