to see certain things about faith and law that hid themselves behind the expanse of common sense. Jail without arraignment helps his eyesight.
“You see their game,” Watchman tells him. “They don’t want the cost or publicity of putting us on trial. They just use the legal system to hurt us as much as they can.”
“Isn’t there a law . . . ?”
“There is. They’re breaking it. They can hold us seventy-two hours without charging. That was yesterday.”
It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.
ON HIS FOURTH NIGHT in the cell, Nick dreams about the Hoel family chestnut. He watches it, sped up thirty-two million times, reveal again its invisible plan. He remembers, in his sleep, on the cot’s thin mattress, the way the time-lapse tree waved its swelling arms. The way those arms tested, explored, aligned in the light, writing messages in the air. In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.
WHILE NICK DREAMS, so does the forest—all nine hundred kinds that humans have identified. Four billion hectares, from boreal to tropic—the Earth’s chief way of being. And as the world forest dreams, people converge in the public woods one state north. Four months earlier, arson blackened ten thousand acres in a place called Deep Creek—one of the year’s many fires of convenience. The burn prompts the Forest Service to salvage-sell the lightly damaged standing timber. The arsonist is never found. No one wants to find him. No one, that is, except for a few hundred of the forest’s owners, who converge on the sold-off groves bearing signs. Mimi holds one reading NOT ONE BLACKENED STICK. Douglas’s reads SAY IT AIN’T SO, SMOKEY.
ADAM, NICK, AND OLIVIA are held without arraignment two days longer than is legal. They’re threatened with a dozen charges, only to have everything dropped overnight. The men meet Maidenhair at her release. They see her through the chicken-wire window, walking down the women’s wing with a little hobo’s ball of her stuff in her hands. Then she’s on them, embracing. She steps back and narrows her fire-green eyes. “I want to see it.”
They take Adam’s car, which seems to him now like it belongs to someone else. The loggers are gone; there’s nothing left to cut. They’ve long since headed to fresh groves. The absence is obvious from half a mile away. Where once there was a green weave of textures you could study all day, there’s only blue. The tree that promised her that no one would be harmed is gone.
Now, Adam thinks. Now she’ll decompensate. Begin to rage.
At the base, her hand stretches out, touching some final proof, amazed. “Look at that! Even the stump is taller than me.”
She touches the edge of the wondrous cut and breaks down sobbing. Nick stumbles toward her, but she holds him off. Adam must watch every awful spasm. There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
“WHERE WILL YOU GO?” Adam asks, over eggs in a breakfast roadhouse.
Maidenhair gazes out the plate glass, where California sycamores run along the sidewalk by the curb. Watchman follows her glance. These, too, raking their fingers in the air. Waving and swelling like a gospel choir.
“We’re heading north,” she answers. “Something’s happening up in Oregon.”
“Resistance communities,” Watchman says. “All over the place. They can use us up there.”
Adam nods. Ethnography is over. “Did . . . they tell you this? The . . . your voices?”
She bursts into a curt, wild laugh. “No. The deputy sheriff loaned me her jogging radio. I think she had a thing for me. You should come with us.”
“Well. I have this research to finish. My dissertation.”
“Work on it up there. The place will be filled with the people you want to study.”
“Idealists,” Watchman says.
Adam can’t read the man. Somewhere up in the tree or in his narrow cell, he lost the ability to tell sardonic from straight. “I can’t.”
“Ah. Well. If you can’t, you can’t.” Maybe she’s being sympathetic. Maybe she’s felling him. “We’ll meet you up there. When you come around.”
ADAM CARRIES the curse back to Santa Cruz. For weeks he works up his data. Almost two hundred people have answered the 240 questions of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. They’ve also completed his custom questionnaire testing for various beliefs, including thoughts on human entitlement to natural resources, the scope of personhood, and plant rights. Digitizing the results is