IT’S EASIER TO LIVE for months high up in the redwood canopy than to pass seven days at ground level. Everything is owned; a one-year-old knows that. It’s as much a law as Newton’s. Walking down the street without cash is a crime, and no one alive would imagine for a minute that things in real life might go any other way. Nick can’t afford to be picked up for anything—not for vagrancy, not for camping without a permit, not for grazing on manzanita berries in a state park. He finds a cabin, rented by the week, in a depressed little town at the foot of the logged mountains. His yard backs onto a stand of juvenile redwoods, straight and clear, only a foot and a half thick, but known to him. The closest thing left to kin.