The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Desire, she scribbles into her field notebooks, turns out to be infinitely varied, the sweetest of evolution’s tricks. And in the pollen storms of spring, even she turns out to be a more than adequate flower.

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.

She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe. “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.”

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. 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.

And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful. She sees the source of that forestry doctrine she so resisted in school. Looking at all this glorious decay, a person might be forgiven for thinking that old meant decadent, that such thick mats of decomposition were cellulose cemeteries in need of the rejuvenating ax. She sees why her kind will always dread these close, choked thickets, where the beauty of solo trees gives way to something massed, scary, and crazed. When the fable turns dark, when the slasher film builds to primal horror, this

where the doomed children and wayward adolescents must wander. There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.

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.

Yet on such a night as this, as the forest pumps out its million-part symphonies and the fat, blazing moon gets shredded in Mimas’s branches, it’s easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

Truth is, his eyes are drooping and he can’t quite keep her question from turning into hieroglyphics.

He surrenders to the rage as this tree has done, through a millennium of killer storms. As sempervirens has done for a hundred and eighty million years. Yes, a storm topped this tree, centuries ago. Yes, storms will bring down trees this size. But not tonight. Not likely. Tonight, the top of a redwood is as safe a spot in this gale as any. Just bend and ride. A howl cuts through the hail-thickened wind. He howls back. Their shrieks turn into asylum laughter. They screech in tandem until all the world’s war cries and wild calls turn into thanksgiving. Long past the hour when his clenched fists would have given out, they whoop descant to the storm.