The Overstory –– A Book Walk with Matthew Rohrer in the Redwoods

When I was in grad school in Iowa in the early 90s there was an event advertised by flyers on telephone poles, and I don’t really know why, but I went. It was a fundraiser and lecture by members of Earth First!. Daryl Cherney was the speaker, and he was infamous for having apparently blown himself and a friend up in a car. A pipe bomb went off in his car and seriously injured his friend Judi Bari. The FBI claimed they did it; they claimed FBI involvement; the case oddly petered out. What is interesting is that they were awarded $4.4 million dollars for violations of their civil rights, which makes it seem like the FBI was lying.

I went to a church basement. There were hokey songs. There was a slideshow. There were paper cups of punch and wholesome snacks. I bought a bright green Earth First! T-shirt and it made me feel righteous to wear it around; I wore it until it wore out, well into the 21^st century.

As the meeting ended, people were milling about and talking about going to a bar or whatever, and the idea of smoking some Humboldt County weed came up. My apartment was closest so we went there. The weird thing was, though, that “we” consisted, by the time we got there, of just me and a frightening, enormous, blue collar fellow. My apartment also was just one room in a rooming house. I sat on the bed, he sat on my one chair, and said “play some protest music.” I put on Billy Bragg. We smoked his Humboldt Hooter, as he called it. I would never call it that. After what seemed like either hours or just about four minutes, he abruptly stood up and told me that Saturday night was his night in the big city (the big city of Iowa City) and that he had pleasure to chase, and thanks, and goodbye. I was so relieved. He seemed to simmer with a kind of violence and did not seem to really belong in the milieu of radical environmental protestors. He just didn’t seem like he belonged there. Neither did I, frankly, but no one would have known that looking at me. This guy seemed out of place. I was glad he left.

The next year, during a tai chi class, someone was making a fuss in the parking lot and threatening someone in the class. It got tense. Some people stayed indoors after class was over but I left, and in the parking lot, I saw a huge semi-truck pulled up with a guy standing on the running board, yelling threatening remarks at the building I’d just come out of; it was that same guy.

So it was with great interest that I realized that several of the characters in The Overstory were based on Daryl Cherney, as well as the more radical off-shoot of Earth First! known as Earth Liberation Front, or ELF.

But one of the many remarkable things about this novel is that this doesn’t come up til way, way deep into the book. The book begins with a novel-in-a-chapter. The Hoel family saga. It begins in Brooklyn in the 1800s or possibly earlier, follows the patriarch to Iowa (ironically) and then follows his family for many—and I mean, probably five—generations. All of whom have one Hoel dedicated to taking a photo, once a month, from the same spot, of an enormous Chestnut tree. The Chestnut blight is described, killing millions of trees across the East, but because this tree had been planted in Iowa by Hoel the elder, it survived. The end. Of that chapter. What?

Then the next chapter starts in Shanghai. A rich businessman has a disappointingly narrow minded engineer of a son who is heading to America, to study engineering in Pittsburgh. He is given tree-related items, and in America, plants a tree for each of his three daughters. They like to camp. The father, for no clear reason (is there ever really one of these?) kills himself. The end.

And then more, and more. What’s remarkable to me about these opening sections is how Powers gets the sweep of multi-generational family stories down so well, compressing them into quite short chapters, but doing it in a way that is so convincing, he made me cry during several of these.

Why did I cry? Part of the reason could be the Covid-19 pandemic which rages still. I read this book during an ostensible lock down because of nature going apeshit. But more on this soon; why I think I cried during the opening chapters, which are all focused on humanity (though, sneakily, trees are being introduced in comprehensive ways you don’t quite notice yet), is because these human stories are heartbreaking, every one of them. And seeing them all compressed so heavily but still so COMPLETE, makes the human life clearly reveal itself as heartbreaking.

As these many stories unfold, all the little children you met become much different grown-ups, and they all basically converge in the woods of the Pacific Northwest joining up with an organization that is obviously based on ELF. One girl gets so high in college she dies of electrocution, but is revived, and hears messages from “beings of light” who seem to be giant redwood trees, guiding her on a new life defending redwood trees. 

There is a period in the middle of the book where the action stabilizes and is mostly about these activists. This is the only part of this novel that seems like a “real” novel. The rest of it seems to be something slower, or larger, than what we think novels are. Like an Ent. Taking its own sweet time to do a thing that you just have to trust. And this is in no way a complaint.

The heart of the novel, I believe, is when two of the characters occupy a giant redwood and live 200 feet up on a platform for a year. The descriptions of life up there are so compelling, so magical, I wonder what kind of research Powers did. Another character joins them, to do research—he’s a psychologist trying to apply Logical Positivism to the study of what makes people care so much, and he is pretty quickly turned into an activist himself. I wonder if Powers was able to spend time in the canopy like this. What is described up there is truly remarkable.

And then my mind wanders, back to myself and my concerns. Why did I go to this meeting in Iowa City and just buy the shirt? Reading this novel, there is no question that Powers is absolutely right, that these activists are right, that the logging has to stop, that we are killing ourselves, that the cops are bastards, that they will cut down anyone who challenges Order, that Order is merely capital, that the trees truly are alive in ways that make us seem like spinning tops, wobbling and about to totter, and that human life is out of control. Would I have joined them had I had the chance to spend time in the canopy? I agree with everything Powers says in this activist’s novel, and yet I did, and do, nothing.

The characters eventually become arsonists and bombers, and one of them dies and two of them are caught, years later, and they agree that what they did meant nothing, and changed nothing. It’s terrible. I cried then too. It could have been because this scene is rendered just like a nightmare: one of the characters is now a respected professor at NYU; he’s married, with a five year old son; this is twenty years after some “domestic terrorism.” He’s lecturing, and the Feds are waiting in the back of his classroom for him to finish. Twenty years later, with a new life, and suddenly, this thing he’s done, which can’t be undone, has fucked him. This is the template of most of my nightmares.

This book tells you the thing you already knew. Humans are fucked. Humans are fouling their own nest. And it’s too late. And we will pay the price. And we will die, or most of us, enough of us, that our cultures and abilities to keep fucking up the Earth will cease. The Covid-19 virus is not this end-times thing, but it’s a preview. Nature is coming for us not because it’s got it out for us, but because we screwed ourselves. If it’s not a virus, it’ll be warming to a level that is literally unsustainable for human life. And though things like redwoods and polar bears will die, and never return, other things will come, because life keeps coming, it’s like a fucking champion in the ring and we are like little children thrown in there with it—little children who are idiots but someone gave us a pistol to use in the ring, which in the short term is not fair. But life is a fucking champion and though we will destroy this aspect of it, that will be our own demise, and the champion will rise. The champion will rise. What’s hard about finishing this book though is realizing, or remembering, that we are not the champions.

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Redwood (Kahs-tcho) photographs taken in Humboldt County, California on Sinkyone, Wiyot, and Yurok lands by Matthew Rohrer and Emily Wallis Hughes. If you’re reading this, please consider donating to the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council.

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of several books, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.