The Overstory

by Richard Powers

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

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.

God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

Why do you linger at this fork in the road rubbing your eyes? You don’t get me, do you, boy?

“But the Americans. They promise.”

“Look the color!” The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green.

How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?

There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world.

A 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.

Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy.

your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.

Douglas-fir: America’s most valuable timber tree, so, sure—why not grow a tree farm full of nothing but? Five new houses per acre. He knows he’s slinging trees for middlemen to the same fuckers who cut down the primordial gods to begin with.

captain’s chair on a starship forever voyaging through strange regions of thought.

Thrones have crumbled and new empires arisen; great ideas have been born and great pictures painted, and the world revolutionized by science and invention; and still no man can say how many centuries this Oak will endure or what nations and creeds it may outlive. . . .

Those she doesn’t scare away come sniff her out, this keen, homely, forthright girl who has escaped the stoop of constant social compliance. To her astonishment, she even has suitors. Something about her perks boys up. Not her looks, of course, but an ever-so-slightly head-turning quality to her walk that they can’t quite place. Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

She goes to the barbecues and hootenannies and manages to take part in departmental gossip while remaining her own little sovereign state.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious?

That wasn’t me, she wants to say. That was somebody else. Someone lying dead and rotting somewhere.

She herself is well into autumn. Forty-six—older than her father was, when he died. All her flowers have long since faded. But here’s the bee.

The music says: You don’t know how brilliantly you shine. It says: Something is waiting for you, the clean,

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

They’re part of her, kin in some way that isn’t yet clear. Emissaries of creation—things she has seen and known in this world, experiences lost, bits of knowledge ignored, family branches lopped off that she must recover and revive.

Her only stipulation is that she gets the Commander’s Chair. “What exactly does it command, Captain?” She waves toward the window. “This view.”

“My ancestors came to this state empty-handed. I should leave the same way, don’t you think?”

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

And we know what’s coming—thanks to the fruit of the taboo tree that we were set up to eat. Why put it there, and then forbid it? Just to make sure it gets taken.

Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

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?

But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.

Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime.

“That’s what my teachers believed, twenty years ago.” “Is twenty years a long time, in these matters?” “It’s nothing, for a tree.”

“Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we’ve barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once.”

Verse springs up and flows over the empty white: For you have five trees in Paradise which do not change, either in summer or in winter, and their leaves do not fall. He who knows them shall not taste of death.

They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through.

No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds. A quarter minute and they’re in agony—introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all—fear of seeing and being seen.

All around her, the forest reels from the hottest, driest year since the beginning of record-keeping. Yet another freak, once-in-a-century event, almost annual these days.

“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”

First there was everything. Soon there will be nothing.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .