moon. There’s a straight line of them, the memory of a vanished fence where red crossbills once liked to sit and shit out seeds. The trees are busy tonight, fixing carbon in their dark phase. All will be in flower before long: huckleberry and currant, showy milkweed, tall Oregon grape, yarrow and checkermallow. She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.
Tonight the stands are as drizzled and murky as her word-filled mind. She finds the trail and ducks beneath her beloved Pseudotsuga. A path cuts under the spires lit by late winter’s moon, a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural. The many uncataloged volatile compounds breathed out by needles at night slow her heart rate, soften her breathing, and, if she’s right, even alter her mood and thoughts. So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees—jasmonate—supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I’m in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees. All the forests of the world, even the quaintly named set-aside lands. More trouble than she has the heart to tell readers of her little book. Trouble, like the atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict or control.
She pops out into the pond’s clearing. The starry sky erupts above her, all the explanation a person needs for why humans have waged war on forests forever. Dennis has told her what the loggers say: Let’s go let a little light into that swamp. Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky.
Her seat is vacant and waiting—that moss-blanketed nurse log by the water’s edge. The moment she looks out over the water, her head clears and she finds the passage she’s after. She has searched for a name for the great ancient trunks of the uncut forest, the ones who keep the market in carbons and metabolites going. Now she has one:
Fungi mine stone to supply their trees with minerals. They hunt springtails, which they feed to their hosts. Trees, for their part, store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded. A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.
Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.
The reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love. And with those two words, Patricia Westerford seals her own fate and changes the future. Even the future of trees.
IN THE MORNING, she splashes cold water on her face, makes a flax-berry slurry, drinks it while reading yesterday’s pages, then sits at the pine table, vowing not to stand up until she has a paragraph worthy of showing Dennis at lunch. The smell of her red cedar pencil elates her. The slow push of graphite across paper reminds her of the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons of water up hundreds of feet into a giant Douglas-fir trunk every day. The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.
The final chapter eludes her. She needs some impossible trifecta: hopeful, useful, and true. She could use Old Tjikko, that Norway spruce who lives about midway up the length of Sweden. Above the ground, the tree is only a few hundred years old. But below, in the microbe-riddled soil, he reaches back nine thousand years or more—thousands of years older than this trick of writing she uses to try to capture it.
All morning long, she works to squeeze the nine-thousand-year saga into ten sentences: a procession of trunks falling and springing back up from the same root.