on each side.” What’s left of her vow of circumspection blows away. “There were four great forests on this continent. Each was supposed to last forever. Each went down in decades. We barely had time to romanticize! These trees out here are our last stands, and they’re disappearing—a hundred football fields a day. This state has seen rivers of logjam six miles long.
“If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you’ll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century’s soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.”
When she finishes, she falls back into blushing silence. But the counsel pressing for the injunction is beaming. The judge says, “Would you say that old forests . . . know things that plantations don’t?”
She squints and sees her father. The voice is wrong but there are the rimless glasses, the high, surprised eyebrows, the constant curiosity. All those first lessons from half a century ago cloud around her, days in the beaten-up Packard, her mobile classroom, tooling around the back roads of southwest Ohio. It stuns her to recognize all her own adult convictions, there in embryo, formed by a casual few words with the window rolled down on a Friday afternoon and the soy fields of Highland County unspooling into the rearview mirror.
Remember? People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures—bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful—call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
But the judge wasn’t in that car. The judge is another man.
“It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out.”
The judge chews on her statement, the way her father used to chew on sassafras, those root-beer-scented twigs that stay green all winter.
THEY RETURN after recess for the decision. The judge places a stay on the contested cut. He also issues an injunction on all new timber sales of public land in western Oregon until the impact of clear-cuts on endangered species is assessed. People come up to Patty and congratulate her, but she can’t hear. Her ears shut down the moment the gavel hits the desk.
She leaves the courtroom in a bank of fog. Dennis is by her side, leading her down the hall and out onto the plaza, where two crowds of demonstrators face off in a gauntlet of banners on each side of her.
YOU CAN’T CLEARCUT YOUR WAY TO HEAVEN
THIS STATE SUPPORTS TIMBER; TIMBER SUPPORTS THIS STATE
Enemies shout at each other across the gap, stoked by triumph and humiliation. Decent people loving the land in irreconcilable ways. They sound to Patricia like quarreling birds. A tap on her right shoulder, and she turns to face the opposing expert witness. “You’ve just made lumber a whole lot more expensive.”
She blinks at the accusation, unable to see how that might be a bad thing.
“Every timber firm with private land or existing rights is going to cut as fast as they can.”
THEIR HANDS FREEZE and their legs stiffen up, in space too cramped to turn over in. Nights are harsh enough to frostbite their sap-covered toes. The constant wind and flapping tarps shred their attempts to talk. Sometimes fat branches crash down from above. The quiet can be even more unnerving. Climbing is all the exercise they get. But in the changing light and floating days, things that would have seemed impossible on the ground become routine.
Mornings are a game of cat and mouse. Or, say, owl and vole, with Watchman and Maidenhair peering down from their damp, freezing aerie onto the tiny mammals scurrying on the floor far below. The crews show up before the fog diffuses. One day, there are only three. The next, twenty, loud in the cockpits of their machines. Sometimes the loggers wheedle: “Come down for ten minutes.”
“Can’t right now. We’re busy tree-sitting!”
“We have to scream. Can’t even see you. This is breaking our necks.”
“Come on up. Lots of room up here!”
It’s an impasse. Different men show up on different days, trying to break it. Crew boss. Foreman. They yell hoarse threats and reasonable promises. Even the vice president for forest products pays a visit. He stands underneath Mimas in a white hard