The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  That night he makes her read to him about a tree that once ran in great vertical veins of living ore from Georgia to Newfoundland, out through Canada, and past the Great Lakes to where they camp out together by lamplight. She tells him about giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet straight up before the first sideways branches bothered to extend. Trees that stood in endless stands that darkened the air with pollen each spring, the clouds of golden dust raining down on the decks of ships far out at sea.

  She reads to him of how the English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide. She shows him paintings of Pinus strobus, in hulking shafts as big as church steeples, so valuable that the Crown branded even those that stood on private land with the King’s Broad Arrow. And her husband, who spent his life protecting private property, must see it coming, even from the future: The Pine Tree Riot. Revolution. War, fought over a thing that grew on these shores long before humans came down out of trees.

  It’s a story to match any fiction: the well-wooded land, succumbing to prosperity. The light, soft, strong, dimensioned boards, sold back across the ocean as far away as Africa. The triangular profit making the infant country’s fortune: lumber to the Guinea coast, black bodies to the Indies, sugar and rum back up to New England, with its stately mansions all built of eastern white pine. White pine framing out cities, making millions in sawmill fortunes, laying a bed of rails across the continent, building and pitching warships and whaling fleets that wander out from Brooklyn and New Bedford into the unmapped South Pacific, ships made of a thousand trees or more. The white pines of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota: split into a hundred billion roof shingles. A hundred million board feet a year, splintered into matchsticks. Scandinavian lumberjacks clearing a swath of pine three states wide, wrestling the colossal husks into rivers with tackle and boom, riding miles-long rafts of them downstream to market. A giant hero and his big blue ox cutting the pine to clear the Brinkmans’ neighborhood.

  Dorothy reads, and the wind picks up. All the yard bends with complaint. Rain blows in. The small room grows smaller still. Night: the third part of every day that remains a foreign country. The house next door vanishes, and the ones just north of that, until the Brinkmans huddle up alone, out on the edge of a savage wilderness. Ray’s working leg thrashes against the sheets that hem him in. All he ever wanted was to earn an honest living, promote the general welfare, earn the respect of his community, and raise a decent family. Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood. Nothing left on the continent even hints at what has gone. All replaced now, by thousands of miles of continuous backyards and farms with thin lines of second growth between them. Still, the soil remembers, for a little while longer, the vanished woods and the progress that unmade them. And the soil’s memory feeds their backyard pine.

  Spittle wells on Ray’s trembling lips; it stays there until Dorothy wipes it off, sometime before midnight. The lips move as she wipes them. She leans in, and thinks she hears him whisper, “One more. Tomorrow.”

  THE NIGHT IS WARM, the windows of Patricia’s cabin bang in the breeze, and the sturgeon moon rises over the lake like a pale red penny. She rests her palms on the stack of notebooks filled with her careful hand. “Well, Den. I believe we may finally be done.”

  There’s no answer tonight, as there never is. The words do no more than hang in the air. Plenty of creatures hear, inside the cabin and out. Her syllables answer and change the various chirps, groans, sighs, plans, and estimates that punctuate this night. The conversation is long, patient, beyond any party’s ability to follow, and the patterned noises her kind add to it are still brand-new.

  She listens for a moment to the hour’s alarms. Then she pushes down against the walnut table. Her legs straighten, and she rises. She flips open the uppermost notebook, to the page where she has just written: In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

  “You’re sure this is a good idea?” She asks herself; she asks the dead man. The membrane between the two is thin. She knows she’ll never see him again in this or any life to come. Yet she sees him wherever she looks. That’s life; the dead keep the living alive. Every other night she asks her missing friend for words and phrases. For courage. For enough forbearance to keep from pitching her notes into the wood-burning stove. Now the asking is done. She flips the page.

  No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

  “It’s not bad, Den. A little bleak, maybe.” Short, too, she might add. Far smaller than her firstborn. There’s so much more to tell, but she’s an old woman now, without much time, and there are so many more species still to find and take aboard the ark. The book is a simple enough story. She could have told it in a page or two: how she and several others spent years traveling to all the continents but Antarctica. How they saved a few seeds from a few thousand trees, a fraction of the species that will vanish as the Earth’s current custodians watch, bringing countless dependents down with them. . . .

  She has tried to hold out hope, to tell every story that might make the truth a little easier. She gives a whole chapter to migration. She describes all the trees already marching north at rates that astonish those who measure them. But the most vulnerable trees will need to move much faster, to keep from burning up. They can’t cross highways or farms or housing developments. Maybe we can help them.

  She spins short biographies of her favorite characters: loner trees, cunning trees, sages and solid citizens, trees that turn impulsive or shy or generous—as many ways of being as there are forest elevations and facings. How fine it would be if we could learn who they are, when they’re at their best. She tries to turn the story on its head. This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

  One passage keeps springing back, every time fear or scientific rigor makes her prune it. Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

  She’s up from the table with a groan meant for no one. In the front closet, she finds the stack of nested cardboard boxes that she and Dennis always had such trouble throwing out. Moldy boxes saved for decades. Who knows when you might need one exactly this size? The notebooks fit, as if by design. She’ll mail them to an assistant tomorrow, for typing. Then to her editor in New York, who has been waiting for years for a follow-up to a book that’s still in print, still selling, still weighing on Patricia’s conscience for its cost in pines.

  As soon as she seals the carton with packing tape, she cracks it open again. The last line of the last chapter is still wrong. She looks at what she has, although the sentence has long since burned itself into permanent memory. With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.

  “That’s probably better,” she says out loud. “Right?” But the ghost has finished dictating, tonight.

  When the box is set to go, she gets ready for bed. Ablutions are quick, and grooming even faster. Then the reading, her nightly thousand-mile walk to the gulf. When her eyes won’t stay open any longer, she finishes with verse. Tonight’s poem is Chinese—Wang Wei�
��twelve hundred years old, from an anthology of poetry she winds through at random, the way she likes to hike:

  I know no good way

  to live and I can’t

  stop getting lost in my

  thoughts, my ancient forests. . . .

  You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?

  The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.

  Then the river is running over her, and she’s done. She douses the dim, low-watt bulb clipped to the headboard. All that’s left her is the moon. She rolls on her side and curls up, her face pressed into the dank pillow. After a minute, the end of her mouth pulls into an abiding smile.

  “I did not almost forget. Good night.”

  Good night.

  . . .

  ADAM IN ZUCCOTTI PARK, Lower Manhattan. This time, the fieldwork comes to him. The forces he has been studying his entire professional life are loose again and partying in the heart of the Financial District, a few blocks south of where he works and lives. The park is buzzing. The squared circles of honey locusts already tint yellow, and all underneath them, sleeping bags and tents make camp between the skyscrapers. Hundreds slept here last night, as they have for days. They fall asleep to songs of protest and wake to the free hot meal served by five-star chefs donating their efforts to the cause. Only, Adam isn’t sure what the cause is. The cause is a work in progress. Justice for the ninety-nine percent. The jailing of financial traitors and thieves. An eruption of fairness and decency on all continents. The overthrow of capitalism. A happiness not born of rape and greed.

  The city prohibits all amplified sound, but the human megaphone is in full swing. One woman chants, and the people all around her pick up the words.

  “Banks got bailed out.”

  “BANKS GOT BAILED OUT!”

  “We got sold out.”

  “WE GOT SOLD OUT!”

  “Occupy.”

  “OCCUPY!”

  “Whose streets?”

  “WHOSE STREETS?”

  “Our streets.”

  “OUR STREETS!”

  Still the resolutely young, keeping true to the world-saving dreams of their youth. But among the ethnic vests and backpacks are men older than Adam. In breakout sessions around the square, women in their sixties pass along the institutional memory of insurgence. People in leotards pedal stationary bikes to generate electricity for the occupation’s laptops. Barbers give away free haircuts, since the bankers seem unwilling to get theirs cropped. People in Guy Fawkes masks hand out leaflets. College kids stand in a ring and drum. Lawyers behind flimsy card tables donate legal advice. Someone has been hard at work defacing signs:

  NO SKATEBOARDING, ROLLER BLADING, OR BICYCLING ALLOWED IN THE PARK

  OTHERWISE, ALL GOOD, BRO

  And what’s a circus without a band? A whole battalion of guitars—one with the inscription This Machine Kills Day-Traders—joins together in a chorus of high lonesome:

  For the po-lice make it hard, wherever I may go,

  ’Cause I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

  Just beyond the square’s far corner is the wound that won’t heal. The hole in the canopy has long since filled in, but it still oozes. A decade has passed since the buildings fell. The math astounds Adam. His own son is only five, but the attacks feel younger. A tree, a Callery pear that survived half burned and with roots snapped, has just returned in good health to Ground Zero.

  He squeezes through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People’s Library. He can’t help grazing the shelves and bins. There’s Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, marked up with a million tiny marginal words. There’s a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street. Free circulation, on the honor system. Smells like democracy, to him.

  Six thousand books, and out of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects. Bright yellow—the only real edition that classic ever had. In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy No. 2 all-caps balloons. But the name is someone else’s, inked in in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B.

  The pages stink of mildew and the purity of child science. Adam flips through, recalling everything. The field notebooks and home natural history museum. The pond scum under the cheap, child’s microscope. Above all, the daubs of fingernail polish on the abdomens of ants. Somehow, he has managed to spend his entire life repeating that experiment. He lifts his eyes from the miniature page—“Weevils and Caddisflies”—to watch this happy, furious, anarchic swarm. For a few seconds, he sees the system of ranks and duties, the waggle-dances, the trails of pheromone that feel, from inside the hive, like pure physics, the pull of gravity. He wants to paint them all with a daub of polish and climb up forty floors in the next-door high rise, for a better look. The look of a real field scientist. The look of a ten-year-old.

  He sticks the Golden Guide into his pants pocket and ducks back into the crowd. Ten steps down, seated on the edge of a granite slab bench, a ghost swings its face toward him and startles. “Occupy,” someone shouts, into the human megaphone. And the word comes a hundred times louder out the other end: “OCCUPY!”

  The ghost’s surprise turns into a grin. Adam knows the guy like it’s his brother, back from the dead. The man he sees is balding, in a ball cap, where the one he remembers had a luxurious ponytail. He can’t for the life of him say who the man is. Then he can, and he doesn’t want to. It’s too late for anything but to walk up and clasp the intruder by the forearm, laughing at the evidence, like luck is such a rascal and the strange old story will lurch forever on. “Doug-fir.”

  “Maple. Whoa. This can’t be real.” They embrace like two old men already over the finish line. “Jesus. Man! Life is long, huh?”

  Longer than anyone. The psychologist can’t stop shaking his head. He doesn’t want this. The corpse being pulled up out of the tumulus by brutal archaeologists is not him. But the run-in is funny, somehow. Chance, that comedian with the perfect timing.

  “Is this . . . ? Are you here for . . . ?” Adam waves toward the teeming crowd saving mankind from itself. Pavlicek—Pavlicek, the name is. Pavlicek wrinkles up his eyebrows and scouts the square. Like he’s just seeing it, this moment.

  “Aw, naw, man. Not me. I’m just a spectator, these days. Don’t get out much. Haven’t made a peep since . . . you know.”

  Adam takes the man—still gawky, still adolescent—by the bony elbow. “Let’s walk.”

  They stroll down Broadway, past Citibank, Ameritrade, Fidelity. The years they need to catch up on are done in a New York minute. Professor of psychology at NYU, with wife who publishes self-help books and five-year-old son who wants to be a banker when he grows up. Longtime BLM employee, between jobs and residences, here in town to see his friend. The end. But they keep walking, under the spire of Trinity Church, passing near the ghost of the buttonwood tree, that sycamore where businessmen once met to trade stock, now the site of free enterprise’s main engine room. And they keep talking, a slow circle around the past whose circumference Adam won’t be able to retrace even an hour later. Douglas keeps touching the brim of the baseball cap, like he’s tipping it to passersby.

  Adam asks, “Are you . . . in touch with anyone?”

  “In touch?”

  “With the others.”

  Douglas fiddles with the cap. “No. You?”

  “I . . . no. Mulberry—no idea. But Watchman? This sounds crazy. It’s like he’s following me around.”

  Douglas stops on the sidewalk in a sea of businessmen. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m probably nuts. But I travel a lot for the job. Lectures and conferences, all over the country. And in at least three cities, I’ve seen street art that looks just like those drawings he used to make.”

  “The tree people?”

  “Yeah. You remember how weird . . . ?”

  Douglas nods,
fingering the brim. A group of tourists ring the sidewalk in front of them around a wild animal. It’s huge, muscular, charging, nostrils flared, with long, wicked horns ready to gore the throng ringing it and taking selfies. Seven thousand pounds of bronze guerrilla art, trucked in by its maker in the dead of night and left on the stoop of the Stock Exchange as a gift to the public. When the city tried to haul it away, people objected. The Trojan Bull.

  A few short weeks ago, a ballerina riding the beast bareback in midpirouette became the stunning poster child of the latest Stop the Humans movement:

  WHAT

  IS OUR

  ONE

  DEMAND?

  #OCCUPYWALLSTREET

  BRING TENT

  People take turns buddying up for a picture with the charging animal. Douglas doesn’t seem to get the irony. His eyes are everywhere except where the crowd is looking. Something fights out of him. “So.” He rubs his neck. “You have a pretty good life now?”

  “Crazy lucky. Though I work long hours. The research . . . is a pleasure.”

  “What exactly do you research?”

  Adam has performed the sound bite thousands of times, for everyone from anthology editors to strangers on airplanes. But this man—he owes this man a little more. “I was working on the topic already when we met. When the five of us . . . The focus has changed, over the years. But it’s the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious?”

  Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull’s horn. “And? What does?”

  “Mostly other people.”

  “You know . . .” Douglas looks up Broadway, to see what so enrages the bull. “I may have hit upon that idea independently.”

  Adam laughs so loud the tourists turn to look. He remembers why he loved the man once. Why he trusted him with his life. “There’s a more interesting part of the question.”

  “How some people manage to see . . . ?”

  “Exactly.”

  With a gesture, an Asian tourist asks the two men to step away from the statue for the length of a quick photo. Adam nudges Douglas and they walk some more, down into the teardrop of Bowling Green Park.