He pads along, feeling with the snowshoes where the path should be. A slog around the first S, and the valley unfolds below. Down the sharp escarpment spreads a carpet of trees so thick it’s impossible to believe that the world is, in fact, frayed to the point of snapping. Mounds of sculpted powder weigh down the heavy limbs into skirts that drag on the ground. The purple, upright cones of the firs have disintegrated into seed. But clusters of cones hang in the spruce tops, white-capped eggs that forgot to fall. Juniper grows right out of the raw, unbroken rock. Spruce elders stand in judgment over him.
He wanders to the escarpment for a better look, and what he takes for solid ridge collapses beneath him. The first snow-covered rock on the vertical drop bounces him into the air onto the lip of a thousand-foot tumble. He swings out one foot and clips a cylinder of spruce before smashing his way down the snowy talus. Two hundred feet of scree drop off in front of him. He screams and manages to snag a savior trunk. For the second time, trees save his life.
Blood freezes on his abraded face. The air is so cold it electrocutes his nose. His arm twists outward from his shoulder, wrong. Snow blankets him. He lies still, knowing nothing more than a snow-skirted spruce. The sky darkens. What seemed cold gives way to professional subzero. His brain flickers and he opens his eyes on the white that wants to kill him. He looks back up the ridge and, beaten by the sheer rock face, thinks, Let me just rest here a little. In the end, it’s the dead woman, kneeling beside him and stroking his face, who gets him up. You’re not just you.
The sound of his own voice—“I’m not?”—brings him to. The dead woman’s stroking fingers turn into a bough of the spruce that he wrapped up on in his fall. His nose is broken and his shoulder dislocated. His old wounded leg is worthless. Night and cold are dropping fast. The bluff rises a steep eighty feet above him. But facts count for nothing. She tells him as much, in four more words. You’re not done yet.
. . .
PAST RETIREMENT AGE, Patricia works like there’s no tomorrow. Or like tomorrow might yet show up, if enough people dug in and worked. She has two jobs, each the other’s opposite. In the one she hates, she stands behind podiums begging for money, stuttering like a black-backed woodpecker pile-driving a pine. She trots out a small stable of dog-and-pony quotes. Blake: A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Auden: A culture is no better than its woods. Ten percent of her audience gives her seed bank twenty dollars.
Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn’t Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century’s end. Ten percent of her audience gives her twenty dollars.
She argues economics, good business, aesthetics, morals, spirit. She tells them stories, with drama, hope, anger, evil, and characters you can love. She gives them Chico Mendes. She gives them Wangari Maathai. One in ten gives her twenty bucks, and an angel gives a million. That’s enough to keep her working the job she loves: flying around the world, pouring unconscionable volumes of greenhouse gas into the air, speeding the planet’s doom, collecting seeds and starts from trees that will be gone in no time at all.
Honduran rosewood. Hinton’s oak in Mexico. St. Helena gumwood. Cedars from the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty species of monster kauri, ten feet thick and clear of branches for a hundred feet and more. An alerce in southern Chile, older than the Bible but still putting forth seeds. Half the species in Australia, southern China, a belt across Africa. The alien life-forms of Madagascar that occur nowhere else on the planet. Saltwater mangroves—marine nurseries and the coasts’ protectors—disappearing in a hundred countries. Borneo, Papua New Guinea, the Moluccas, Sumatra: the most productive ecosystems on Earth, giving way to oil palm plantations.
She walks through the bleak, manicured remnant woods of overharvested Japan. She walks across living root bridges deep in northeastern India—Ficus elastica trained to span rivers by generations of Khasi hill people—into forests where the natives have been replaced by fast-growing pines. She walks through former expanses of Thai teak, given over to spindly eucalyptus harvested every three years. She surveys what’s left of countless acres of Southwest pinyon plowed up to plant wheat. Wild, diverse, uncataloged forests are melting away. Always the locals tell her the same thing: We don’t want to kill the golden goose, but it’s the only way around here to get to the eggs.
The press loves her enterprise, so desperate and doomed. “The Woman Who Saves Seeds.” “Noah’s Wife.” “Banking Trees Away for a Better Day.” She has the world’s attention for fifteen minutes. If she’d put her bank in one of those fortresses deep underground in the arctic, she might have rated half an hour. But a boxy bunker in the upper foothills of the Front Range is barely worth a video.
Inside, the vault feels like a chapel crossed with a high-tech library. Thousands of canisters, ordered and labeled with dates, species, and locations, lie in indexed drawers of sealed glass and brushed steel, like a real bank’s safe-deposit boxes, except twenty degrees below zero. Standing in the vault, Patricia gets the strangest feeling. She’s in one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, surrounded by thousands of sleeping seeds, cleaned, dried, winnowed, and X-rayed, all waiting for their DNA to awaken and begin remaking air into wood at the slightest hint of thaw and water. The seeds are humming. They’re singing something—she’d swear it—just below earshot.
The reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe. Instead, she says, “We’re banking trees whose uses haven’t been discovered yet.” The journalists perk up when she mentions all the hot spots of forest decline, each with its own proximal cause: acid rain, rust, canker, root rot, drought, invasives, failed agriculture, boring insects, rogue fungi, desertification . . . But their eyes glaze over when she tells them how all these threats are made fatal by one single thing: the ongoing overhaul of the atmosphere by people burning once-green things. The monthlies, weeklies, dailies, hourlies, and minutelies each write her up and proceed to the next newer thing. A few people read and send her twenty dollars. And she’s free to search the next vanishing forest for the next failing tree.
IN MACHADINHO D’OESTE, in western Brazil, Patricia learns what a forest can do. Shafts of sunlight cut through the vine-covered trunks, the wildest engines of life on Earth. Species clog every surface, reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment. All is fringe and braid and pleat, scales and spines. She fights to tell trees from lanyard strands of liana, orchid, sheets of moss, bromeliad, sprays of giant fern, mats of algae.
There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad. One swing of a net suffices to fill it with two dozen kinds of beetles. Thick mats of ant attack her for touching the trees that feed and shelter them.
Here, the week is seven long days of census. Dr. Westerford’s team counts from dawn to dusk, a workday that should drain any woman in her sixties. But she lives for this. Yesterday they counted 213 distinct species of tree in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud. In so dense a living mass, it’s risky to rely on anything as capricious as the wind. Most flavors of tree have their own pollinators. The flip side of this insane diversity is dispersal. The nearest recipient of pollen might be a mile or more a
way. Every other day, they run across species that none of the team can identify. New and unknown forms of life: There goes another Lord-knows-what. Thousands of ingenious kinds of trees spread up the branching river basin. Any one of these disappearing chemical factories might make the next HIV-block, the next super-antibiotic, the newest tumor killer.
The air is so wet it soaks Patricia from the inside out. Walking is hard, in the vine-covered coverts. Every cubic inch is busy converting soil and sun into thousands of volatiles that chemists may never have the chance to identify. Her squad of rubber tappers fans out around her in a police dragnet, to search for the eight thousand Amazonian species that may disappear before she can get them into her temperature-controlled vaults in Colorado.
Well over a century ago, an Englishman smuggled rubber tree pips out of the country, to Brazil’s devastation. Now almost all the world’s natural rubber grows in South Asia, on land cleared of other trees that no one ever fully cataloged. It puts the Brazilians on their guard about her—another Anglo collector, here to steal their seeds. But on the afternoon when her team discovers mahogany and ipe elders hacked to pieces, they come around. They’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t them, crying over trees.
Her men are armed, if only with their great-grandfathers’ nineteenth- century rifles. Pistoleiros prowl the stream and roadbeds at night. Poachers kill anyone who comes between them and their harvest. You don’t have to be a hundredth of the hero that Mendes was, to die for wood. One of her best guides, Elizeu, tells her a story, through Rogerio, the interpreter, over a night’s campfire. “Friend of mine, tapping since childhood—baff! Head taken clean off with a piece of trip wire. Just for protecting his little grove.”
Elvis Antônio nods, staring into the fire. “We found another, three months ago. His body was stuffed into an animal den in the base of a big tree.”
“It’s the Americans,” Elizeu tells her.
“Americans? Here?” Stupid, stupid. She gets it, as soon as the words slip through her mouth.
“Americans make the market. You buy the contraband. You’ll pay anything! And our police are jokes. They get their cut. They want the trees to die. It’s amazing we’re not all smugglers. Compared to tapping rubber? Laughable.”
“Then why don’t you give up and poach?”
Elizeu smiles, forgiving the question. “You can tap a rubber tree for generations. But you can only poach a tree once.”
She falls asleep under her netting, thinking of Dennis. She wishes he could see this place, so much like a boy’s book of lost worlds. He’s waiting, back at the seed bank in Colorado. He’ll never get used to that state. It’s way too cheery, cold, and dry—the harshest kind of Oz. He finds it unnatural, all the aspens and sun. Not a tree out here taller than an adolescent hemlock back home.
He’s happy working on the facility’s maintenance, ensuring that the vaults never vary in temperature or humidity. But mostly he spends his fragmented year waiting for the seed hunter to return with her vials full of species that soon will exist nowhere else but in their climate-controlled tombs. He never objects, yet the project doesn’t quite convince him. How long do you think they’ll keep in there, babe?
She has told him about the Judean date palm seed, two thousand years old, found in Herod the Great’s palace on Masada—a date pit from a tree that Jesus himself might have sampled, the kind of tree Muhammad said was made of the same stuff as Adam. It germinated, a few years ago. She tells him about the campion seeds, buried yards under the Siberian permafrost. Growing, after thirty thousand years. He just whistles and shakes his head. But he never asks what he wants to ask, what she knows he should. Who’s going to do the replanting?
SHE WAKES AT DAWN to impenetrable green. Light filters through layers of vine-encased rot, like a picture on the bulletin of a church reverting to paganism. Dennis’s unasked question plays in her head. The glut of life outside her tent makes her wonder what good it does to save a species without all the epiphytes, fungi, pollinators, and other symbionts that, in the trenches of the day, give a species its real home. But what’s the alternative? She lies in her bag a moment, picturing the campsite as pasture—120 new square miles of cropland a day. And the shrinking forest only speeds the warming world, making it harder to feed.
Back on the trail after breakfast, they come upon a stack of fresh-cut logs. The scouts fan out. In minutes, rifles pop, followed by a motorcycle grunting through the undergrowth. Elvis Antônio returns through the bush, waving his arms in an all-clear. Patricia follows him onto a rough approximation of a road running up into a pistoleiro shanty camp evacuated in haste. There’s little left but a stack of oily clothes, a bag of moldy manioc flour, soap flakes, and one Portuguese girlie magazine that has made the rounds too many times. They set the camp on fire. The blaze feels good—a tiny orange reversal of progress.
They hike along a streambed to a plain that the guides swear will satisfy all Patricia’s desire for rare seeds. She stops along the trail to inspect strange fruit. Annonas—soursop, Bullock’s heart, custard apple in wild varieties and hybrids, each one up to something. An incredible Lecythis overwhelms her with crazy stink. There are silk floss trunks armed all over with spikes. The collection vials come out. They find a dramatic Bombax in flower, one unlike anything documented.
Elvis Antônio appears at her side, laughing and tugging on her sleeve. “Come see!”
“Sure. In a minute, yes?”
“Now is better!”
She sighs and follows, into a bower of branches and mad lianas. Four of the men stand marveling at a big tree with buttresses like falling folds of cloth. She can’t even guess the family, let alone the genus and species. But the species isn’t what interests them. She comes behind the excited men and gasps. No one tells her what to see. A child could make it out. A one-eyed myopic. In knots and whorls, muscles arise from the smooth bole. It’s a person, a woman, her torso twisted, her arms lifting from her sides in finger branches. The face, round with alarm, stares so wildly that Patricia looks away.
She steps closer, to see the carving marks. What kind of sculptor would pour such skill and effort into a thing so remote it might never be discovered? But it’s not a carving. No sign of sanding or woodworking of any kind. Just the contours of the tree. The men shout hot, fast words in three languages. One of the dendrologists claims, with too many hand gestures, that the wood has been somehow pollarded to look like a woman. The rubber tappers jeer. It’s the Virgin, looking on the dying world in horror.
“Pareidolia,” Patricia says.
The translator doesn’t know the word. Patricia explains: the adaptation that makes people see people in all things. The tendency to turn two knotholes and a gash into a face. The translator says that’s not a thing in Portuguese.
Patricia looks harder. The figure is there. A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge. The face may have been formed by the chance efflorescence of a canker, with beetles as cosmetic surgeons. But the arms, the hands, the fingers: family resemblance. The impression grows stronger as Patricia walks around it. A dog would bark at the twisting body. A baby would cry.
The myths come back to her in this tropical upland, stories from her own childhood and the world’s. The young person’s Ovid her father gave her. Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things. She has come across the same stories everywhere she collects seeds—in the Philippines, Xinjiang, New Zealand, East Africa, Sri Lanka. People who, in an instant, sink sudden roots and grow bark. Trees that, for a little while, can still speak, lift up their roots, and move.
The word turns odd, foreign in her head. Myth. Myth. A mispronunciation. A malaprop. Memories posted forward from people standing on the shores of the great human departure from everything else that lives. Send-off telegrams composed by skeptics of the planned escape, saying, Remember this, thousands of years from now, when you can see nothing but yourself, everywhere you look.
Just upriver, the Achuar—people of the palm tree—sing to their gardens and forests, but secretly, in their heads, so only the souls of the plants can hear. Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage. These are the wedding songs Patricia’s seed bank needs. Such a culture might save the Earth. She can think of little else that can.
Cameras come out of packs. Botanists and guides alike snap away. They argue over what the face means. They laugh at the stupefying odds against anything accidental growing exactly like this, like us, out of mindless wood. Patricia does the estimate in her head. The odds are nothing compared to the first two great rolls of the cosmic dice: the one that took inert matter over the crest of life, and the one that led from simple bacteria to compound cells a hundred times larger and more complex. Compared to those first two chasms, the gap between trees and people is nothing at all. And given the outlandish lottery capable of producing any tree, where’s the miracle in a tree shaped like the Virgin?
Patricia, too, snaps away, capturing the figure imprinted on the bole. She and the collectors bag some samples for ID. There are no seeds. They press on to more collecting. But every trunk now appears like an infinitely lifelike sculpture too complex for any sculptor but life to have made.
She shows her photos to no one at Seedbed, when she returns from her wanderings to the gleaming facility outside Boulder. Her staff, her scientists, her board of directors: no one has any use for myth. Myths are old miscalculations, the guesses of children long ago put to bed. Myths aren’t part of the foundation’s charter.
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