Tree Listener
Alia always dropped her heart rate below fifty-five before she started working with a slower-paced species. It seemed a natural courtesy. She pressed her fingers against her thumping jugular vein—no, she still had too much on her mind today to get down to speed.
A blanket of sweet forest breezes had drifted here all the way from the jungle in Chile. There, the tiny hum of unseen insects made the air dense. This forest was unnaturally quiet compared to those in the tropics. No insistent background of calling and shrieking, of monkeys playing, and of sudden death. The thrill in this forest came from being admitted to the majestic company of brooding giants a thousand years old. The silence cushioned her. It felt like when they lived in San Francisco with her grandparents after her father died. The fog used to roll up her street to make the houses on her block disappear like in a dream, when she could stalk across the moors in the mists with a silvery cloak floating out behind her like a sail. Then she would climb her plum tree and sit on the big branch, watching her back alley re-emerge from the invisible world. She still liked to think about all the things that were really there but you couldn't see them. Microbes. Subatomic particles. Chromosomes. Heartstrings stretched to the breaking point.
This morning she had gotten an email from Antoine's sister Angelina, saying, “Antoine is arrested, and we don't know where he is. I wish we could celebrate Ground Hog’s Day together, but we'll have a party whenever you get here.The snakes have been a real problem for us lately; we need to get some predators for them. Be sure to watch out for snakes in the woods when you are at work, maybe a different species but the same goals.”
This must be a coded message from Rafa. “Ground Hog’s Day” meant he'd had to go underground. “Snakes” referred to Axel Timber and Mining, the company whose clear-cutting of the rainforest he and Antoine were fighting against with their organization, Accion Medioambiental. Rafa seemed to be warning her that either Axel or a “different species of snake with the same goals” were a threat in California. He might be referring to Nonsantis, the drug company that owned Axel and which had sued him for infringing their patents on jungle botanical medicines. Or he might not know what the other “species” was. They had not established a code word for Nonsantis yet.
As she touched the side of her throat again to take her pulse, she imagined Rafael's fingers gliding up her neck and cheek into her hair as he held her to say goodbye on her last visit to Chile. Why couldn't he come with her here? Without him, she felt split down the middle like a lightning-struck oak. She knelt in the fragrant duff at the foot of a giant redwood to pack another core sample into her specimen box. Then she carefully picked a whole Trillium ovatum and spread it out in a newspaper-lined cardboard folder, ready for drying. At least she had gotten the permits quickly enough to get here before Axel logged this old growth forest and wiped out all her data. The injunction against this timber harvest plan was still in place, but she knew their reputation for moving in early to harvest illegally, then buying their way out later.
Alia was here to study the genetics of long-lived species. She hoped to find molecular keys that would apply to human diseases characterized by short life spans. It was established that plant diseases were often contained or reversed by specific biochemistries transmitted to them by companion plants. The data in a virgin forest of old growth redwoods was critical to knowing not only what plants naturally occurred together with these thousand year old trees, but what were the biochemical and microbial messaging relationships among them. And, with finer instrumentation for phylogenetic examination being invented every year, soon she could see whether the very long-term relationships in an old-growth ecosystem caused interactive adaptations in genetic structure. The keys to critical issues in longevity and climate change were right here in front of her nose, she was sure of it, but the evidence would be wiped out before the instrumentation caught up with the issues. She had to hurry. She had to guess what kind of sampling was most important; she couldn't get it all. She noticed her breathing was shallow. Her chest was in a vise again, just thinking about the urgency to prevent the incalculable loss of life-saving, ecosystem-saving information through ignorance and greed.
If only she could concentrate. Her mind slid to a vision of Rafa, his eyes sparkling with mischief as he swung his black hair back over his wiry shoulders, dripping from a dive into the river. He looked so tough, but his skin felt like silk.
A splintering sound yanked her back to the present. Was a large animal crushing branches and snapping twigs through the understory shrubs behind her? She leapt up, whirled, and flung her leg hard against an approaching beer-belly. Above it, a beefy face framed a drinking man's bulbous nose.
My god, she thought as her heart froze, this is what Rafa's message meant. Now the “snakes” have come for me!
When she finished her spin, she reversed and caught him in the neck with her other leg on his way down. The soft duff was hard to turn in; she was used to practicing capoeira moves on basketball floors and pavement. She regained a balanced crouch to face his companion, but only had time to throw up her arms across her face as a third man grabbed her from behind and slammed her to the ground. It hurt. Centuries of forest litter softened her fall, but needles and stickers pocked and stung her forearms. She was down, outnumbered; should she duck and curl or should she jump back up and run for it?
A blanket of sweet forest breezes had drifted here all the way from the jungle in Chile. There, the tiny hum of unseen insects made the air dense. This forest was unnaturally quiet compared to those in the tropics. No insistent background of calling and shrieking, of monkeys playing, and of sudden death. The thrill in this forest came from being admitted to the majestic company of brooding giants a thousand years old. The silence cushioned her. It felt like when they lived in San Francisco with her grandparents after her father died. The fog used to roll up her street to make the houses on her block disappear like in a dream, when she could stalk across the moors in the mists with a silvery cloak floating out behind her like a sail. Then she would climb her plum tree and sit on the big branch, watching her back alley re-emerge from the invisible world. She still liked to think about all the things that were really there but you couldn't see them. Microbes. Subatomic particles. Chromosomes. Heartstrings stretched to the breaking point.
This morning she had gotten an email from Antoine's sister Angelina, saying, “Antoine is arrested, and we don't know where he is. I wish we could celebrate Ground Hog’s Day together, but we'll have a party whenever you get here.The snakes have been a real problem for us lately; we need to get some predators for them. Be sure to watch out for snakes in the woods when you are at work, maybe a different species but the same goals.”
This must be a coded message from Rafa. “Ground Hog’s Day” meant he'd had to go underground. “Snakes” referred to Axel Timber and Mining, the company whose clear-cutting of the rainforest he and Antoine were fighting against with their organization, Accion Medioambiental. Rafa seemed to be warning her that either Axel or a “different species of snake with the same goals” were a threat in California. He might be referring to Nonsantis, the drug company that owned Axel and which had sued him for infringing their patents on jungle botanical medicines. Or he might not know what the other “species” was. They had not established a code word for Nonsantis yet.
As she touched the side of her throat again to take her pulse, she imagined Rafael's fingers gliding up her neck and cheek into her hair as he held her to say goodbye on her last visit to Chile. Why couldn't he come with her here? Without him, she felt split down the middle like a lightning-struck oak. She knelt in the fragrant duff at the foot of a giant redwood to pack another core sample into her specimen box. Then she carefully picked a whole Trillium ovatum and spread it out in a newspaper-lined cardboard folder, ready for drying. At least she had gotten the permits quickly enough to get here before Axel logged this old growth forest and wiped out all her data. The injunction against this timber harvest plan was still in place, but she knew their reputation for moving in early to harvest illegally, then buying their way out later.
Alia was here to study the genetics of long-lived species. She hoped to find molecular keys that would apply to human diseases characterized by short life spans. It was established that plant diseases were often contained or reversed by specific biochemistries transmitted to them by companion plants. The data in a virgin forest of old growth redwoods was critical to knowing not only what plants naturally occurred together with these thousand year old trees, but what were the biochemical and microbial messaging relationships among them. And, with finer instrumentation for phylogenetic examination being invented every year, soon she could see whether the very long-term relationships in an old-growth ecosystem caused interactive adaptations in genetic structure. The keys to critical issues in longevity and climate change were right here in front of her nose, she was sure of it, but the evidence would be wiped out before the instrumentation caught up with the issues. She had to hurry. She had to guess what kind of sampling was most important; she couldn't get it all. She noticed her breathing was shallow. Her chest was in a vise again, just thinking about the urgency to prevent the incalculable loss of life-saving, ecosystem-saving information through ignorance and greed.
If only she could concentrate. Her mind slid to a vision of Rafa, his eyes sparkling with mischief as he swung his black hair back over his wiry shoulders, dripping from a dive into the river. He looked so tough, but his skin felt like silk.
A splintering sound yanked her back to the present. Was a large animal crushing branches and snapping twigs through the understory shrubs behind her? She leapt up, whirled, and flung her leg hard against an approaching beer-belly. Above it, a beefy face framed a drinking man's bulbous nose.
My god, she thought as her heart froze, this is what Rafa's message meant. Now the “snakes” have come for me!
When she finished her spin, she reversed and caught him in the neck with her other leg on his way down. The soft duff was hard to turn in; she was used to practicing capoeira moves on basketball floors and pavement. She regained a balanced crouch to face his companion, but only had time to throw up her arms across her face as a third man grabbed her from behind and slammed her to the ground. It hurt. Centuries of forest litter softened her fall, but needles and stickers pocked and stung her forearms. She was down, outnumbered; should she duck and curl or should she jump back up and run for it?