fear was willing to make her do. The opinion of others left her ready to suffer the most agonizing of deaths. She runs the entire meal down the garbage disposal and goes hungry, a hunger more wonderful than any meal.
Her real life starts this night—a long, postmortem bonus round. Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself. Human estimation can no longer touch her. She’s free now to experiment. To discover anything.
Then several missing years. From the outside, yes: Patricia Westerford disappears into underemployment. Sorting storeroom boxes. Cleaning floors. Odd jobs leading from the Upper Midwest through the Great Plains toward the high mountains. She has no affiliation, no access to equipment. Nor does she try for lab positions or teaching stints, even when former colleagues encourage her to apply. Pretty much all her old friends add her to the roster of science roadkill. In fact, she’s busy learning a foreign language.
With few claims on her time and none on her soul, she turns back outside, into the woods, the green negation of all careers. She no longer theorizes or speculates. Just watches, notes, and sketches into a stack of notebooks, her only persistent possessions aside from clothes. Her eyes go near and narrow. She camps out many nights with Muir, under the spruce and fir, completely lost, turned wildly around by the smell of inland oceans, sleeping on beds of thick lichen, sixteen inches of brown needle pillow, the living earth beneath her bag, its fluid influence rising up into the fiber of her and all the towering trunks that surround and watch over. The particle of her private self rejoins everything it has been split off from—the plan of runaway green. I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
She reads Thoreau over wood fires at night. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? And: What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
Now she drifts farther west. It’s amazing how far a little war chest will go, once you learn how to forage. This country is awash in food free for the eating. You just need to know where to look. She glimpses her own face once, while splashing water on it in the bathroom of a service station near a national forest in a state where she’s the merest beginner. She looks marvelously weathered, old beyond her years. She has gone to seed. Soon she’ll start to scare people. Well, she has always scared people. Angry people who hated wildness took away her career. Frightened people mocked her for saying that trees send messages to each other. She forgives them all. It’s nothing. What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they’re seeing.
On a late fall afternoon she pulls her ancient beater over to the side of the road along a stretch of the Fishlake Scenic Byway, on the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in south-central Utah. She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints. She gets out of the car and walks up into the trees on the crest west of the road. Aspens stand in the afternoon sun, spreading along the ridge out of sight. Populus tremuloides. Clouds of gold leaf glint on thin trunks tinted the palest green. The air is still, but the aspens shake as if in a wind. Aspens alone quake when all others stand in dead calm. Long flattened leafstalks twist at the slightest gust, and all around her, a million two-toned cadmium mirrors flicker against righteous blue.
The oracle leaves turn the wind audible. They filter the dry light and fill it with expectation. Trunks run straight and bare, roughed with age at the bottom, then smooth and whitening up to the first branches. Circles of pale green lichen palette-spatter them. She stands inside this white-gray room, a pillared foyer to the afterlife. The air shivers in gold, and the