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Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.
Moore’s law
Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.
Cambrian Explosion
QUEENSLAND BOTTLE TREE.
silk floss tree,
They have come from hot islands and desiccated outback, from remote valleys in Central Asia breached only recently. Dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor tree, flame tree, empress tree, kurrajong, red mulberry: unearthly life, waiting to waylay him in this courtyard while he was searching for them on distant planets.
rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian
“It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.”
Her father is her water, air, earth, and sun. He teaches her how to see a tree, the living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man has yet figured out. He drives them to a copse of spared hardwoods in the bottoms of a slow stream. “Here! Look at this. Look at this!” A patch of narrow stalks, each with big, drooping leaves. A sheepdog of trees. He makes her sniff the giant spoonlike foliage, crushed. It smells acrid, like blacktop. He picks up a thick yellow pickle from the ground and holds it to her. She has rarely seen him so excited. He takes his army knife
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with pleasure. But her mouth is full of butterscotch pudding.
Later that winter, Bill Westerford is coming home from a field trip after sundown when the Packard hits a patch of black ice. He’s thrown from the car as it flips off the road into a ditch. His body flies for twenty-five feet before crashing into a row of Osage orange that farmers planted for a hedge a century and a half earlier. At the funeral, Patty reads from Ovid. The promotion of Baucis and Philemon to trees. Her brothers think she has lost her mind with grief. She won’t let her mother throw anything out. She keeps his walking stick and porkpie hat in a kind of shrine. She preserves his
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The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.
singing stick
She sighs long and slides down into the way things need to be. “It’s good to be cooked for.” But everything is so much less spooky than she could have supposed. So much lighter. He says, “What if we kept our separate places? And just . . . came to each other from time to time?” “That . . . could happen.” “Did our work. Saw each other for dinner. Like now!” He sounds surprised to make the connection between his wild proposal and what the present already holds. “Yes.” She can’t yet believe that luck might extend so far. “But I’d want to sign the papers.” He peers out into an opening in the
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“Data,” the engineer’s engineer daughter answers. And in a few steps, she’s outside. The smell is on her before she reaches the trees—the scent of resin and wide western places. The clean smell of her childhood’s only untouched days. The music of the trees, too, tuning the wind. She remembers. Her nose slips into one of those dark fissures between the flat terra-cotta plates. She falls into the smell, a devastating whiff of two hundred million years ago. She can’t imagine what such perfume was ever meant to do. But it does something to her now. Mind control. It’s neither vanilla nor
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She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering the morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body’s provinces, across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.
A woman passing by on the sidewalk sees her sniffing and wonders whether there might be an emergency. Blissed by memory and volatile organics, Mimi calms her with a look. Back in the office, her card-playing companions stand at her floor-length window, watching her like she’s turned dangerous. She leans back into the tree, falling one last time into that unnamable scent. Eyes shut, she summons up the arhat under his pine, that slight amusement on his lips as he tips over the brink into full-fledged acceptance of life and death. Something comes over her. The light grows brighter; the smell
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People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end. Nicholas knows all this; he has cleaned house after his dead parents and grandparents, made all the terrible discoveries that only death affords. How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.
Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.
“That funky wall in the small bedroom upstairs. We could have a carpenter design some built-ins.” The plans they once had for that room now seem older than anything on their shelves. She nods and tries to smile, reaching down inside herself for a word. She doesn’t know the word. She doesn’t even know that that’s what she’s doing. Nevertheless. The word is nevertheless.
SHE DESCENDS into the real anguish of imaginary beings. She lies still, trying not to wake him with her sobs. What is this, grabbing at my heart, like it means something? What gives this pretend place so much power over me? Just this: the glimpse of someone seeing something she shouldn’t be able to see. Someone who doesn’t even know she’s been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.
He lies as still as he can, a tumescent monk. He counts the poundings of his heart high up in his ears until the surf weakens into sleep. As he drifts off, a spidery thought spins through him. People from another planet will wonder what’s wrong with earthly names, that it takes so many different ones to tag a thing. But here he lies, alongside this friend he has known only weeks, joined again after so many lifetimes. Nick and Olivia, Watchman and Maidenhair—the complete quartet of them—open to the January night, under topless columns of coastal redwood, the ever-living Sempervirens.
La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
The smell of her red cedar pencil elates her. The slow push of graphite across paper reminds her of the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons of water up hundreds of feet into a giant
Douglas-fir trunk every day. The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.
Old Tjikko,
She remembers the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book’s end.
he already knows how few things man is really the measure of. And he’s as generous and eager as weeds.
three crows hatch their elaborate plans for breaking into her compost bin.
Page Mill Road.
Salal, somehow, she knows. Oxalis and trillium.
There are creatures that live so high up and far away from man that they never learned fear. And thanks to the insanity
in his cells, Nick has—this very first night on his very first tree-sit—taught them.
It’s a daring step, but in the world game, no daring is fatal.
And then, like a creature with no memory except for the sun,
Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.
More people are born in twenty years than were alive in the year of Douglas’s birth.
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.
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.
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.
the subject of endless eulogies, who runs forever through the canopies of a giant ghost forest from here to the Mississippi, without ever touching paws to the ground. It’s all island-hopping now, through scattered fragments of second growth subtended by highways littered with roadkill. But the men stop to look, as if the endless forest still starts there, in front of them.
They turn to one another and hug goodbye, like bears testing their strength against each other. Like they’ll never see each other again in this life. Like even then, it would be too soon.
“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
He has made a living studying defiant hope. Defiant hope is what landed him here.
He can no longer explain himself. He has no answer. For two days, the two of them have followed that fact down to hell.
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.
The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say. The judge asks, “Would you care to address any final words to the court?”
