The Woman Redeemed by Trees
Real life starts in graduate school. Some mornings in West Lafayette, Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school: Purdue pays her to take classes she has craved for years. She gets food and lodging for teaching botany, something she’d gladly pay to do. And her research demands long days in the Indiana woods. It’s an animist’s heaven.
By her second year, the catch becomes clear. In a forest management seminar, the professor declares that windthrow should be cleaned up and pulped, to improve forest health. That doesn’t seem right; a healthy forest needs dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds use them, and small mammals. More forms of insects live on them than science has counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data.
Soon, she sees. Something is wrong with the entire field. The men running American forestry dream of producing straight, clean grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment. These men will have to fall, next year or the year after. And up from the downed trunks will spring rich new undergrowth. That’s where she’ll thrive.
She preaches this covert revolution to her undergrads. “You’ll look back in twenty years, amazed at what every person in forestry took to be self-evident. It’s the refrain of all good science: ‘How could we not have seen?’ ”
She abides her fellow grads. She goes to the barbecues and smiles at departmental gossip while remaining her own sovereign state. One night there’s a dizzy, wild misunderstanding with a woman in plant genetics. Patricia puts the embarrassed fumble away in her heart’s drawer and never takes it out again.
A suspicion sets her apart from the others. She’s sure, on no evidence whatsoever, that trees are social. Motionless things that grow in mass communities must have evolved ways to synchronize. Nature knows few loner trees. But the belief leaves her marooned. Here she is, with her people, at last, and even they can’t see the obvious.
His sigh is as clear as a public service announcement: Girls doing science are like bears riding bikes.
Purdue gets hold of a prototype quadrupole gas chromatography-mass spectrometer. With such a device, she can measure which volatile organics the grand old eastern trees exude and what these gases do to the neighbors. She pitches the idea to her advisor. People know nothing about the stuff trees make. It’s a green world, ripe
