There’s the hopeful she’s after. The truth is somewhat more brutal. By late morning, she catches up to the present, when, for the first time, the new man-made atmosphere coaxes the latest of Old Tjikko’s usually snow-stunted krummholz trunks to shoot up into a full-sized tree.
But hope and truth do nothing for humans, without use. In the clumpy, clumsy finger-paint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we, to trees? She remembers the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book’s end.
DENNIS SHOWS AT NOON, reliable as rain, bearing broccoli-almond lasagna, his latest midday masterpiece. She thinks, as she does several times a week, how lucky she has been, to spend these few blessed years married to the one man on Earth who’d let her spend most of her life alone. Game, patient, good-natured Dennis. He protects her work and needs so little. In his handyman’s heart, he already knows how few things man is really the measure of. And he’s as generous and eager as weeds.
As they eat Dennis’s feast, she reads him today’s installment on Old Tjikko. He listens, astonished, like a happy child might listen to Greek myths. She finishes. He claps. “Oh, babe. It’s just fine.” Something deep in her callow green soul likes being the world’s oldest babe. “I hate to tell you this, but I think you’re done.”
It’s terrifying, but he’s right. She sighs and stares out the kitchen window, where three crows hatch their elaborate plans for breaking into her compost bin. “So what do I do now?”
His laugh is as hearty as if she said something funny. “You type it up and we mail it to your publishers. Four months late.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Everything’s wrong. Starting with the title.”
“What’s wrong with How Trees Will Save the World? Trees won’t save the world?”
“I’m sure they will. After the world shrugs us off.”
He chuckles and packs up the dirty dishes. He’ll take them home, where there are deep sinks, strainers, and hot water. He looks across the kitchen at her. “Call it Forest Salvation. Then you don’t have to commit to who’s saving what.”
“I do love you.”
“Did someone say you didn’t? Look. Babe. This should be pure pleasure. Talking to people about your life’s great joy.”
“You know, Den. The last time I was in the public eye, it didn’t go so well.”
He swipes at the air. “That was another lifetime.”
“Wolfpack. They didn’t want to disprove me. They wanted blood!”
“But you’ve been exonerated. Over and over.”
She wants to tell him what she has never mentioned: how the trauma of those days was so great that she cooked herself a fatal woodlands feast. But she can’t. She’s too ashamed of that long-dead girl. Part of her no longer entirely believes that she could ever have considered such a course. Deniable theater. A game. So she conceals the only thing she has ever kept from him—how she had the poison mushrooms all but in her mouth.
“Babe. You’re practically a prophetess, these days.”
“I also spent a lot of years as a pariah. Prophetess is much more fun.”
She helps him out to the car with the dirty dishes. “Love you, Den.”
“Please stop saying that. You’re spooking me.”
SHE TYPES UP THE DRAFT. She prunes a few words and pollards a few phrases. There’s now a chapter called “The Giving Trees,” about her beloved Doug-firs and their underground welfare state. She ranges around the country’s forests, from cottonwoods that top a hundred feet in a decade to bristlecone pines that die slowly for five thousand years. Then the post office, where all her anxiety drains out of her the minute she pays the postage and sends the manuscript off to the other coast.
SIX WEEKS LATER, her office phone rings. She hates the phone. Handheld schizophrenia. Unseen voices whispering to you from a distance. Nobody calls her except with unpleasant business. It’s her editor, whom she has never met, from New York, a city she has never seen. “Patricia? Your book. I just finished it!”
Patricia winces, waiting for the ax.
“Unbelievable. Who knew that trees got up to all those things?”
“Well. A few hundred million years of evolution gives you a repertoire.”
“You make them