I have a big bur oak in our back yard that must be 200 years old. Last spring, one side of it started to sicken. It’s killing me to watch it die in slow motion. What can I do?
Many mention the giving trees—those ancient Douglas-firs that, with their last act, give all their secondary metabolites back to the community.
“Hear that, babe? ‘You’ve made me think about life in a different way.’ That might be a compliment.”
She laughs, but it sounds like a bobcat caught in a snare.
“Oh. Now, here’s something. A request to go on the most listened-to public radio program in the country. They’re doing a series on the planet’s future, and they need someone to speak for the trees.”
She hears his words from high up in a Douglas-fir in the middle of a howling storm. Human industry, everywhere. People need things from her. People mistake her for someone else. People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.
MOSES COMES into base camp frazzled. Actions everywhere, and they’ve lost thirteen people to detention and arrest in the last half a week. “We’ve got a legacy tree sit that needs manning. Anyone up for a brief stint up top?”
Maidenhair’s hand shoots into the air before Watchman even understands the request. Such a look crosses her face: Yes. This. At last.
“You sure?” Moses asks, as if he hasn’t just fulfilled the voices of light’s predictions. “You’ll be up there for at least a few days.”
SHE ASSURES NICK while she packs. “If you think you can do more from down here . . . I’ll be fine by myself. They wouldn’t dare hurt me. Think of the press!”
He won’t be fine, except where she is. It’s that simple, that absurd. He doesn’t tell her. The thing is so screamingly obvious, even in the way he hovers and nods. Of course she knows. She can hear beings that aren’t even here. Of course she can hear his banging thoughts, the blood pounding in his ears, even above the endless rain.
THEIR PACKS go up and over the gate first. Then they follow—Maidenhair, Watchman, and their guide, Loki, who has run ground support for this tree for weeks. Their feet come back down in Humboldt Timber territory, trespass with criminal intent. The packs are heavy and the path steep. Weeks of steady rain have turned the trail to Turkish coffee. Weeks ago, they wouldn’t have made it to mile three. Even now, five miles in, Watchman sucks air in great gulps. He’s ashamed and falls back on the trail, where she can’t hear him wheeze. The path ascends a sloppy escarpment. The weight of the pack and the foot-sucking muck pull him down until every step is a pole vault. He stops to catch his breath, and the sleety air goes through him. Up ahead, Maidenhair forges on like some mythic beast. Power rises into her feet from the needle-bedded ground. Each mud-coated plunge renews her. She’s dancing.
Cowardice adds several stones to Nick’s pack. He doesn’t want to get arrested. He’s not crazy about heights. He has only love to drive him up the cliff face. She’s fueled by the need to save everything alive.
Loki puts out his palm. “See that flashing light? Buzzard and Sparks. They hear us.” He cups his hand to his lips and hoots. The light up in the high forest flashes again, impatient. This, too, makes Loki laugh. “Those bastards can’t wait to get back down to earth. Can you tell?”
Nick is ready himself, and he hasn’t even left the ground. They slog the last few hundred yards up the rut. A profile emerges out of the thicket, so huge it can’t be right.
“There it is,” Loki says, pointlessly. “There’s Mimas.”
Sounds come up and out of Nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, Oh, my hopeless Jesus. He has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. Mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. Here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. The tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. From underneath, it could be Yggdrasil, the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. Twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the Hoel Chestnut. Two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. The whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the