many centuries this Oak will endure or what nations and creeds it may outlive. . . .
Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .
And of her father’s beloved tree:
Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground . . .
She never exactly becomes a swan. Yet the senior who emerges out of freshman ugly ducklinghood knows what she loves and how she intends to spend her life, and that’s a novelty among the youth of any year. Those she doesn’t scare away come sniff her out, this keen, homely, forthright girl who has escaped the stoop of constant social compliance. To her astonishment, she even has suitors. Something about her perks boys up. Not her looks, of course, but an ever-so-slightly head-turning quality to her walk that they can’t quite place. Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.
When boys come calling, she makes them take her for a picnic lunch in Richmond Cemetery—serving the needs of dead people since 1848. Sometimes they flee, and that’s that. If they stick around and mention the trees, she’ll see them again. Desire, she scribbles into her field notebooks, turns out to be infinitely varied, the sweetest of evolution’s tricks. And in the pollen storms of spring, even she turns out to be a more than adequate flower.
One boy sticks around, month after month. Andy, the English major. He plays in the orchestra with her and loves Hart Crane and O’Neill and Moby-Dick, although he can’t say why. He can get birds to land on his shoulder. He’s waiting for something to come and redeem his aimless life. One night, over cribbage, he says he thinks it might be her. She takes him by the hand and leads him to her narrow bed. Clumsy and green, they peel back the shields of clothing. Ten minutes later, she’s turned into a tree just a little too late to be spared.
REAL LIFE STARTS in graduate school. There are mornings in West Lafayette when Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school. She feels unworthy. Purdue pays her to take classes that she has craved for years. She gets food and lodging for teaching undergraduate botany, something she’d gladly pay to do. And her research demands long days in the Indiana woods. It’s an animist’s heaven.
But by her second year, the catch becomes clear. In a seminar on forest management, the professor declares that snags and windthrow should be cleaned up from the forest floor and pulped, to improve forest health. That doesn’t seem right. A healthy forest must need dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds turn them to use, and small mammals, and more forms of insects lodge and dine on them than science has ever counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data. All she has is the intuition of a girl who grew up playing in the forest litter.
Soon, she sees. Something is wrong with the entire field, not just at Purdue, but nationwide. The men in charge of American forestry dream of turning out straight clean uniform grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment and economic maturity. She’s sure these men who run the field will have to fall, next year or the year after. And up from the downed trunks of their beliefs will spring rich new undergrowth. That’s where she’ll thrive.
She preaches this covert revolution to her undergrads. “You’ll look back in twenty years, amazed at what every smart person in forestry took to be self-evident truth. It’s the refrain of all good science: ‘How could we not have seen?’ ”
She works well with her fellow grads. She goes to the barbecues and hootenannies and manages to take part in departmental gossip while remaining her own little sovereign state. One night there’s a dizzy, warm, wild misunderstanding with a woman in plant genetics. Patricia puts the embarrassed fumble away in a drawer of her heart and never takes it out again, even to look at.
A secret suspicion sets her apart from the others. She’s sure, on no evidence whatsoever, that trees