makes her frantic calls, Neelay glances up at the wall where he has hung those words of Borges, still the guiding principle of his young life:
Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.
PORTLAND SOUNDS TOXIC to Patricia. Expert educating witness, even worse. Dr. Westerford lies in bed on the morning of the preliminary hearing, feeling like she’s had a stroke. “Can’t do it, Den.”
“Can’t not, babe.”
“Do you mean that morally or legally?”
“It’s your life’s work. You can’t walk away now.”
“It’s not my life’s work. My life’s work is listening to trees!”
“No. That’s your life’s play. The work part is telling people what they’re saying.”
“An injunction to halt logging on sensitive federal land. That’s a question for lawyers. What do I know about the law?”
“They want to know what you know about trees.”
“Expert witness? I’m going to be ill.”
“Just tell them what you know.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know anything.”
“It’ll be just like stepping in front of a class.”
“Except instead of idealistic twenty-year-olds who want to learn things, it’ll be a bunch of lawyers fighting over millions of dollars.”
“Not dollars, Patty. The other thing.”
And yes, she admits, hauling her feet out onto the cold floorboards. This one is about the other thing. The very opposite of dollars. The thing that needs all the testifiers it can get.
DENNIS DRIVES HER the hundred miles in his decaying truck. Her ears are throbbing by the time they reach the courthouse. During her preliminary statement, her childhood speech defect flowers forth like a great May magnolia. The judge keeps asking her to repeat. Patricia struggles to hear every question. And yet, she tells them: the mystery of trees. The words rise in her like sap after winter. There are no individuals in a forest. Each trunk depends on others.
She fights off personal hunch and keeps to what the scientific community agrees on. But as she testifies, science itself starts to seem as flighty as a high school popularity contest. Unfortunately, the opposing counsel agrees. He produces the letter to the editors of the journal where her first major scholarly article appeared. The one signed by three leading dendrologists, crushing her into the earth. Flawed methods. Problematic statistics. Patricica Westerford displays an almost embarrassing misunderstanding of the units of natural selection. . . . Every part of her flushes with blood. She wants to vanish, to never have been. To have folded some poison mushrooms into the omelet she made herself this morning, before Dennis drove her to this tribunal.
“Everything in that paper has been confirmed by later research.”
She doesn’t see the trap until it’s sprung. “You overthrew existing beliefs,” the opposing counsel says. “Can you guarantee that further research won’t overthrow yours?”
She can’t. Science, too, has its seasons. But that’s a point too subtle for any court of law. Watching—the watching of many—will converge on something repeatable, despite the needs and fears of any one watcher. But she can’t swear to the court that the science of forestry has finally converged on new forestry, that set of beliefs she and her friends have helped to promote. She can’t even swear that forestry is really a science, yet.
The judge asks Patricia if it’s true, what the expert witness for the opposition has earlier claimed, that a young, managed, fast-growing, consistent stand is better than an old, anarchic forest. The judge reminds her of someone. Long car trips through newly plowed fields. If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?
“That’s what my teachers believed, twenty years ago.”
“Is twenty years a long time, in these matters?”
“It’s nothing, for a tree.”
All the warring humans in the courtroom laugh. But for people—relentless, ingenious, hardworking people—twenty years is time enough to kill whole ecosystems. Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that’s for another trial.
The judge asks, “Young, straight, faster-growing trees aren’t better than older, rotting trees?”
“Better for us. Not for the forest. In fact, young, managed, homogenous stands can’t really be called forests.” The words are a dam-break as she speaks them. They leave her happy to be alive, alive to study life. She feels grateful for no reason at all, except in remembering all that she has been able to discover about other things. She can’t tell the judge, but she loves them, those intricate,