Three weeks later, she’s near the same spot, pulling invasive plants. The thick, furry twigs of ailanthus suckers leave her fingers stinking of coffee and peanut butter. She climbs a switchback at a good clip and runs into the two researchers again. They’re several yards up the slope, kneeling by a downed log. Before she can flee, they see her and wave. Caught, she waves back and hikes up to them. The older man is on the ground, on his side, popping tiny creatures into specimen bottles.

“Ambrosia beetles?” The two heads turn toward her, startled. Dead logs: the topic was her passion once, and she forgets herself. “When I was a student, my teacher told us that fallen trunks were nothing but obstacles and fire hazards.”

The man on the ground looks up at her. “Mine said the same thing.”

“ ‘Clear them off to improve forest health.’ ”

“ ‘Burn them out for safety and cleanliness. Above all, keep them out of streams.’ ”

“ ‘Lay down the law and get the stagnant place producing again!’ ”

All three of them chuckle. But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound. Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

“Well,” the man on the ground says, “I’m sticking it to the old bastard now!”

Patricia smiles, hope pushing through the ache like a breeze through rain. “What are you studying?”

“Fungi, arthropods, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, frass, webs, denning, soil. . . . Everything we can catch a dead log doing.”

“How long have you been at it?”

The two men trade looks. The younger man hands down another sample bottle. “We’re six years in.”

Six years, in a field where most studies last a few months. “Where on earth did you find funding for that long?”

“We’re planning to study this particular log until it’s gone.”

She laughs again, a little wilder. A cedar trunk on the wet forest floor: their grad students’ great-great-great-grandchildren will have to finish the project. Science, in her absence, has gone as crazy as she always thought it should be. “You’ll disappear long before it does.”

The man on the ground sits up. “Best thing about studying the forest. You’re dead by the time the future can blame you for missing the obvious!” He looks at her as if she, too, is worth researching. “Dr. Westerford?”

She blinks, as baffled as any owl. Then she remembers her uniform badge, on her chest for anybody to read. But that Doctor. He could only have gotten that from her buried past. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t remember ever meeting you.”

“You haven’t! I heard you talk, years ago. Forest studies conference, in Columbus. Airborne signaling. I was so impressed, I ordered offprints of your article.”

That wasn’t me, she wants to say. That was somebody else. Someone lying dead and rotting somewhere.

“They hit you pretty hard.”

She shrugs. The younger scientist looks on like a kid on a visit to the Smithsonian.

“I knew you’d be vindicated.” Her bafflement is enough to tell him everything. Why she’s in the uniform of a wilderness ranger. “Patricia. I’m Henry. This is Jason. Come visit the station.” His voice is soft but urgent, like there’s something at stake. “You’ll want to see what our group is doing. You’ll want to learn what your work’s been up to, while you were gone.”

And a named apple is a patentable apple, as Olivia’s father would tell her. She once fought with him over a case of his. He was helping a transnational company prosecute a farmer who’d saved some of last year’s soybean crop and replanted, without paying royalties again. She was outraged. “You can’t own the rights to a living thing!”

“You can. You should. Protecting intellectual property creates wealth.”

“What about the soybean? Who’s paying the soybean for its intellectual property?”

They play three-ball, in rotation. Douglas is beyond pitiful. Four years of scrambling across slash, slag, and mud, stooping and planting, has shot his nervous system, wrecked his bum leg, and left him with a motor tremor that shows up on seismometers down in the Bay Area. Dum and Dee feel almost bad, taking his money, rack after rack, inning after inning, pot after pot. But Douggie has a time of it, here in the big city, knocking back foamy dog piss and remembering the joy of anonymous company. He’ll sleep in a bed tonight. Take a hot shower. Fifty thousand trees.

Dum sinks all three balls on the break. His second on-the-snap tonight. Maybe he’s racking them for an instant win. Douglas Pavlicek doesn’t care. Then Dee completes in four.

“So. Fifty thousand trees,” Dum says, just to distract Douggie, who’s struggling enough without the cognitive load of having to carry on a conversation.

“Yup. Could die now, and I’d be ahead of the game.”

[...]

They play for hours. Douggie, who can drink without apparent consequence, battles back from the brink. Dee and Dum cycle out, replaced by newcomers, Things One and Two. Doug buys another round, explaining for the graveyard shift just what they’re celebrating.

“Fifty thousand trees. Huh.”

“It’s a start,” Douglas says.

Thing Two is in strong contention for asshole of the night. Week, even. “Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself! You’d have to plant for like four or five centuries just to—”

“Okay. Let’s keep shooting, here.”

“And those companies you plant for? You realize they get good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut.”

“No,” Douglas says. “That can’t be right.”

“Oh, it’s right, all right. You’re putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they’ll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests.”

“Okay. Shut the fuck up for a second, please.” Douglas holds up his cue, then his head. “You win, friend. Party’s over.”

THE BRINKMANS TAKE TO READING, when they’re alone together. And, together, they’re alone most of the time. Community theater is over; they haven’t acted in a play since the one about the nonexistent baby. They’ve never said out loud to each other that their acting days are over. No dialogue required.
In place of children, then, books. In their reading tastes, each of them stays true to the dreams of youth. Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race. Dorothy needs wilder reclamations, stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

Ray’s shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy’s, alphabetical by author. He prefers state-of-the-art books with fresh copyrights. She needs to communicate with the distant dead, alien souls as different from her as possible. Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

Life in their forties. Once any given volume enters the house, it can never leave. For Ray, the goal is readiness: a book for every unforeseeable need. Dorothy strives to keep local independent booksellers afloat and save neglected gems from the cutout bin. Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

It’s drizzling. Nick and Olivia hardly notice.

“Most of you already know all about Humboldt Timber. For those who don’t, they were a family business for almost a century. They ran the last progressive company town in the state and paid incredible benefits. Their pension system was overfunded. They took care of their own and rarely hired gypos. Best of all, they cut selectively, for a yield they might have sustained forever.

“Because they cut the old stuff slowly, they still had several billion board feet of the best softwood on the planet, long after their competitors all along the coast shot their bolts. Two hundred thousand acres—forty percent of the area’s remaining old growth. But HT’s stock price lagged compared to those companies out there maximizing profits. Which, by the rules of capitalism, meant somebody had to come in and show the old-timers how to run a business. You remember Henry Hanson, the Junk Bond King? The guy who went to jail last year for racketeering? He set up the deal. A raider buddy of his pulled off the steal, all the way from Wall Street. Ingenious, really: you pour junk-raised cash into a hostile takeover and sell the debt to your savings and loan, which the public ultimately must bail out. Then you mortgage the company to the hilt to pay off the funny money, loot the pension fund, run through the reserves, sell off everything of value, and dispose of the remaining bankrupt husk for whatever you can get. Magic! Loot that pays you extra to plunder it.
“Right now they’re in that second-to-the-last stage: cashing out every salable scrap of timber in the inventory. Which in this case means lots of seven- and eight-hundred-year-old trees. Trees wider than your dreams are going into Mill B and coming out as planks. Humboldt is cutting at four times the industry rate. And they’re speeding up, before legislation can catch up with them.”

Nick turns to Olivia. The girl is years younger than he is, but he has begun to look to her for explanations. Her face stiffens and her eyes close in pain. Tears roll down her cheekbones.

“Obviously, we can’t wait for legislation. The new, efficient Humboldt Timber will have killed all the giants by the time the law catches up with them. So this is the question I ask each of you. What can you bring to the effort? We’ll take anything you can give. Time. Effort. Cash. Cash is surprisingly helpful!”

RAY NIBBLES ON DINNER—pistachios and an apple. Reading is slow, and all things distract him. Staring at the bottom of the apple’s core, he realizes that the calyx—a word he’ll never know in this life—is nothing less than the leftover bits of a withered apple flower. He looks up from the thicket of words three times a minute, waiting for truth to hit like a falling oak smashing through the house’s roof. Nothing comes to kill him. Nothing at all happens, and it keeps on happening with great force and patience. Nothing happens so completely that when he checks his watch to see why Dorothy isn’t home yet, he’s stunned to discover that less than half an hour has passed.

He bows his head and fixes on the page. The article stokes his distress. Should trees have standing? This time last month, it would have been his evening’s great sport to test the ingenious argument. What can be owned and who can do the owning? What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

But tonight the words swim. Eight thirty-seven. Everything that was his is going down, and he doesn’t even know what brought on disaster. The terrible logic of the essay begins to wear him down. Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn’t trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? The whole idea is a holy nightmare, a death dance of justice like the one he now lives through, watching the second hand of his watch refuse to move. His entire career until this moment—protecting the property of those with a right to grow—begins to seem like one long war crime, like something he’ll be imprisoned for, come the revolution.

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

Eight forty-two, and he’s desperate. He’ll do anything now, to deceive her, to make her think he has no idea. Her fit of craziness will run its course. The fever that has turned her into someone he can’t recognize will burn away and leave her well again. Shame will bring her back to herself, and she’ll remember everything. The years. The time they went to Italy. The time they jumped from the plane. The time she ran the car into a tree while reading his anniversary letter and almost killed herself. The amateur theatrics. The things they planted together, in the backyard they made.

It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.

The key thing is for her never to learn that he knows. He must be cheerful, smart, funny. The minute she suspects, it’ll destroy them both. She might live with anything except being forgiven.

But concealment is killing him. He never could play anyone but an earnest Macduff. Eight forty-eight. He tries to concentrate. The evening stretches out ahead like two consecutive life sentences. He has only this essay to keep him company and torture him.

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?

The essay flickers under his fingers. He can’t follow it, can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or rubbish. His whole self is dissolving. All his rights and privileges, everything he owns. A great gift that has been his since birth is being taken away. It’s a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant’s: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

SHE COMES IN rosy from the cold. Her scarf trails as she pushes the door shut behind her. The Requiem score drops from her hands. She bends to pick it up, and when she straightens, their eyes catch, spilling everything. Scared, defiant, pleading, thuggish. Wanting to be home again, with an old friend.

“Hey! You haven’t budged from that chair.”

“Good rehearsal?”

“The best!”

“I’m glad. What sections did you sing?”

She crosses to where he sits. Something of their old rhythm. She hugs him, Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck. Before he can stand, she slips past, into the kitchen, smelling on herself that blend of salt and bleach. “I’ll just take a quick shower before bed.”

She’s a smart woman, but she has never had much patience with the obvious. Nor does she think him capable of simple observation. She showered twenty minutes before heading out to sing her Brahms.

They look together: high-wire surveyors of a newfound land. The view cracks open his chest. Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist—all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with—leave him stupid and speechless. Reiterated trunks grow out of Mimas’s main line, shooting up parallel like the fingers of a Buddha’s upraised hand, recouping the mother tree on smaller scales, repeating the inborn shape again and again, their branches running into each other, too mazy and fused to trace.

Fog coats the canopy. Through an opening in Mimas’s crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale. It’s morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.
Watchman sweeps back another wall of tarp along its rope runner and looks up. Dozens more feet of Mimas unfold above—trunks that took over when lightning clipped this one. The top of the tangled system disappears into low cloud. Fungi and lichen everywhere, like splatters of paint from a heavenly can. He and Maidenhair perch, most of the way up the Flatiron Building. He looks down. The floor of the forest is a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns.

[...]

Nicholas watches the drama as if thumbing an infinite flip-book. The land unfolds, ridge beyond ridge. His eyes adjust to the baroque abundance. Forests of five different shades bathe in the mist, each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered. And every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.

The judge frowns. “What grows back after a clear-cut isn’t a forest?”

Frustration boils over in her. “You can replace forests with plantations. You can also arrange Beethoven’s Ninth for solo kazoo.” Everyone laughs but the judge. “A suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm!”

“How much untouched forest is left?”

“Not much.”

“Less than a quarter of what we started with?”

“Oh, heavens! Much less. Probably no more than two or three percent. Maybe a square, fifty miles on each side.” What’s left of her vow of circumspection blows away. “There were four great forests on this continent. Each was supposed to last forever. Each went down in decades. We barely had time to romanticize! These trees out here are our last stands, and they’re disappearing—a hundred football fields a day. This state has seen rivers of logjam six miles long.

“If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you’ll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century’s soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.”

DAYS PASS, wet and icy, each more miserable than the last. The sitters that were to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never show. The standoff enters week two, and the ring of workers at the foot of Mimas turns angry.

“You’re out in the middle of nowhere. Four miles from the nearest person. Things could happen. Nobody would know.”

Maidenhair beams down on them, beatific. “You guys are too decent. You can’t even make a credible threat!”

“You’re killing our livelihood.”

“Your bosses are doing that.”

“Bullshit!”

“One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years. More trees cut, fewer people working.”

Stumped, the loggers wander into other tactics. “For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back! Have you seen the forests south of here?”

“It’s a onetime jackpot,” Watchman shouts down. “A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”

“What’s the matter with you two? Why do you hate people?”

“What are you talking about? We’re doing this for people!”

“These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”

“Great. Let’s grind up your grandfather for dinner, while he still has some meat on him.”

“You’re insane. Why are we even talking to you?”

“We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives.”

One of the loggers revs up his chain saw and whacks the branches of one of Mimas’s largest basal sprouts. He steps back and looks up, brandishing a limb like a sailboat mast. “We feed people. What do you do?”

They shout at Maidenhair, tag team. “We know these forests. We respect these trees. These trees have killed our friends.”

Maidenhair holds still. The idea of a tree killing a person is too much for her to think about.

The men below press their advantage. “You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”

Watchman has seen the numbers. Hundreds of board feet of timber, half a ton of paper and cardboard per person per year. “We need to get smarter about what we need.”

“I need to feed my kids. How about you?”

Watchman sets to shout some things he knows he’ll regret. Maidenhair’s hand on his arm stops him. She’s gazing downward, trying to hear these men, attacked for doing what they’ve been asked to do. For doing something dangerous and vital that they’ve learned to do so well.

“We’re not saying don’t cut anything.” She dangles her arm, reaching out to the men from two hundred feet away. “We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .”

She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too.