The Bookworm: The Wild Trees

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. 291 pages. Random House. 2007.

“There’s always a moment during a climb when you lose yourself,” he said. “You don’t have a name anymore. When you find yourself in a place in nature where if you make a mistake you will die, you become open to what’s around you. You start feeling the limits of your perceptions as a human being. You perceive time more clearly in redwoods, and you see time’s illusory qualities.”

Preston’s The Wild Trees is the last of my Prairie Lights haul from July. I saw it in the nature/environmental section and couldn’t leave it on the shelf. It was calling me, pleading for me to read it. I had to get it.

Along with arousing my love of narrative nonfiction and reading new authors, The Wild Trees appealed to the admiration and awe I feel toward the giant redwood trees in California. They are almost unfathomable. Though I’d always known about them, I didn’t see them in person until I lived in Santa Cruz. I visited Henry Cowell Redwood State Park and was floored by the size and longevity of the coast redwoods. Having known nothing but the trees in the Midwest, it was hard for me to comprehend what I was looking at — trees 15-20 feet wide and over 250 feet tall. As I walked the trails, I understood more than ever why many are compelled to live in redwood canopies and protect the enormous trees from human exploitation. (The son of my third grade teacher lived in a redwood for a time.) They truly are a natural wonder to be cherished and preserved.

Divided into five parts, The Wild Trees chronicles the lives of three people (two, mostly), who become infatuated with the redwoods along the northern coast of California, and their quest to find, climb, and study the largest and tallest trees on Earth. Steven Sillett, whose quote I used above, is the focal point; he’s the person at the center of the book and the research being done on redwoods. With the help of many others, he pioneered the techniques used in scaling 350-foot tall redwoods — no small feat — to study their canopies. Michael Taylor is an oddball who loves trees but doesn’t climb them, and dreamed of one day finding the world’s tallest tree. Marie Antoine, Sillett’s wife, is also a redwood canopy climber and researcher.

Antoine is given a lot of undeserved attention, I think. Her interest in trees starts late, and Preston doesn’t connect her story until two-thirds of the way through the book. It’s not that Antoine isn’t important; by the end she is a pivotal part of the redwood climbing and research team. What peeved me was that while Preston was outlining Sillett and Taylor’s early endeavors in the redwood forests — finding new trees, meeting people in the biology and climbing community, and developing methods for surveying the highest reaches — he lingered on Antoine’s childhood in Canada and the unfortunate death of her mother when Antoine was young. Although the chapters detailing her life in Lake of the Woods are well written, interesting, and somewhat useful as character development, they are, however, of minor importance to the whole book and subject at hand. Her backstory drags on and on, and I kept wondering when her storyline would be coupled to those of Sillett (literally, in his case) and Taylor. In comparison, the early, pre-redwood lives of Sillett and Taylor are glanced over. On top of that, here is no mention of her for 71 pages, and her climbing background and interest in trees doesn’t come into play until the 140-page range, almost halfway through the book. I think Antoine’s past is important, but I don’t think it deserved that much ink.

At the beginning of the book is a short author’s note: “This book is narrative nonfiction. The characters are real and the events are factual, told to the best of my understanding. Passages in which I narrate a person’s thoughts and feelings and present dialogue have been built from interviews with the subjects and witnesses, and have been fact-checked.” What Preston should have said was, “This book is second-hand narrative nonfiction.” That’s basically what it is; he got most of the material second-hand because he wasn’t there. Four of the five parts are written using this hand-me-down historical information, which is okay. But while some parts were compelling and well crafted, others read like a 20-year-old English major had written them. (And I know how a 20-year-old English major writes because I was once a 20-year-old English major myself. The shameful proof is saved on this very computer.) The writing was young; it lacked the type of craftsmanship that comes from many years of writing experience (the type of craftsmanship I’m still striving for). The contrived dialogue was especially bad, bordering on useless at times.

But, despite the lackluster quality of the second-hand narrative, Preston’s first-person narrative was suburb. The fifth and final section detailed Preston’s personal experiences and adventures with Sillett and Antoine. Preston bought climbing gear, took tree climbing lessons, and eventually climbed into redwoods and Australia’s mountain ash trees with them. These accounts were first class, showcasing Preston’s skills as a narrative journalist.

Peppering The Wild Trees were high quality sketches, most of them drawn by Andrew Joslin. Photography is not the best medium in a dense redwood forest or in the canopy 300 feet above the ground, so the sketches were informative, enlightening, and very beautiful, illustrating Preston’s textual descriptions.

New words I learned: All descriptions courtesy my MacBook dictionary. Thrush: “a small or medium-sized songbird, typically having a brown back, spotted breast, and loud song.” Prehensile: “(chiefly of an animal's limb or tail) capable of grasping.” Mellifluous: “(of a voice or words) sweet or musical; pleasant to hear.” Yurt: “a circular tent of felt or skins on a collapsible framework, used by nomads in Mongolia, Siberia, and Turkey.” Gorp: “another term for trail mix.” Homunculus: “a very small human or humanoid creature.”