The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The burred husks prickle, but their No is more of a tease than any real barrier. The nuts want to slip free of their spiny protection. Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might be spread far afield.

A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts, lifting its lower limbs and shrugging its ample globe. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.

His father rolls up the scroll again, wrapping the frayed ribbon around the cylinder with great care. “A Moslem from the land of Confucius, going to the Christian stronghold of Pittsburgh with a handful of priceless Buddhist paintings. Who are we missing?”

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

Charlotte gives up trying to control them. No one suspects yet, but she has already begun to slip into the long private place that each passing year will deepen. She sits in the front seat, navigating maps for her husband and humming Chopin nocturnes under her breath. Dementia starts here, in these days of quiet, automotive sainthood.

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.

And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?

CARMEN AND AMELIA ARRIVE. United, the trio sit together one last time.

“So you’re not coming home for Christmas?” But something in her tone is as good as a signed confession. Home has gone wherever their father went.

The painting doesn’t show this, but his mother only ever hugs him when her whistle is wet. Adam fights her embrace to save the painting from getting crushed. Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.

The Grahams laugh as the boy speeds off. From the landing, halfway up the stairs, Adam hears his mother whisper, “He’s a little socially retarded. The school nurse says to keep an eye.”

Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he’s even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He’ll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

As usual, their father has rigged the election. “There’s a sale on black walnut,” he says, and democracy is over. By chance, nothing in the American arboretum could better suit what baby Charles will grow into: a towering, straight-grained thing whose nuts are so hard you have to smash them with a hammer.

A tree that poisons the ground beneath itself so nothing else can grow. But wood so fine that thieves poach it.

Adam doesn’t get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets. He keeps his head down and keeps counting.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

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. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

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.

A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

“I’m a good helper.” The boy counts on his father’s forgetfulness.

The boy looks. He remembers his father’s bedtime stories from the last two years—tales of heroic project managers and adventuring engineers who suffer more mishaps than the white monkey Hanuman and his entire monkey army. His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees. He grins, cagey but uncertain. “Thousands and thousands of transistors!”

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

But his father holds the photo in front of Neelay as if it proves the happiest destiny. “You see? If Vishnu can put one of these giant figs into a seed this big . . .” The man leans down to pinch the tip of his son’s pinkie. “Just think what we might fit into our machine.”

So many trunks growing downward from the same tree. The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.

To them, humans are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck into the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home.

He does. Ms. Gilpin returns to Steinbeck while he soaks in a pool of injustice and shame. After the bell, when the room clears, he returns to Ms. Gilpin’s desk. He knows why she hates him. His kind will drive hers extinct.

He knows almost nothing of his parents’ world, but one thing is as certain as math. Shame, for Indians, is worse than death.

“Living things,” he says, almost to himself. “Self-learning. Self-creating.” The whole room laughs, but he doubles down. “So fast, they’ll think we’re not even here.”

And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

He shows her extraordinary things: the spreading cambium of a sycamore that swallowed up the crossbar of an old Schwinn someone left leaning against it decades ago. Two elms that draped their arms around each other and became one tree.

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.

“We’ll keep the tub moist and free of weeds for the next six years. When you turn sweet sixteen, we’ll weigh the tree and the soil again.”

The fables seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away.

The underscores start, triple, on the very first line: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air. Her father knew this. Now she does, too.

And yet, she also cares for a bonsai juniper that looks to be a thousand years old, a spiky haiku of a creature with no scientific purpose whatsoever.

With such a device, she can measure which volatile organic compounds the grand old eastern trees put into the air and what these gases do to the neighbors.

“How will that produce anything useful?” “It might not.” “Why do you need to do this in a forest? Why not the campus test plots?” “You wouldn’t study wild animals by going to the zoo.” “You think cultivated trees behave differently than trees in a forest?” She’s sure of it.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

She makes almost nothing, but life requires little.

Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status. And the woods teem with free food.

Confirmation comes the following spring. Three more trials, and she’s convinced. The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives. That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare.

Only one conclusion makes any sense: The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.

The short letter contains four uses of the word Patricia and no mention of Doctor, until their own signatures.

Something stops her. Signals flood her muscles, finer than any words. Not this. Come with. Fear nothing.