Chapter 3
I always enjoy the early phase of a book, the dreaming phase.
You’ve made a decision about what you’re doing, and then you get to walk around with a magnet in your head, looking for iron filings that might fit your design.
Any stray scenes on the street that might be relevant?
Any anecdotes at the party that might find some place?
You’re searching everywhere, open to anything.
I scoured everywhere for relevant facts, landing interesting tidbits here and there on the web, but fewer than one might think.
Ultimately, I believed, it took books to write a book.
All kinds of books, new and old, relevant and seemingly not.
For the new books, I headed to the bookstore, seeking to understand the current trends and titles and, sure enough, I discovered many tree books already in the Nature and Gardening and Spirituality sections.
Collectively, the writers of the world were turning their attention to trees, awakening to the tree life all around them.
But no one else, thankfully, seemed to be writing exactly the tree book I imagined.
I went to the library in search of the deeper ore.
I wanted to find tree books going back generations, beyond Muir and Emerson and Thoreau.
What did the Incas say about trees? What did the bushmen know?
I started at the local city branch, checking out piles of books that I took home and devoured and brought back for more piles, knowing I had to aerate the new discourses with antiquated notions or else I was only drafting in our current moment’s thought-stream.
The new regime was all about interconnectivity, interdependence, rhizome thinking, but what about the other tree models that had come before?
It was part of a writer’s job, I believed, to resuscitate.
I visited the college’s science library, too, where I wasn’t allowed to check anything out, but where they gave me a carrel and let me read on-site.
It was a certain impressionistic kind of reading I did there.
These were tomes with graphs and charts I didn’t really understand, filled with specialized language beyond my comprehension.
But poring over them was still helpful as a form of contemplation.
I was searching for exotic vocabulary words, interesting bibliographic entries, any scraps of data I might repurpose.
If I decided a page merited more attention, I took a picture with my phone and then almost never looked at it again.
I was collecting stray buttons and threads, weaving them into my growing structure.
I was making room. I was becoming absorbed.
I could tell I was moving in the right direction when the universe started sending me signs.
This was how it always went, little synchronicities and unexplained phenomena popping up on my radar.
One day, walking home, I saw a postcard lying on the ground.
The picture was a photograph of a silver birch, the very tree I’d been reading about in the library only minutes before.
Another day, sitting on my back deck, a samara, the winged seed of a maple, came spinning into my hands, totally out of season.
I spent hours staring at that tiny propeller, wondering who’d sent it, who’d made it, what the universe was trying to tell me with its elegant, aeronautical design.
The signs were all fundamentally insignificant things, but as anyone who has gotten deep into creative work knows, they’re the kinds of communications you long for.
They mean you’re tuned to the right frequency, catching at least some of the world’s subaudible whispers.
They mean something is talking to you, telling you you’re on the right path.
In the words of Meister Eckhart, “God keeps on withdrawing, farther and farther away, to arouse the mind’s zeal and lure it on to follow and finally grasp the true good that has no cause.
” Already, I sensed that hide-and-seek going on, the recent presence of some guiding, inhuman force.
When I ran into Sarah one day at the science library, I assumed she was a sign, too.
I hadn’t seen her since our trip to the meadow a month earlier, but I’d been getting news about her on and off from Phil.
She’d visited her parents in California, and she’d bought a new Instant Pot.
He hadn’t mentioned anything about a new job at the college, but then, why would he?
We barely knew each other. Seeing her there in the library, scanning books behind the main desk, I felt a mild shock.
It seemed like a sign, for sure. Granted, in those days, as I drifted deeper into the Tree Book, pretty much any pleasant surprise counted as a sign.
“The famous author,” she said, as I approached the counter.
“The famous librarian,” I said. “I guess the college job came through.”
“Careful what you wish for, right?” she said. “I already miss the kids. But the pay is better here. I couldn’t really say no.”
“Things happen for a reason,” I said. “Just usually not at the right time, I find.”
“Who knows why anything happens,” she said. “Anyway. How’s your Tree Book going? Making progress?”
“Still easing into it,” I said. “Doing my homework.”
“Are you looking for anything particular today?” she said. “Anything I can help you find?”
“Yeah, these,” I said, and slid a scrap of paper with call numbers her way.
They matched old issues of the International Society of Arboriculture Journal , and one Journal of Arboriculture and Urban Forestry .
The bound volumes didn’t go back far enough on the shelves, but they supposedly had them downstairs.
She looked at the call numbers, her fingers already flitting over the keys, double-checking the volumes’ existence.
Windows inside windows opened on her screen.
The program looked ancient. She was wearing a green silk blouse with puffed sleeves that day.
Her hair was up, making a loose, black bundle over her head, with flashes of blackness falling around her temples.
On her wrist she wore a wide-gauge leather bracelet with a gold buckle.
“Okay,” she said. “Just a second. I’ll get them.”
She got up and disappeared into a doorway and I stood at the counter waiting.
The smell of the carpet was dry and woolly sweet.
I could hear the sounds of pages turning, a pen tapping, a phlegmy cough somewhere in the stacks.
I could hear a clock ticking, and in between the strokes, the gentle hum of the wheels inside.
By the time Sarah got back, I’d come up with a reason to loiter a little longer.
“Anything else?” she said, sliding my volumes over.
“Maybe you could help me with a little search,” I said. “I don’t think I’m really maximizing the engines in here. I keep coming back to the same lists.”
“Sure,” she said, and sat at the monitor again. “What keywords are you using?” Already, her fingers were opening fresh windows, preparing to dig.
“Anything about trees,” I said.
“That’s pretty broad,” she said. “Books? Articles? Anything to cross-reference that with?”
“Synapses? Ganglia?” I said. “Consciousness? That’s the area I’m thinking about right now.”
“Sounds like you’ve been talking to Phil, all right,” she said.
Her words felt like a mild rebuke. “We have some similar interests,” I said. “He’s been really helpful.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “So which one is it?”
“Which what?” I said.
“Which cross-reference?” she said.
“Uh, how about ganglia?”
“He likes talking to you, you know,” she said, typing away. “He’s happy to have someone interested in what he’s thinking about. It doesn’t happen very often.”
“He’s a very brilliant guy,” I said. “I find out something new every time we talk.”
“His students don’t appreciate him,” she said.
“They’re so fucking lazy. Any of these titles look interesting?
” She leaned back, tilting the monitor to give me a view.
Some of the titles were new to me, most of them not relevant.
There were a few maybes. Leaning over the counter, I was close enough that I could see the fine hairs on Sarah’s wrist, the wrinkles of her knuckles.
I could almost feel the heat coming off the nape of her neck.
“Go down,” I said.
She moved the list downward.
“Yeah. That one,” I said. “?‘The Architecture of Quercus.’?”
“What’s quercus?” she said.
“Oak,” I said. “The genus. I’ve learned that much already. Now a little more.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. That one is something I’d love to see, too. ‘Fungi Described and Recorded from Eucalyptus.’?”
She wrote down the call numbers. “Keep going?”
“No,” I said. “That’s plenty. I can only deal with so much at a time.”
She left again. By the time she got back, the clock had edged to noon. She said she was going to lunch. I happened to be going to lunch then, too.
We walked over to the grocery store together and ordered out of the deli case, with its bounty of ruby beets, iridescent tomatoes, shining bulgar, and glossy green beans, nested in beds of decorative kale. What amazing times for food, we agreed. How had people eaten before this millennium?
We took our boxes to a picnic table and ate in the fresh spring air.
It was only early April, but already warm.
It’d been warm for weeks. The camellias had run their course by the end of February, and the rhododendrons had burst in mid-March.
There were roses already budding. It was all wrong.
And yet, smelling the fresh-cut grass, hearing the mellow buzzing of the bees, I had to admit, in the moment, everything was very pleasant.
Maybe the calm glory of summer would come on and never end.
“So you don’t talk about something when you’re working on it?” she said. “Is that always how it is?”
“It just isn’t really anything yet,” I said. “Which makes it hard to talk about.”