fills with reflux and dread. Foot by foot, he closes the impossible gap. Near the top, he dares to look up. Two arboreal creatures speak soft encouragements he neither hears nor believes. He reaches something solid, still breathing. Not well, but breath.
“See?” The woman’s radiant face makes him wonder if he didn’t die somewhere on the way up. The man—clotted skin and Old Testament beard—hands him a cup of water. Adam drinks. He’s a while believing he’ll be okay. The platform under him tips in the wind. The tree couple hover, offering him berries.
“I’m good.” Then, “I suppose that would have been more convincing if I’d said it five minutes ago.”
The woman called Maidenhair scampers up a limb to the makeshift pantry, looking for a tea that she claims will help his vertigo. She’s attached to nothing. Barefoot, twenty stories up. He buries his face in the needle-stuffed pillow.
When he’s able, Adam looks down. Patchwork slop spreads through the forest below. He has passed through the massacre up close, smuggled in by the messenger Loki. But this bird’s-eye view is worse. The longest, most resolute tree-sit in the area—manned by the ideal subjects for his study of misguided idealism—is the last large remnant spared by the harvest. Scattered stands dot the bald patches, like the tufts missed by a teenage shaver. Fresh stumps everywhere, slag and burnt slash, refuse sprinkled with sawdust, the occasional trunks left in ravines too steep to bother with. And a clump circling the great tree that these sitters call by name.
The man, Watchman, points out the landmarks. “All that loosened topsoil is washing down this face into the Eel. Killing fish all the way to the ocean. Hard to remember, but when we came, ten months ago, everything was green as far as you could see. So much for trying to slow things down.”
Adam is no clinician, and 250 interviews of activists along the Lost Coast have left him gun-shy about diagnoses. But Watchman is either deeply depressed or a born-again realist.
A flare-up far below, the hornet buzz of heavy machinery, and Watchman bends to look. “There.” Yellow brighter than a banana slug, crisscrossing a half a mile away in the dissolving forest.
“What do we have?” Maidenhair asks.
“Skyline yarder. A couple of grappler Cats. We could be sealed off by tomorrow.” He looks at Adam. “You may want to ask whatever you want to ask, then head back down tonight.”
“Or join us,” Maidenhair says. “We’ll put you up in the guest room.”
Adam can’t answer. His head is still crushing him. Breathing makes him ill. He just wants to be back in Santa Cruz, analyzing the data from his questionnaires and drawing dubious conclusions from ironclad statistics.
“You’re more than welcome,” the woman tells him. “After all, we only volunteered for a few days, and here we are, almost a year later.”
Watchman smiles. “There’s a beautiful line of Muir’s. ‘I only went out for a walk . . .’ ”
The contents of Adam’s guts spill through the air, two hundred feet down to Earth.
THE SUBJECTS sit on the platform, gazing at the questionnaire and the pencils Adam gives them. Their hands are stained brown and green, with crusts of duff under their nails. They smell ripe and musty as redwood. The examiner has gotten himself above them in the lookout hammock, which won’t stop rocking. He studies their faces for the strains of paranoid salvationism he has seen in so many of the activists he has already interviewed. The man—capacious yet fatalistic. The woman—self-possessed in a way that no one getting hammered so badly has a right to be.
Maidenhair asks, “This is for your doctoral research?”
“It is.”
“What’s your hypothesis?”
Adam has been interviewing for so long the word sounds alien. “Anything I say might affect your answers.”
“You have a theory about people who . . . ?”
“No. No theories yet. I’m just gathering data.”
Watchman laughs, a brittle monosyllable. “That’s not how it works, is it?”
“How what works?”
“The scientific method. You can’t gather data without a guiding theory.”
“As I’ve told you. I’m studying the personality profiles of environmental activists.”
“Pathological conviction?” Watchman asks.
“Not at all. I just . . . I want to learn something about people who . . . people who believe that . . .”
“That plants are persons, too?”
Adam laughs, and wishes he hadn’t. It’s the altitude. “Yes.”
“You’re hoping that by adding up all these scores and doing some kind of regression analysis—”
The woman fingers her partner’s ankle. He hushes at once in a way that answers