Chapter 2
That’s one beginning, anyway. Every story has a thousand beginnings, a thousand places you might tip in.
You could go all the way back to the beginning of the universe every time if you wanted to, map out all the branching realities that’d brought you to a given moment, but no reader wants that.
Readers want beginnings with some kind of momentum built in and a few obvious clues as to where things might lead.
They don’t want every chicken and egg leading back to infinity.
In those days, I had no idea the story of Sarah and me was at its beginning.
I assumed I was at the beginning of a completely different story, the story of the new book.
That may not sound like much of a story to some, but to others of us, the writers, it’s a story of major significance and suspense.
It takes all a person’s cunning and patience to write a book.
In the beginning, you’re trying to design a boat that won’t capsize halfway across the ocean.
You’re laying in supplies for a yearslong voyage.
It demands a kind of mental purification to make sure your motivations are correct.
The meeting with Phil was exactly what I’d needed to begin building my vessel at the water’s edge.
He’d thrown out a few stimulating ideas and suggested a few intriguing sources, but, most of all, he’d given me enthusiasm.
The fact that a professional forest ecologist found my project interesting and even laudable was hugely encouraging.
I was still far away from putting actual words on paper, but I felt like I was ready to start calling in my raw materials in earnest: buying more books, watching more online lectures, ordering the conceptual lumber that would eventually become my grand clipper ship of words.
I had a few more meetings with Phil over the next months, all of which were profitable sessions.
We roamed freely and digressed easily. He wasn’t above speculating at the edges of scientific reason, which I appreciated.
I heard all about his theories of tree sentience, tree mind.
The resemblance of the tree’s bloom and root ball to the ganglia of the brain was not a coincidence, he thought.
How could it be? The lobe, the branch, the whorl, they were the very signature of something or other.
He taught me about the world of mosses and liverworts that had preceded our world of vascular plants, the giant mushrooms and fungi of the pre-tree era.
He brought to the conversations the perfect balance of awe, logic, rage, and hope, I thought.
Every time we talked, I came away with pages of scribbled notes and quotations.
“God loves a scale change,” he said. That would go straight into the book.
I also wanted to find contemporary case studies to supplement the theoretical and historical materials, and Phil was helpful with that, too.
I was looking for real-life examples of human/tree relationships, the kind of stories that would bring some living heat to the text.
Phil suggested a bonsai master in Japan, the last of a centuries-long line, and a woman on a permanent pilgrimage around the American West who planted seedlings wherever she went.
Both immediately became part of my store.
And then, as the winter started to taper and the first little minarets of the camellias began peeking into view, he emailed to invite me on a trip to the southern Cascades.
He said he had a couple of friends doing regenerative work in a meadow on the north side of Mount Shasta; he thought I might be interested in checking out their program.
They were working with trees, among other plants and shrubbery, and were fascinating, possibly visionary people.
There might be something there for my book.
“They’re kind of out there,” he wrote. “But you might appreciate that.”
“What are they doing, exactly?” I wrote.
“They call it ‘re-greening,’?” he wrote. “Easier for them to explain. It’s humble. But interesting. It might be something, might not. I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’m in,” I wrote. “And thank you!”
That Saturday morning, under a low, chilly lid of clouds, I arrived at Phil’s house, a sturdy Craftsman on a corner lot a few blocks from campus.
I’d passed by it a thousand times in my life, never giving it much note, but on that day, suddenly, it became a place of significance—the home of my tutor.
I had my backpack, with a water bottle and a brand-new notebook inside, and new hiking boots on my feet.
I’d just climbed the steps, girding myself for a mountain adventure, when the door opened and Phil appeared, shirtless, waving me inside.
“Come in, come in!” he said. “Welcome! We’re just getting things together here. Won’t be long. Just hang out for a second. We’re almost there.”
I stepped into the fragrant warmth of Phil’s domestic life.
Two cats were asleep on the back of the sofa and clean laundry was piled on the dining room table.
On the floor, there were bright Turkish rugs; on the built-in shelves, rustic outsider sculptures; on the coffee and end tables, antique lamps of oblong shape and citrusy glaze.
There were books everywhere, mostly old, and above all else, house plants.
Monsteras and ficas, a crazy jade, an origami-like purple shamrock, all flourishing.
The house was a teeming jungle of art and life, the dwelling of clearly interesting people.
“Smells great in here,” I said.
“Sarah made oatmeal cookies,” Phil said, tucking a long john shirt into his Carhartt pants. “We’re not going very far, but there isn’t much food out there. We might get peckish. Hey, do you have gloves? You might want gloves. It’ll be cold on the mountain.”
“I’ve got gloves,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “And we can get ourselves more coffee on the way if you want it.”
“I’ve had plenty of coffee already,” I said.
“Well, I might need more,” he said. “No greater pleasure than driving with coffee, in my opinion.”
And it was then that Sarah entered the room.
Nothing announced her arrival. There were no birds singing, no sunbeams streaming.
She simply wandered from the kitchen into the dining room holding a Mason jar of lumpy cookies.
By then, I’d heard a few things about her, in little asides and oblique references.
She’d grown up in California, Phil had said.
She enjoyed jogging. She didn’t follow any prestige television shows.
But my physical memory of her was bleary at best, more a suggestion than an actual image.
It turned out she was a tall, slender woman with wide shoulders and loose limbs coming to knobby joints and long, elegantly tapered fingertips.
She had wild black hair and drowsy eyes and a very large nose.
Her lips were full, the lower lip more so than the top, with a certain ironic smirk kinking the edges.
Her skin was dusky olive, and she moved with a tentative, slightly pigeon-toed gait, but there was a certain gracefulness to her movements, too, like a heron’s or a stork’s.
She seemed almost demure, but underneath that, I could already sense, she was more like coolly observant and wry.
“Hi, Arthur,” she said. “Sorry the house is such a shithole right now.”
Such were the first words I remember her speaking to me, as if we’d known each other for years.
“You should see my place. It’s a lot worse.”
“It honestly never looks much different,” she said. “I might as well not pretend. Anyway, I hope it’s okay if I come on the drive today. Phil’s been talking about Merle and Candy for so long, I thought I should see what their deal is. Plus I really need to get out of the house.”
“Of course,” I said. “The more the merrier.”
“Also, Phil’s a pretty terrible driver,” she said. “I have to watch him, especially in the snow.”
“I’m a good driver,” he said, lacing his boots. “My record is perfect. Insurance companies love me.”
“That’s what all the bad drivers say,” she said. “They don’t even know how bad they are.”
“The truth is,” Phil said, “Sarah is skeptical about Candy and Merle. She wants to meet them in order to prove a point.”
“I’m not skeptical,” Sarah said, mock affronted. “Phil talks about them so glowingly. I’m completely open to being amazed.”
“You’ll see,” Phil said to both of us, donning a weather-softened leather fedora. “They’re great. Anyone who finds a way to be hopeful in this world gets my vote.”
“Mine, too,” Sarah said, and disappeared back into the kitchen. Whether she meant what she said was impossible to tell.
We headed out. We took their Jetta, Sarah in the back seat and me in the front, and as we pulled off into the wintery air, heading south over the pass into California, we stuck to easy topics of conversation, the go-to complaints about Ashland, mostly.
It was too cute, we agreed, too secretly uptight.
The sense of moral superiority among its citizens was almost suffocating.
There was no good pizza, either. By the same token, we agreed that the surrounding territory was even worse—a land of incels and secessionists driven insane by the Internet.
When the subject of our town had run its course, I started making inquiries into Sarah’s life. Although on some deep level we already might have been entangled, on the shallower levels, I knew almost nothing about her at all.
“What do you do, Sarah?” I said, as the gray road rolled toward us.
“I’m a librarian,” she said from behind my shoulder.
“You’ve been doing that for a long time?”
“About fifteen years.”
“Sarah went to library school right out of college,” Phil said. “It’s the only job she’s ever had.”
“I’ve had other jobs,” she said. “Ice cream scooper. Cheese counter girl. But this one is the longest, it’s true.”
“So you like it then, I guess,” I said.