proclaims, The Year’s Surprise Bestseller—Translated into 23 Languages. “Would you like me to read to you a little?”
She reads like she’s in the front of the assembled class, reciting that long freight train of stanzas from Leaves of Grass that the entire tenth grade was assigned to memorize.
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor.
She stops and looks out the transparent wall of their tree house.
A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.
She pauses again, as if to do the math.
But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.
In this manner, tacking into the breeze of the author’s thought, they make their way through four full pages before the light starts to fail. They eat again by candlelight—instant soup mix floating on two cups of water warmed on the tiny camp stove. By the time they’re done, darkness rules. The loggers’ engines have stopped, replaced by the thousand spectral challenges of night that they cannot decode.
“We should save the candle,” she says.
“We should.”
It’s hours before bedtime. They lie on the long, rocking platform of their pledge, chattering to each other in the dark. Up here, they face no dangers but the oldest one. When the wind blows, it feels like they’re crossing the Pacific on a makeshift raft. When the wind stops, the stillness suspends them between two eternities, entirely in the caress of here and now.
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. “I was thinking it’s going to be cold again tonight. We may need to zip the bags together.”
“I’m down with that.”
Every star in the galaxy rolls out above them, through the blue-black needles, in a river of spilled milk. The night sky—the best drug there was, before people came together into something stronger.
They zip the bags together. “You know,” she says, “if one of us falls, the other is going with.”
“I’ll follow you anywhere.”
THEY WAKE before it’s fully light, to the sound of engines in the deep beneath them.
HER CITATION for unlawful assembly costs Mimi three hundred dollars. It’s not a bad deal. She has paid twice as much for a winter coat that gave her half the satisfaction. Word of her arrest gets out at work. But her superiors are engineers. If she can deliver her team’s molding projects on time, the company doesn’t care if she works from a federal prison. When a thousand marchers descend with placards on the Department of Forestry headquarters in Salem demanding reform of the Timber Harvest Plan approval process, Mimi and Douglas join them.
Early one April Saturday, the pair drive to an action in the Coast Range. Douglas takes a vacation day from the hardware store where he has found work. The morning is beyond beautiful, and as they head south, listening to grunge and the day’s headlines, the sky cools from dusky rose to cerulean. A rucksack in the back seat contains two pairs of cheap swimming goggles, T-shirts to wrap around their noses and mouths, and modified water bottles. Also, his-and-hers steel double-lock police-grade handcuffs, chains, and a couple of bicycle U-locks. There’s an arms race on. The protesters begin to think they might even be able to outspend the police, who are funded by a public convinced that all taxes are theft, but giving away public timber is not.
They turn down the spur road to the protest site. Douglas scans the parked vehicles. “No television trucks. Not one.”
Mimi curses. “Okay, nobody panic. I’m sure the print journalists are here. With photographers.”
“No TV, might as well never have happened.”
“It’s early yet. They could still be on their way.”
A shout rises down the road, the sound of a crowd after a field goal. Through the trees, opposing armies square off in each other’s faces. There’s shouting, a bit of scrum. Then a scuffled tug-o’-war with someone’s jacket. The latecomers trade glances and break into a trot. They reach the face-off in a clearing in the denuded woods. It’s like some Italian circus. A double ring of protesters surrounds a track-mounted Cat C7–powered monster whose crane arches above their heads like a long-necked dinosaur. Fellers and buckers circle the anarchy. A special fury hangs in the air, the product of how far this wooded hillside is from the nearest town.
Mimi and