The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is another book I picked up a the Green Valley Book Fair, the same place I found Why Birds Sing. Preston's book is an adventure through the world's oldest and tallest forests, with a big focus on the exploration of giant and coastal redwoods in California (two different species tree). The narrative spans 20 years beginning in 1987 with Steve Sillet and Michael Taylor, unknown to each other at the time, but each finding the redwoods an irresistable wildnerness in need of exploration. Taylor had a drive to find the biggest trees. Sillet had a drive to climb them. The book ends in 2006 with Sillet and Taylor, now close friends, finding and climbing the world's tallest tree, Hyperion, at just shy of 380 feet high.
The majority of the redwood forests have not been public land for very long. It was only in 1978 that the government bought up most of the land on which the redwoods grow. Ironically, it was this push to buy the forests and add it to national park lands that caused a lot of clearcuts. The legislation for aquiring the land would allow the companies to take out any trees laying on the ground. In response, the companies made sure that as many as possible were laying on the ground. I'm not sure who learned a lesson there. Probably no one. Interspersed throughout the book, historical facts like this are thrown in as relevant to the exploration of the forests we still have. Thankfully, the author does not drone on and beat a dead environmentalist horse at points like this. The history is effectively given as a backdrop, not a sob story, actually adding to the book in a meaningful way without making detours into a fantasy wish-list of "what might have been" that journalists almost always fall into.
It was amazing to me how much of the redwood forests were and are still unexplored, beyond incomplete and inaccurate surveys by lumber companies. This facet to the narrative is what I felt I could relate to and a part of the book I really enjoyed. A lot of my weekends are spent hiking in Virginia's national forests, wilderness areas, and Shenandoah National Park. Just recently I spent a Saturday afternoon trying to find a trail in St. Mary's Wilderness Area that the map said existed, but the real world refused to show me. The adventures of Taylor in his search for the tallest trees put me right back into that wilderness area. I could easily imagine Taylor crawling through all of that brush and trackless land, as the author's description was as close to my own experience in the wilderness as a second hand account could be.
The book is also about exploring the canopy of these tall trees. Sillet became a pioneer of giant tree climbing, learning from others and coming up with his own techniques. He would climb, study, and even sleep in hammocks at the top of the world's tallest trees. The adventure in the sky was just as fun or more so to read as the adventure on the ground, sometimes keeping the pages turning like a crafted novel. This section is from a September evening in 1994 when Sillet and a small climbing team were sleeping in a redwood named Telperion during a rain storm:
Steve Sillet couldn't get the Dyerville Giant out of his mind: that pancake of roots tipped up into the air, that crater forty feet across. He was also concious of the fact that there were very few standing dead redwoods anywhere in the groves. No rotting skeletons of redwoods standing upright. The floor of the redwood forest was a maze of fallen trunks. Now, in Telperion, the meaning of it became very clear: redwoods fall while they're still alive.
A heart stopping realization when your hammock is in the top a tree swaying to its breaking point in wind so loud you couldn't hear the guy next to you talking without yelling.
These sections of the narrative and the discoveries made in the canopy are what really kept me interested in the book. The descriptions of what is actually up there in the tops of trees was so interesting that it has had me wondering for several days how I could get up into some of the trees in the forests here: gardens of ferns, lichen, and moss; soil deep enough for colonies of earthworms, non-flying insects, and salamanders; bonzai-like trees growing in the crooks of branches creating mini-forests within a single top. Of course, the top of a single redwood can be a huge place to explore:
"Adventure Tree is never exactly my first choice for a tree to climb," Antoine commented, as she got her stuff together in the garage. "My first experience climbing that tree was kind of scary." I asked her what had been scary about Adventure. "I got lost in it."
Some of what I learned just from this book has even made my local hikes more interesting. I've been able to identify some of the strange lichen I was stomping through as something that originated in the tops of the trees, taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and returning it as fertilizer to the soil as the tree shed braches or as wind and wildlife knocked it from its perch.
This book contains many good stories, adventures, and even useful information. However, the first two-thirds is also filled with grating soap opera type disfunction. The adventure and exploration is often broken up by the personal life of the explorers. Most of this I could really have done without. I got pretty tired of reading about how this guy or that guy didn't have a clue about how his personal life was collapsing and the daytime tv style arguments and bad decisions they would make. I realize the information is important to getting to know the people he is describing and why they do what they do, but I found the writing in these sections to be extremely poor to the point of almost skipping entire pages from boredom. The only good thing about the writing and descriptions of these guys' personal lives is that these sections are completely forgettable. That way they don't hurt much when you think back over what you've read.
Though badly written, there is one good lesson to learn from what is told about these guys. When you dedicate your hightest priorities, affection, and even worship, to something incapable of returning that love (in this case trees), your life will rot from the inside out. The lives of these two men suffer greatly until they find an actual person to whom they decide to give some of the attention they had always given to the trees.
In the end, I think I can better appreciate the forests I have here because of this book. They seem more interesting in their details and pull the beauty of the wilderness higher into the sky. Together with my recent fascination with birds, this book has made areas I've hiked in for 10 years a place with new mysteries to explore.
Author: Richard Preston
Title: The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (Paperback)
Genre: Science, Nature
Year: 2007, paperback 2008
These are some great photos of trees and people described in the book, a National Geographic video of measuring the world's tallest tree that features the people in this book, from Hulu an episode of National Geographic Explorer on the redfeaturing some of the people in this book and an October 2009 edition of National Geographic Magazine featuring redwoods.
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