The Overstory

by Richard Powers

“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ ” The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.” “ ‘When is the next best time? Now.’ ” “Ah! Okay!” The smile turns real.

She’s old enough now to know that the men in the scroll are not her ancestors. But seeing her father like this, on the river, complete and at peace, she cannot help but think: He’s their descendant.

One by one, they’ve drifted out of the neighborhood of green things into the louder, flashier party of other people.

That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

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.

The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below. Now and then words come trickling up the trunk for Douglas, like he’s still hanging upside down in the air: Tree saved your life. They neglect to tell him why.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

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.

Yet the senior who emerges out of freshman ugly ducklinghood knows what she loves and how she intends to spend her life, and that’s a novelty among the youth of any year.

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.

myth. She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

She crosses the Mississippi at the Quad Cities and stops at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, on I-80, over the Iowa border. The place is a small town. She has her choice of more gas pumps than she can count before freezing. Several hundred trucks school around the spot where she pulls up, colossal sharks in a feeding frenzy.

But he can’t stop the questions: What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can’t the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.

The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.

In the dark, she asks, “What are you thinking?” He’s thinking that his life has reached its zenith, this very day. That he has lived to see everything he wants. Lived to see himself happy.

It dawns on the blue god: the fish in these seas, the birds in the air, and all that creeps on this made Earth is just a crude start for some future refuge, saved from the vanishing original.

A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

The whole urgent calculus of need—what she called her life—shrinks down to a pore on the underside of a leaf, way out on the tip of a wind-dipped branch, high up in the crown of a community too big for any glance to take in.

Trees have ruined his life. Trees are the reason these men have come to lock him up for whatever years he has left.

HOW FAR can a leaf blow? Over the East River, to be sure. Across the shipyard where a Norwegian immigrant sanded down the massive curved oak beams of frigate hulls. Through Brooklyn, once hilly and forested, full of chestnuts.

She looks out back, through the window, on the riot of new growth. 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 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.

He didn’t look hard enough. He loved too little. More than enough to jail him, too little to get him through today.

No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here’s the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can’t see them, even when he can’t get near, even when he can’t remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.