The Overstory
It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch. It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.
The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.
At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.
They camp near Slough Creek for three days. The younger girls spend hours playing Old Maid. Mimi joins her father in the stream. The shared lassitude of casting, the C of the line as it lengthens in the air, that four-stroke swelling rhythm with the stiff hand stopping at ten and two, the ripple of the dry fly as it alights on the water, her small dread that something might actually strike, the startle of the fish’s mouth when it breaks the surface: these are charmed to her and will stay so forever.
An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute. You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.
Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.
He has no idea. The thing that comes for him is a genus more than six hundred species strong. Familiar, protean, setting up camp from the tropics all the way up through the temperate north: the generalist emblem of all trees. Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.
On their first anniversary, he writes her a letter. He puts some time into the wording. He can’t possibly speak the words, so he leaves them on the breakfast table when he goes to work. You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.
And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.
Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
He teaches her to tell a shellbark from a shagbark hickory. No one else at her school can even tell a hickory from a hop hornbeam. The fact strikes her as bizarre. “Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?” “Plant-blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain’t it, kiddo?”
Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .
Desire, she scribbles into her field notebooks, turns out to be infinitely varied, the sweetest of evolution’s tricks.
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
All through this part of the West, few aspens have done so in ten thousand years. Long ago, the climate changed, and an aspen’s seeds can no longer thrive here. But they propagate by root; they spread. There are aspen colonies up north where the ice sheets were, older than the sheets themselves. The motionless trees are migrating—immortal stands of aspen retreating before the latest two-mile-thick glaciers, then following them back north again. Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. All the drama of the world is gathering underground—massed symphonic choruses that Patricia means to hear before she dies.
All three of them chuckle. But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound. Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.
She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
All day long, she has followed Johnny Appleseed’s path into the interior. Olivia read about the man once, in a comic her father gave her. The comic made him a superhero, with the power to make things spring up from the dirt. It said nothing about the philanthropist with a shrewd sense of property, the tramp who’d die owning twelve hundred acres of the richest land in the country. She always thought he was just myth. She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.
People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.
He reads the encyclopedia article on mental disorders. The section on diagnosing schizophrenia contains this sentence: Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.
The reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love. And with those two words, Patricia Westerford seals her own fate and changes the future. Even the future of trees.
But she’s thinking of the book her father gave her when she was fourteen. She realizes she must dedicate this book to her father. And to her husband. And all the people who will, in time, turn into other things.
This is what people do—solve their own problems in others’ lives.
She seizes up in the doorway, and the moment is there again, between them.
In Mastery 6, a player’s colonies go on thriving while he’s away. Dynamic, concurrent economies. Cities full of actual people trading and making laws. Creation in all its extravagant waste. People pay monthly rent to live there. It’s a daring step, but in the world game, no daring is fatal. The only thing that will kill you is failing to leap.
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.
Ray regards the screen but can’t make out what he’s seeing. That happens in seconds one through three. He thinks, with what is still coherent thought: I’ve been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future. Now that’s done.
“I mean, how does knowing you’re going to die give you a leg up? Smart enough to see you’re a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?”
“You’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.
Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.
Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.
“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 good story.”
But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.
Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
Likeness is the sole problem of men.
But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through.
Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession. She and her lover have hit this wall many times before. Now, in the new millennium, the man who has kept her sane, the man who might even have been her soul mate if only her soul were a slightly different shape, hits the wall one last time and collapses at its base.
No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds.
A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia. Stephanie steps into the street, and a car screams past. The rage of its horn Dopplers downward for another block. She fights to hold on to the thing she has just glimpsed. But traffic, bickering, business: the street’s brutality begins to close in. She walks faster, on the brink of the old panic. Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people.
That’s how it happened. He was sleeping, and she burst in. Each of them had half a prophecy. They put them together and read the message. They found their joint calling, their shared vocation.
It’s like evolution’s decision tree: If the winters are tough and the water scarce, try scales or needles. It’s even weirdly like acting: If you need to respond with fear, go to gesture 21c; If wonder, 17a. Otherwise . . . It’s a programmed telephone support system for living on Earth. It’s the mind moving through mysteries, their explanations forever one more choice away. More than anything, it’s like the tree itself, with one central questioning stem splitting into dozens of probing ones, and each of those forking into hundreds, then thousands of green and independent answers.
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.
They sit together in the evening, reading and looking, as the sun glints chartreuse off their chestnut’s scalloped leaves. Every baring twig seems to Dorothy like a trial creature, apart from but part of all the others. She sees in the chestnut’s branching the several speculative paths of a lived life, all the people she might have been, the ones she could or will yet be, in worlds spreading out just alongside this one.
“A reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.
In its middle, the tree that shouldn’t be there. Its branches rush outward, toward the house, slowly, to be sure, but fast enough to inspire her. How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around. But there it is: the ability to see, all at once, in all its concurrent branches, all its many hypotheticals, this thing that bridges past and future, earth and sky.
The ones that hit on something right will increase and multiply. As Neelay has learned with the greatest pain: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late.
Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.