Picture, right: climbers in the redwood forest ascend into the canopy of a giant tree, putting them out of sight of the ground. Photo © Richard Preston
Tree climbing was second nature to me when I was growing up. On my parents’ property, my sisters and I had favorite trees that we claimed as our private domain. The giant maple in the back, superior to the poplars because of its split trunk that formed a cradle perfect for lounging, was open territory: whoever scaled it first after school could remain, unchallenged, all afternoon in the leafy green light. Across the road, the trees rose sharp and unmanaged, surrounded by a tangle of sturdy, wrist–thick wild grape vines offering easy access to tops of second–growth walnuts and hickories, providing a lofty view of the surrounding valley.
My tomboyish ways receded with adolescence, replaced by adult–like occupations such as driving around on back roads listening to the Grateful Dead on an eight–track cassette player.
Fortunately, not everyone dropped their youthful pastimes as easily as I did. From the beginning pages of Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, when Steve Sillett takes a leap into a coast redwood in Humboldt County and scampers into its canopy, hundreds of feet above the ground, I was hooked on this book that traces the evolution of tree canopy research. The story recounts the lives of pioneering young scientists, from their days as tree–climbing kids to their cutting–edge research that today spans continents.
The idea that there are still places on the North American continent that remain undiscovered is startling. Until Sillett and his gang began climbing the coastal redwoods in 1987, tree canopy research was largely confined to rainforests. No one was aware that the tops of the temperate forests were anything more than a wasteland devoid of life. It’s ironic that a similar school of thought once applied to temperate old–growth forests, and was used as a justification for logging. The realization that old growth contained some of the most diverse biological habitat on the planet, and the implications of that revelation on science and policy, is akin to the discovery that the tree canopy teemed with a life of its own—an ecosystem in the air. Those who could reach the crowns of the coast redwoods and giant sequoias, which reach as high as 380 feet into the air, found themselves in a world full of life: unidentified species of lichens and fungi; networks of caves from which animals, unaccustomed to human contact, gazed at the curious visitors placidly; trees sprouting from other trees; multiple spires of trunks holding enough soil to support huckleberry bushes. All of this exists more than thirty stories above ground.
In the two decades since Sillett’s first climb, tree canopy research in temperate forests has become more common and more sophisticated. In 1995, the Wind River Canopy Crane was built to study treetops in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State; around the world, nine other tree canopy cranes operate in places such as Borneo, Australia, Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Panama. Like old–growth forests, tree canopies have garnered respect as a unique ecosystem, which has opened the door to a new generation of scientific discovery.
The science surrounding canopy research is fascinating, and well presented in the book, but it’s the escapades of a group of people who turned their love for the big trees into a cult–like devotion—and later a profession—that carries the narrative along.
It’s hard to grasp the urgency that drove Michael Taylor to search the redwood forest for the largest tree in the world—not to climb, but just to find it. After all, whether a tree is 369 or 378 feet tall is immaterial from the ground. To most people, all redwoods seem huge. But Taylor, who worked as a grocery clerk to support his tree–hunting habit, and Kevin Hillery—an arborist who saw a story on television about Sillett and wound up teaching him roping techniques used by arborists and joining him on climbs—are just a few of the characters who became entranced by the big trees. Girlfriends and spouses show up, some feeling abandoned by their partners’ obsession, some supporting the habit emotionally and financially. And there’s Marie Antoine, a fellow scientist who bonds with Sillett over climbing and later marries him in the treetops, after finding a minister willing to perform the aerial ceremony.
Much has been made of the scene in which Sillett and Antoine unhook their harnesses to make love—Stephen Colbert of the satirical Colbert Report referred to the book as eco–porn—but that episode pales in comparison with the description of Hillery’s fall from ninety–six feet above ground (twice the height of what is referred to as the redline, the line that marks certain death if exceeded in a fall). Hillery fell during a tree–climbing party to celebrate the winter solstice in 1993. He thought he had caught a sturdy branch he had been eyeing in the dusk, but accidentally cast his rope over a small spray of epicormic branches—tiny shoots that grow like hair from the trunk of a redwood. As soon as he put his weight on the rope, the branches snapped off. He yelled the standard warning, “Headache!” to indicate a falling object, then plummeted downward—much to the horror of his fellow climbers, who looked up to see his body twisting and clawing through the dusk. He landed at their feet, his final speed more than ninety miles an hour. Amazingly, he survived, in part due to quick thinking that caused him to flip his body so that he landed on his arm, which protected his head, and in part because the thick duff of the forest floor cushioned his fall.
When I picked up this book, it was hard for me to imagine that the author could sustain a narrative about tree climbing. But once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This book reminds us that science is a very real process, practiced by human beings who are smart enough, in part, to notice the unusual, and to recognize when they have discovered unknown treasures in unlikely places. It reminds us that the minds of people who have slowed down enough to pay attention to their surroundings can produce very fertile results.
Read this book, and you’ll find yourself ruminating about ropes and branches and, just maybe, lazy afternoons spent in leafy bowers.