few more weeks and his thesis will be done. First this, though: a last bit of holdout research.
The Northwest has more miles of logging road than public highway. More miles of logging road than streams. The country has enough to circle the Earth a dozen times. The cost of cutting them is tax-deductible, and the branches are growing faster than ever, as if spring has just sprung. This road’s curves at last broaden out, and the settlement appears in front of him. Along the edge of the camp, brightly colored people, mostly young, maybe a hundred of them, take a last stand. Adam draws close; the work grows clearer. Community trench digging. Anarchic assembly of a drawbridge. Palisades and stockades rising from salvage timber. Spanning the moated entrance across the chopped-up road, a banner announces:
THE FREE BIOREGION OF CASCADIA
The words sprout stems and tendrils. Birds perch on the letters’ vegetation. Adam recognizes the style and knows the artist. He enters the Lincoln Log fortress through the drawbridge over the trench in progress. Just past the defile, a man in camo and receding-hairline ponytail lies in the middle of the road. His right arm stretches down his side, like a reclining Buddha. His left disappears down a hole into the Earth.
“Greetings, biped! You here to help or hinder?”
“Are you all right?”
“Name’s Doug-fir. Just testing out a new lockdown. There’s an oil drum full of concrete six feet down there. If they want me out, they’re going to have to rip my arm off!”
From a nest at the top of a tripod of lashed logs in the road, a small, dark-haired, ethnically ambiguous woman calls, “Everything okay?”
“That’s Mulberry. She’s thinks you’re a Freddie.”
“What’s a Freddie?”
“Just checking,” Mulberry says.
“Freddies are the Federales.”
“I don’t think he’s a Freddie. I’m just . . .”
“It’s probably the button-down and chinos.”
Adam looks up at the woman’s tripod nest. She says, “They won’t be able to take equipment down this road without knocking this over and killing me.”
The man with his arm in the ground clucks. “Freddies won’t do that. They think life is sacred. Human life, anyway. Crown of creation and such. Sentimental. It’s the one chink in their armor.”
“So if you’re not a Freddie,” Mulberry asks, “who are you?”
Something comes to Adam that he hasn’t thought about for decades. “I’m Maple.”
Mulberry smiles a little crooked smile, like she can see into him. “Good. No Maples here yet.”
Adam looks away, wondering whatever became of that tree. His backyard second self. “Do either of you know a man called Watchman or a woman named Maidenhair?”
“Shit, yeah,” the man chained to the Earth says.
The tripod woman grins. “We don’t have leaders here. But we do have those two.”
HIS OLD FELLOW criminals greet Adam like they knew he was coming. Watchman clasps him by the shoulders. Maidenhair hugs him, long. “It’s good you’re here. We can use you.”
They’ve changed in some subtle way no personality test could quantify. Grimmer, more resolute. The death of Mimas has compressed them, like shale into slate. Their transformation makes Adam wish that he’d chosen some other topic to research. Resilience, immanence, numen—qualities his discipline is notoriously poor in measuring.
She grabs his wrist. “We like to have a little ceremony when new people join.”
Watchman sizes up Adam’s pack. “You are joining us, right?”
“Ceremony?”
“Simple. You’ll like it.”
SHE’S HALF RIGHT; the ceremony is simple. It happens that evening, on a broad meadow behind the wall. The Free Bioregion of Cascadia assembles in parade dress. Scores of people in plaid and grunge. Floral, flowing hippie skirts topped off with fleece vests. Not all the congregation is young. A couple of stout abuelas stand by in sweatpants and cardigans. A former Methodist minister performs the ceremony. He’s in his eighties, with a necklace scar where he lashed himself to a logging truck.
They start in on the songs. Adam fights down his hatred of virtuous singing. The shaggy nature-souls and their platitudes make him queasy. He feels ashamed, the way he does when remembering childhood. People take turns airing the day’s challenges and suggesting cures. All around him spread the garish colors of ad hoc democracy. Maybe it’s okay. Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything. Who is he to say?
The erstwhile minister says, “We welcome you, Maple. We hope you’ll stay as long as you’re able. Please, if it’s in your heart to do so, repeat these words after me. ‘From this day forward . . .’ ”
“