The Wild Trees

 

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

Nonfiction

2007

Finished on November 25, 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. ~Rachel Carson

Publisher's Blurb:

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees –the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

I picked up a copy of The Wild Trees at Eureka Books a couple of years ago on one of our road trips down to Santa Rosa. Having previously read Damnation Spring (Ash Davidson's novel, which is set in the California Redwoods), I was curious about Preston's work of nonfiction about the same location. It's been years since I've read The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer, two of his nonfiction narratives, but I remembered how both books were page-turners, so I grabbed a copy of The Wild Trees from the local interest display.

While not as engrossing as Preston's earlier books, The Wild Trees held my interest (mostly) and I learned not only a lot about the Coast Redwoods, but also about tree climbing techniques. There is a lot of detailed information on how Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and Preston himself climb these enormous trees. And they don't just climb straight up (using a variety of ropes and assorted tools), but they traverse from tree to tree (skywalking), branchwalk, canopy-trek, and even sleep in treeboats (hammocks). The last time I can remember climbing a tree was in fourth grade. We had a large mulberry tree in our front yard, which my best friend and I would climb and snack on the juicy berries while hiding from my younger brother. I would bet we weren't more than 8 feet off of the ground. I can't imagine climbing 350 feet, which is about the height of some of these ancient old growth redwoods.

As I mentioned in my review of Damnation Spring, I am well-acquainted with Northern California due to our many RV road trips down Highway 101 from our home on the Oregon coast. Preston mentions places we've either camped or enjoyed roadside lunches (Chetco River, Crescent City, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, Redwood Creek, Prairie Creek, Avenue of the Giants, Founders Grove, Eel River, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Eureka, etc.), which made it easy to envision where the old growth forests exist.

Things I learned (all info is based on 2007 publication date):

• The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall.*

• Nobody knows the ages of any of the living giant coast redwoods, because nobody has ever drilled into one of them in order to count its annual growth rings. Drilling into an old redwood would not reveal its age, anyway, because the oldest redwoods seem to be hollow; they don't have growth rings left in their centers to be counted. Botanists suspect that the oldest living redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old--they seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon.

• By the measure of overall size--the volume of wood--the largest species of living tree on earth is not the coast redwood but the giant sequoia, a type of cypress that is closely related to the coast redwood.  

• There are very few birds in the redwood canopy. Redwoods produce poisons in their wood and needles that discourage insects from feeding on them, and consequently many species of birds that feed on insects go elsewhere to look for food.

Preston's book is chock-full of detail, whether it's about tree climbing or the multitude of organisms that live in the redwood canopy. From beginning to end, he introduces numerous students, naturalists, biologists, professors, and experts in the field of botany, so many that I created a list of "who's who" in order to keep track of key players. The writing gets bogged down in spots with the intricate details of not only climbing techniques, but personal information of these folks (dating, marriage, divorce, work life, etc.), making for an uneven read. I rarely skim a book, but I skipped over a few pages and didn't feel as if I missed anything critical in this wordy story. I do know that I will never not take advantage of looking up when in a grove of redwoods. They are magnificent trees. On the other hand, I also know that I have no desire to spend the night in a hammock at the top of any tree! I am curious to know how much the technology of drones has changed the way in which redwoods are measured and studied. I'll bet there are still those who prefer the old-school method of climbing these majestic trees.

"It helps us know how the forests work as a whole and how the trees work as organisms," she said. "Then we can help them out if they're having problems--and they are having problems. It occurs to me that I have a fairly cynical outlook on so many things in the world today--this insane world. But as long as we still have these trees, there's hope for us." 

*The tallest living tree is Hyperion, which is located in the Redwood National Park, and is 380.8 feet.