Chapter 1 #2
I didn’t tell anyone my idea at first. I was still too bruised from the Light Book to make that promise to the world.
And besides, it wasn’t anything yet, only the faintest, most formless intuition.
But I started thinking about it on every walk I took.
I thought about it quietly, tentatively, not wanting to scare it away.
Was it something? I had no idea. It was too flimsy to withstand any pressure.
Almost without acknowledging it to myself, I began reading books and essays that might relate to the subject and bookmarking occasional web pages.
I started sketching the leaf shapes and the bark patterns of the trees I couldn’t identify.
I started thinking the word “tree” as I went around doing my errands.
Slowly, in silence, I was backing my way in.
This went on for months. The thought came and went.
I’d be raking leaves and start thinking about the decomposing litter sending its nitrogen into the earth.
I’d be teaching a class at the local writing center and start staring at the branches of a red alder outside the window, wondering where the red came from and how it was concocted inside the alder’s wooden veins.
Always, I kept the idea of the book tucked in the back of my mind, like a seed warming in loam.
And then, one day, almost on a whim, I looked up the biology department at the local college, Klamath University.
I was thinking I might find an interesting syllabus, or news of an upcoming lecture, anything that might fertilize my ongoing rumination.
I scrolled around the Environmental Science newsletter and tacked over to the faculty list, perusing their bios, until landing on the name Phil French.
He was a forest ecologist, his paragraph read, with a few interesting-sounding publications to his name and some cool class titles.
Genus and Genre sounded especially intriguing.
It was cross-listed with the English department, which suggested some kind of literary bent.
Without really thinking about it, I tossed off an email to him, saying I was a local writer considering a project about trees.
Would he have any time to chat? He responded almost immediately, saying sure, swing by during office hours anytime.
And so it was, on a rain-soaked fall afternoon, that I found myself walking the carpeted hallway of the Klamath biology building, getting ready to share my secret idea with a stranger.
I still wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but time had already started doing its trick on me, and the anguish of the previous book’s failure was gradually receding.
The new idea was what I had now, and it was working insistently in my brain, filtering everything I perceived.
I wasn’t coming to him with any particular questions to ask, only the slimmest notion that he might be able to guide me somewhere interesting.
He’d name an author or a text, and that would in turn lead somewhere else, and on it would go.
Most likely, I’d only end up exposing my own ignorance, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know this guy, Phil French. If he decided I was a fool, so what? Writing is a daily ego death. If you can’t accept that, you probably shouldn’t be trying.
I rapped on the door. From inside, a muffled voice came back, “Come on in!”
I pushed at the door and stepped into a long, narrow office space.
The walls were lined with books and a single, giant poster of a crosscut of a maple tree, with all the main parts labeled—xylem, phloem, cambium, crown.
I couldn’t read the finer labels because the lights in the office were off and the only illumination came from a big, rain-spattered window on the far side of the room.
Watery light spilled onto a large metal desk piled with papers and yet more books.
At the desk, sitting in the wan bubble, was Phil, grading papers.
I already knew he was a handsome man from his pictures on the web, but it turned out he was even better-looking in real life.
He had broad shoulders and thick black hair, a hawkish nose, and high cheekbones.
His skin was burnished from time spent outdoors, and his knuckles were fat and chapped from manual labor.
In other words, he was nothing like the paunchy, balding, papery writer type who’d just walked into his office, with his soft palms and squinty eyes.
In his crisp brown Pendleton shirt, Phil struck me a kind of modern lumberjack, but with the opposite purpose—a strong-jawed protector of the environment, a wide-chested Western Renaissance man, at home in the forest and the classroom alike.
Already, he was smiling at me and sliding a pen behind his ear, generously waving me inside.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“I, uh, emailed a few days ago,” I said. “I’m the local writer who was hoping for a little conversation…”
“Ah, yes, welcome!” he said. “Come on in. Great to meet you, Arthur. I’m glad you came by. Glad to talk.”
I let my wet umbrella drop to the floor and hung my dripping coat on the rack. “I hope this is an okay time to visit?”
“This is an excellent time,” Phil said. “My students are off doing labs. Next week will be busy. But today is great.”
“What kind of labs are they doing?” I said, accepting the chair he offered across from his desk.
Already, I was trying to make myself pliable, predicting his conversational cues.
It was part of the job in the research-and-interview phase of a project.
Before anything, you presented as nonthreatening.
The more comfortable you could make a given expert, the more freely they would divulge.
“Nutrient cycling, nitrogen cycling,” he said. “Basic stuff. They’re out in the woods digging around right now. Perfect day for it. Nice and rainy and cold. They’ll complain about it when we meet next week, but they actually love it.”
“They have no idea how great they’ve got it,” I said. “I wish I could go back to college sometimes. What a vacation that was.”
“Free tuition for senior auditors,” he said. “Once you’re over sixty-five, you’re welcome to join us.”
“Something to look forward to,” I said.
We politely chuckled at the non-joke. We were settling in, making each other feel at ease.
We could already tell we were guys of about the same vintage and orientation, early forties, liberal, bookish.
He was a lumberjack and I was a troll, but inside, we were on a similar wavelength.
If we dug around a little, we might even find a few people and places in common.
I knew he’d spent time in various California college towns; I’d spent some time in those places, too, adjuncting or prowling archives.
I could guarantee we had similar opinions about the president.
To keep things rolling, I lobbed a few easy questions his way about his teaching load and sabbatical schedule, expressing as much wonder and delight at his answers as possible.
I netted another little laugh or two, and when the vibration felt strong enough, not wanting to waste his time, I moved on to the business at hand, my still-forming book.
“So,” I said, placing my palms on my knees to indicate a transition, “I got in touch with you for a reason, Professor French…”
“Please,” he said. “Just Phil.”
“Okay, Phil,” I said. “Well, there’s a project I’m thinking about starting that has something to do with trees. I’m still kind of feeling my way into it, but I’m wondering if I could maybe ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” he said. “Whatever you like. I’ll do my best.”
“You’ll have to bear with me, if that’s okay,” I said. “I’m still very early on in the process.”
“I understand how things begin,” he said. “Take your time.”
I didn’t have a particular plan of attack, but I assumed once we started we’d find our way.
And sure enough, when I got going, I found myself almost overflowing with words.
I opened by telling Phil a little about my previous books, which had all been essayistic, generally speaking, part memoir, part popular science, part polemic, part theology, a lot of things mixed together.
The subjects had been elemental substances like water and light, or epiphenomena like rainbows, I said, and they usually got shelved in the spirituality section, although sometimes they ended up in other categories, too.
They were spirituality, admittedly, but a little more sophisticated than the usual New Age pablum, I liked to think.
In this case, I said, I wanted to do something about trees.
I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to work yet, but maybe each chapter would be about a different species.
Or maybe profiles of people and their special relationships with trees.
Or a census of trees in my neighborhood.
I wasn’t sure. I knew I wanted the book to be heavy on natural description, even lyrical at times.
Not too academic, but not too commercial, either.
I wanted it to feel relevant, but not too of-the-moment.
I wanted people to walk away from it thinking about trees as fellow people in the world, with their own personalities, their own civil rights.
That was my fantasy, to make people see trees in their full glory and magic and precarity.
It was the first time I’d described the idea out loud to anyone, and it turned out I had a lot to say.
“It sounds wonderful,” Phil said, after I’d started repeating myself. “It sounds like a book I’d like to read. I’m already sold.”